A chamber musician praised for his “virtuosic,” “dazzling,” and “brilliant” performances (New York Times) and his “bold, keen sound” (New Yorker), James Austin Smith is driven by the communicative nature of live performance. As an oboist and on-stage host he appears regularly at leading national and international chamber music festivals, at Carnegie Hall and on tour 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 he curates intimate evenings of food, drink, and music designed to engage audiences hungry for singular cultural experiences in New York, San Francisco, and Serenbe, Georgia. He mentors graduate-level musicians as a professor of oboe and chamber music at Stony Brook University and the Manhattan School of Music, and as a regular guest at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. An alum of CMS’s Bowers Program, he holds a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music and bachelor’s degrees in political science and music from Northwestern University. He spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Conservatory in Leipzig, Germany, and is an alum of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, Smith’s principal teachers are Stephen Taylor, Christian Wetzel, Humbert Lucarelli, and Ray Still.

Brandon Ridenour is a stylistically diverse trumpet soloist, collaborative artist, composer, and arranger. Recognized as “heralding the trumpet of the future” (Chicago Sun-Times) and for his “full-bodied, atmospheric arrangements” (New York Times), he began learning about the wonders of music at age 5, studying piano under the tutelage of his father. This morphed into “tootelage” when he picked up the trumpet in 5th grade band class in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Upon graduating from the Juilliard School, he immediately began touring the world with the Canadian Brass and embarked on a solo career. He is also an active composer/arranger, writing in a wide variety of styles for various instrumentations and artists. He has won competitions ranging from the International Trumpet Guild Solo Competition to the American Composers Forum. Emphasizing the role of performer-composer, he assembled a group of similar-minded musicians based in Brooklyn called Founders. He has played with a diverse array of musicians including Jon Batiste, Sting, James Taylor, Marvin Hamlisch, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Esperanza Spalding, Bruce Cockburn, John Williams, and esteemed ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Knights, Orpheus, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and many others. Ridenour is on faculty at Manhattan School of Music and the New School, where he is passionate about developing a new model of education for a well-rounded, progressive musician of the future.

Born in Taiwan, Cho-Liang Lin moved to Sydney at age 12 to further his violin studies with Robert Pikler. After playing for Itzhak Perlman in a master class, the 13-year-old decided that he must study with Mr. Perlman’s teacher, Dorothy DeLay. At age 15, he traveled alone to New York, auditioned for the Juilliard School, and spent the next six years working with Ms. DeLay. His concert career launched in 1980 with his debut playing the Mendelssohn Concerto with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta. He has since performed as soloist with virtually every major orchestra in the world. At the age of 31 he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School, and in 2006 was appointed professor at Rice University. He was music director of La Jolla SummerFest for 18 years, currently serves as artistic director of the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival, and recently founded the Taipei Music Academy and Festival. Many of today’s composers have written for him, including John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, Tan Dun, John Williams, Steven Stucky, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Bright Sheng, Paul Schoenfield, Lalo Schifrin, Joan Tower, and others. Recently, he was soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Nashville Symphony, and Royal Philharmonic. Lin performs on the 1715 “Titian” Stradivari and a 2000 Samuel Zygmuntowicz. His many recordings can be heard on the Sony Classical, Decca, BIS, Delos, and Ondine labels. His albums have won Gramophone Record of the Year, Grammy nominations, and Penguin Guide Rosettes.

Called “superb” by the Washington Post and “stunningly virtuosic” by the New York Times, Peter Kolkay is the only bassoonist to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant. In addition to performing with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, he regularly appears at the Music@Menlo and Bridgehampton summer festivals, and has performed on the Emerald City, Tertulia, and String Theory series. He actively engages with composers in the creation of new music for the bassoon and has premiered solo works by Joan Tower, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Tania León, among others. His 2022–23 season included the premiere of a new work for bassoon and piano by Reinaldo Moya, and the release of two recordings: an album of contemporary works performed with the Calidore Quartet, and the Christopher Rouse Bassoon Concerto with the Albany Symphony. He is a member of the IRIS Collective in Germantown, Tennessee, and has also served as guest principal bassoon of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. A dedicated teacher, he is Associate Professor at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University and has given master classes throughout the United States and Mexico. Kolkay is an alumnus of CMS’s Bowers Program, and holds degrees from Lawrence University, the Eastman School of Music, and Yale University. A native of Naperville, Illinois, he currently calls the Melrose neighborhood of Nashville home, and is the recipient of a 2022–23 Individual Artist Fellowship in music performance from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Educator, entrepreneur, and youth advocate Joseph Conyers—Principal Double Bass of The Philadelphia Orchestra—has spent the whole of his career as a multi-faceted 21st-century artist whose innovative work in music education and access has been recognized internationally. Awards for his celebrated initiatives include the Sphinx Organization’s Medal of Excellence (2019), the organization’s most prestigious recognition; the Theodore L. Kesselman Award from the New York Youth Symphony (2019); the C. Hartman Kuhn award (2018), the highest honor bestowed upon a musician of the Philadelphia Orchestra; and Musical America’s 30 Top Professionals: Innovators, Independent Thinkers, and Entrepreneurs (2018). In 2015, he was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Young Alumni Award from his alma mater, the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Hal Robinson and Edgar Meyer. During the summer of 2021, he was profiled on PBS in an Articulate feature that highlights his work as Founder and Vision Advisor of Project 440, an organization that helps young people use their interest in music to forge new pathways for themselves and ignite change in their communities. He is the Music Director of Philadelphia’s All-City Orchestra, which showcases the top high school musicians of the School District of Philadelphia. He was named the Director of the Young Artists Orchestra for the prestigious Boston University Tanglewood Institute in 2020. A frequent guest clinician and speaker presenting from coast to coast, Conyers serves on the double bass faculty of The Juilliard School.

Kenneth Weiss has an active career as a soloist, conductor, chamber musician, and teacher. He has performed extensively in Europe, North America, and Asia—Wigmore Hall, Tokyo's Bunkakaikan Hall, Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, Library of Congress, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, La Roque d'Anthéron, Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. He is a frequent guest of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, and NYC's Music Before 1800. In May 2021 he made a live concert recording of Bach’s Art of Fugue at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon on the historic Taskin harpsichord belonging to the Portuguese National Music Museum. It will be released on the Paraty label in October. His recordings for Satirino records have been widely acclaimed. They include Bach's Goldberg Variations, partitas, and 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. A native New Yorker, he attended the High School of Performing Arts and the Oberlin Conservatory where he studied with Lisa Goode Crawford, later studying with Gustav Leonhardt at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He is professor of harpsichord at the Haute Ecole de Musique in Geneva, Switzerland, and professor of chamber music at the Paris Conservatory.