2012-13 Guest Artists
Elena Urioste, who has been featured on the cover of Symphony magazine as an emerging artist to watch, first appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra at age thirteen and has since made acclaimed debuts with major orchestras throughout the United States including the Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Pops, Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras. In Europe, she has appeared with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Wurzburg Philharmonic, and Hungary’s Orchestra Dohnányi Budafok.
As first-place laureate in both the Junior and Senior divisions of the Sphinx Competition, Elena Urioste debuted at Carnegie Hall in 2004 and has returned annually as soloist. She has collaborated with acclaimed conductors Sir Mark Elder, Keith Lockhart, Robert Spano, and Carlos Miguel Prieto; pianists Christopher O’Riley and Ignat Solzhenitsyn; cellists Zuill Bailey and Carter Brey; and violinists Shlomo Mintz and Cho-Liang Lin. She has been a featured artist in the Marlboro, Ravinia, La Jolla, and Sarasota Music Festivals, as well as Switzerland’s Sion Valais International Music Festival. Her media credits include the popular radio programs From the Top and Performance Today; and appearances on Telemundo and NBC’s Today Show. Her first CD was released on the White Pine label. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Joseph Silverstein, Pamela Frank, and Ida Kavafian. She completed graduate studies with Joel Smirnoff at The Juilliard School. Visit Elena Urioste’s website.
Jana Bouskova has become a much sought-after harpist and a regular guest of the world’s foremost concert platforms, performing with the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich, Yuri Bashmet, Patrick Gallois, Maxim Vengerov, Christian Tetzlaff, and Gustav Rivinius. She has presented solo recitals at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, Paris’s Châtelet, the Prague Spring Festival and the Berliner Festtage, and was featured in a major tour of Israel and Europe with violinist Maxim Vengerov. She has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Czech Philharmonic, Prague Philharmonia, Chicago Sinfonietta, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Israel Philharmonic, and Tokyo Chamber Orchestra. Since 2005 she has held the post of principal harpist with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. She has served as a professor at the Prague Conservatoire, Brussels Royal Conservatory, and the Academy of Music in Prague. To her credit are over twenty CDs made for Czech and international labels.
Miss Bouskova studied at the Prague Conservatoire and then pursued her schooling at Ostrava University. A Fulbright scholarship grant then enabled her to study at America’s Indiana University with Susann McDonald. Jana Bouskova is her country’s sole harpist to have achieved the highest awards from the world’s most prestigious competitions: gold medal from the International Harp Competition in the U.S.A., and second prize from the International Harp Contest in Israel. As one of the Czech Republic’s ten most distinguished women, in 2004 she was the first classical music instrumentalist to receive the Lady Pro prize. Visit Jana Bouskova’s website.
Esteemed teacher, conductor, and violinist Victor Yampolsky serves as Carol F. and Arthur L. Rice Jr. University Professor in Music Performance at the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music; Music Director of the Peninsula Music Festival in Door County, Wisconsin; Music Director Emeritus of the Omaha Symphony, as well as the Honorary Director of the Scotia Festival of Music in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Born in the Soviet Union in 1942, Yampolsky – the son of the great pianist Vladimir Yampolsky – studied violin with the legendary David Oistrakh at the Moscow Conservatory and conducting with Maestro Nicolai Rabinovich at the Leningrad Conservatory. He was a member of the Moscow Philharmonic as both violinist and assistant conductor.
Yampolsky emigrated to the United States in 1973. Soon afterwards he was appointed Principal Second Violinist of the Boston Symphony. In 1977, Yampolsky became music director of the Atlantic Symphony in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the conductor of the Young Artists Orchestra at Tanglewood. Two years later he was appointed Adjunct Professor of Violin and Director of Orchestras at the Boston University School of Music. Yampolsky was appointed director of orchestras at the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music in 1984. He has also been principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Johannesburg and music director of the Omaha Symphony. Yampolsky has also conducted over 80 professional and student orchestras throughout the world, and has recorded for Pyramid and Kiwi-Pacific Records. Visit Victor Yampolsky’s page at the Peninsula Music Festival website.
