Winner of a 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Arnaud Sussmann has distinguished himself with his unique sound, bravura, and profound musicianship. Minnesota’s Pioneer Press writes, “Sussmann has an old-school sound reminiscent of what you'll hear on vintage recordings by Jascha Heifetz or Fritz Kreisler, a rare combination of sweet and smooth that can hypnotize a listener.” A thrilling musician capturing the attention of classical critics and audiences around the world, he has recently appeared as a soloist with the Vancouver Symphony and the New World Symphony. As a chamber musician, he has performed at the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, London’s Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Dresden Music Festival in Germany, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He has been presented in recital in Omaha on the Tuesday Musical Club series, in New Orleans by the Friends of Music, and at the Louvre Museum in Paris. He has also given concerts at the OK Mozart, Moritzburg, Caramoor, Music@Menlo, La Jolla SummerFest, Mainly Mozart, Seattle Chamber Music, Chamber Music Northwest, and Moab Music festivals. He has performed with many of today’s leading artists including Itzhak Perlman, Menahem Pressler, Gary Hoffman, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Wu Han, David Finckel, and Jan Vogler. An alum of CMS’s Bowers Program, Sussmann is Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach and Co-Director of Music@Menlo’s International Program, and teaches at Stony Brook University. In September 2022, Sussmann was named Founding Artistic Director of the Boscobel Chamber Music Festival.

Tara Helen O'Connor, who Artmag has said "so embodies perfection on the flute that you'll forget she is human," is an Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, a two-time Grammy Award nominee, and, as a member of the New Millennium Ensemble, a recipient of the Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award. A Wm.S. Haynes artist, she was the first flutist selected to participate in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Bowers Program and is currently a season artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and a member of the Windscape woodwind quintet.

O'Connor serves as Visiting Associate Professor, Adjunct, of Flute at the Yale School of Music, and is Artistic Director of the Music from Angel Fire Festival. A champion of contemporary music, Ms. O'Connor has premiered hundreds of works and has appeared on numerous recordings and film and television soundtracks including Barbie, Respect, The Joker, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Only Murders in the Building, and Schmigadoon! to name only a few.

An avid chamber musician, O'Connor regularly appears include the Bravo! Vail festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Music@Menlo, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, Spoleto Festival USA, the Banff Centre, Rockport Music, Bay Chamber Concerts, Manchester Music Festival, the Great Mountains Music Festival, Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival and Music From Angel Fire.

O'Connor has appeared on A&E's Breakfast with the Arts and PBS' Live from Lincoln Center. She has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, EMI Classics, Koch International, CMS Studio Recordings with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Bridge Records. She also serves on the faculty at Bard College Conservatory of Music, and the Contemporary Performance Program at Manhattan School of Music.

She lives with her husband, violinist Daniel Phillips and their two miniature dachshunds, Chloé and Ava on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Performer, curator, and on-stage host James Austin Smith “proves that an oboist can have an adventurous solo career.” (The New Yorker). Smith appears at leading national and international chamber music festivals, as Co-Principal Oboe of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and as an artist of the International Contemporary Ensemble. As Artistic and Executive Director of Tertulia Chamber Music, Smith creates intimate evenings of music, food, and drink in New York and San Francisco, as well as an annual festival in a variety of global destinations. He serves as Artistic Advisor to Coast Live Music in the San Francisco Bay Area and mentors graduate-level musicians as a professor of oboe and chamber music at Stony Brook University and as a regular guest at London’s Guildhall School. A Fulbright scholar and alum of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect and CMS’s Bowers Program, he holds degrees in music and political science from Northwestern and Yale University.

David Washburn is the principal trumpet of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and associate principal trumpet of the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra. Previously, he served as principal trumpet and soloist with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and Redlands Symphony. He has been a featured soloist with such orchestras as the Los Angeles, St. Louis, Hong Kong, and California philharmonics; the Los Angeles, San Diego, St. Matthew’s, and South Bay chamber orchestras; and the Berkeley, Burbank, and Glendale symphonies. He has performed at the Taipei Music and Academy Festival Santa Fe, La Jolla, and Music@Menlo chamber music festivals as well as with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Active in the recording studio, he has played principal trumpet for the soundtracks of Spiderman: Far From Home, Incredibles 2, Rogue One, Coco, A Quiet Place, Spiderman Homecoming, War for the Planet of the Apes, Fast and Furious 7, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Independence Day Resurgence, Godzilla, The Amazing Spiderman, White House Down, Karate Kid, Avatar, The Legend of Zorro, A Beautiful Mind, Troy, Titanic, and Deep Impact. He has also been a member of John Williams’s trumpet section for over 20 years, recently recording Star Wars Episodes VII, VIII, and IX. He is currently a faculty member at Azusa Pacific University and Biola University. He received his master’s degree with distinction from the New England Conservatory and his bachelor’s degree from the Thornton Music School at the University of Southern California.

Violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky was born in Moscow into a family with a well-established musical tradition. His concerto debut came at the age of eight and in the same year he moved to the UK to study at the Menuhin School. Last season he debuted at Vienna’s Musikverein with the Tonkünstler Orchester, made return visits to Anima Musicae Budapest and Russian Philharmonic Novosibirsk and appeared with the Sitkovetsky Trio at festivals throughout Spain, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany. Recent concerto performances include appearances with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Konzerthaus Orchester Berlin, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Moscow and St Petersburg Symphony Orchestras, Orquesta Filarmónica de Bolivia, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. He directs and performs as a soloist regularly with chamber orchestras, including the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, London Mozart Players, New York Chamber Players, Camerata Zurich, and most recently with the Romanian Sinfonietta. He is a founding member of the Sitkovetsky Trio, which regularly performs throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The trio’s fourth disc for BIS Records, Ravel’s Piano Trio and Saint-Saëns’s Second Trio, was released to great critical acclaim in July 2021. Sitkovetsky is an alum of CMS’s Bowers Program and plays the 1679 ‘Parera’ Antonio Stradivari violin, kindly loaned to him through the Beare’s International Violin Society by a generous sponsor.

Violinist Sean Lee has captured the attention of audiences around the world with his lively performances of the classics. A recipient of a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, he is one of few violinists who dares to perform Niccolò Paganini’s 24 Caprices in concert, and his YouTube series, Paganini POV, continues to draw praise for its use of technology in sharing unique perspectives and insight into violin playing. He has performed as a soloist with orchestras including the San Francisco Symphony, Israel Camerata Jerusalem, and Orchestra del Teatro Carlo Felice, and his recital appearances have taken him to Vienna's Konzerthaus, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. As a season artist at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and an alum of CMS’s Bowers Program, he continues to perform regularly at Lincoln Center and on tour. Originally from Los Angeles, Lee studied with Robert Lipsett of the Colburn Conservatory and legendary violinist Ruggiero Ricci before moving at the age of 17 to study at the Juilliard School with his longtime mentor, violinist Itzhak Perlman. Lee performs on violins made by Samuel Zygmuntowicz in 1995 and David Bague in 1999, with bows made circa 1890 by Joseph Arthur Vigneron and circa 1910 by W. E. Hill & Sons.

Violinist/violist Yura Lee is a multifaceted musician, as a soloist and as a chamber musician, and one of the very few that is equally virtuosic on both violin and viola. She has performed with major orchestras including those of New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She has given recitals in London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, Salzburg’s Mozarteum, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. At age 12, she became the youngest artist ever to receive the Debut Artist of the Year prize at the Performance Today awards given by National Public Radio. She is the recipient of a 2007 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the first prize winner of the 2013 ARD Competition. She has received numerous other international prizes, including top prizes in the Mozart, Indianapolis, Hannover, Kreisler, Bashmet, and Paganini competitions. Her CD Mozart in Paris, with Reinhard Goebel and the Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie, received the prestigious Diapason d’Or Award. As a chamber musician, she regularly takes part in the festivals of Seattle, Marlboro, Salzburg, Verbier, and Caramoor. Her main teachers included Dorothy DeLay, Hyo Kang, Miriam Fried, Paul Biss, Thomas Riebl, Ana Chumachenko, and Nobuko Imai. An alum of CMS's Bowers Program, Lee is on the faculty at the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Nugget.

Cellist Timothy Eddy has earned distinction as a recitalist, soloist with orchestra, chamber musician, recording artist, and teacher of cello and chamber music. He has performed with numerous symphonies, including Dallas, Colorado, Jacksonville, North Carolina, and Stamford. He has appeared at the Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Aspen, Santa Fe, Marlboro, Lockenhaus, Spoleto, and Sarasota music festivals. He has won prizes in numerous national and international competitions, including the 1975 Gaspar Cassado International Violoncello Competition in Italy. Eddy is currently Professor of Cello at the Juilliard School and New York’s Mannes College of Music, and he was a frequent faculty member at the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshops at Carnegie Hall. A former member of the Galimir Quartet, the New York Philomusica, and the Bach Aria Group, he collaborates regularly in recital with pianist Gilbert Kalish. He has recorded a wide range of repertoire from Baroque to avant-garde for the Angel, Arabesque, Columbia, CRI, Delos, Musical Heritage, New World, Nonesuch, Vanguard, Vox, and Sony Classical labels. He performs on a 1728 Matteo Goffriller cello.

Kenneth Weiss has worked as a soloist, conductor, chamber musician, and teacher for several decades. Born in New York City, he attended the High School of Performing Arts, later studying with Lisa Goode Crawford at the Oberlin Conservatory and with Gustav Leonhardt at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam.

His recordings for Satirino records have been widely acclaimed. They include Bach’s Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, Books 1 & 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, a recording of Rameau operas and ballets transcriptions, two Scarlatti albums, and two CDs devoted to Elizabethan keyboard music—A Cleare Day and Heaven & Earth.

He was professor of harpsichord at the Juilliard School (2007–11) and at the Haute Ècole de Musique de Geneva (2015–21), and is currently Professor of Chamber Music at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, a position he has held since 1996. 

Highlights of the 2024–25 season include performances of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Berkshire Bach Society, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, the Orchestre National Avignon-Provence, and the North County Chamber Players. He will make his debut at the prestigious Music@Menlo in Atherton, California, and perform solo recitals of Bach’s Art of Fugue in Paris, San Francisco, Saintes, Santander, Santiago de Compostela and the Palau de la Música in Barcelona. The 2024–25 season also sees the release of a new recording with flutist Sooyun Kim, a tour of Australia with violinist Lina Tur Bonet, and the debut of a new recital program A Handful of Keys, celebrating keyboard ingenuity and innovations with works spanning the Renaissance to stride piano.