As an accomplished period pianist, Robert Levin’s solo engagements include the orchestras of Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Montreal, Utah and Vienna with such conductors as James Conlon, Bernard Haitink, Sir Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Joseph Silverstein. He has made recordings for most of the world’s major labels, including a Mozart concerto cycle for Decca/London with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music; a Beethoven concerto cycle for DG Archiv with John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique; and the complete Bach harpsichord concertos with Helmuth Rilling; as well as Bach’s six English Suites and both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier. He is equally devoted to contemporary music, having recorded a great deal of this repertoire, including the complete piano works of Dutilleux on the ECM label. Levin’s active career as a chamber musician includes long associations with the violist Kim Kashkashian, frequent collaborations with his wife, and NCMF artist, Ya-Fei Chuang, as well as performances with many other artists of the Nevada Chamber Music Festival.
In addition to his performing activities, Levin is a noted theorist and Mozart scholar. His completion of the Mozart C-minor Mass, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, premiered in January 2005 and has since been recorded and widely performed. Levin is president of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition (Leipzig, Germany), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Visit Robert Levin’s page at the Harvard University website.
Ya-Fei Chuang has appeared at numerous international festivals, among them the Beethoven Festival in Warsaw, the Taipei International Music Festival, the European Music Festival (Stuttgart), the Bach Festival (Leipzig) Schleswig-Holstein, Ravinia, Sarasota, Gilmore, Tanglewood, the Oregon Bach Festival, and the Nevada Chamber Music Festival. She has performed at venues such as the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, the Schauspielhaus Berlin, the Gewandhaus Leipzig, and Symphony Hall in Boston. Ms. Chuang has performed as duo partner with James Buswell, Steven Isserlis, Kim Kashkashian, and Robert Levin. The Ruhr Piano Festival has released two CDs of her performances there – her May 2007 solo recital, which was also distributed as a premium by the music magazine ‘Fono Forum,’ and the Mendelssohn G minor Piano Concerto.
Her recent engagements include concerts and recordings in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Malaysian Philharmonic, and appearances on national TV in Tel Aviv, at the National Concert Hall Taipei, in Hong Kong, England, Germany, Austria, South America and throughout the U.S. She has recorded solo, concerto and chamber music works for Naxos, Harmonia Mundi, ECM, and New York Philomusica Records. Ya-Fei Chuang is on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory and gives master classes throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Visit Ya-Fei Chuang’s page at the New England Conservatory website.
“Gabriela possesses a marvelous, contagious energy, working with her is very exciting, she transmits all of her energy to the orchestra. She is incredible, she is enormously talented, she is simply a genius.” — Gustavo Dudamel. Lauded by The New York Times as “compelling, elegant, and incisive,” Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez has already amassed an impressive list of recital, concerto, and chamber music performance credits. Since making her orchestral debut at age seven, she has appeared as soloist with orchestras such as the Chicago, New Jersey, Fort Worth, and San Francisco Symphonies, Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Nurnberger Philharmoniker, Symphonisches Staatsorchester Halle, Tivoli Philharmonic, and regularly performs with the Simón Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra. An avid chamber musician, she has collaborated with Itzhak Perlman and the Takacs, Biava and Calder quartets. Ms. Martinez has performed under the batons of conductors Gustavo Dudamel, Itzhak Perlman, Lawrence Foster, James Conlon, and Charles Dutoit. She has performed in over 50 concert halls in the U.S. and Germany, as well as in Salzburg, Copenhagen, Paris, The Netherlands, St. Moritz, Verbier, Sendai, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Montpellier, Rome, Venice, London, Spoleto, Brussels, Caracas, and Bogotá.
Ms. Martinez has won numerous prizes and awards, most recently first prize and the audience award at the Anton G. Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Dresden. She was a semifinalist at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, where she also received a Jury Discretionary Award. She earned her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, and her doctorate in Halle, Germany. In 2008, Ms. Martinez was appointed Concert Artist Faculty at Kean University in New Jersey. Visit Gabriela Martinez’s website.
