Violinist Renée Jolles enjoys an eclectic career as soloist and chamber artist specializing in a wide variety of styles from the Baroque to the contemporary. Hailed as a “real star” by The New York Times for her New York concerto debut in Alice Tully Hall, she has premiered hundreds of works, including the American premiere of Schnittke’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Her concerto engagements have included orchestras such as Orpheus, the Philharmonic Orchestra of New Jersey, and the Salisbury Symphony.

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Ms. Jolles is a member of the Jolles Duo, Continuum, Intimate Voices (with which she has appeared in all 11 seasons), and The New York Chamber Ensemble, and she is a concertmaster of the world-renowned, Grammy Award winning, conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Honored to be a featured soloist in three world premieres as part of the Orpheus “New Brandenburg” commissions, she can be heard as soloist on the WQXR website in live performances from Carnegie Hall. She has performed at festivals such as Marlboro, Cape May, Norfolk, Taos and Riverrun. Committed to recording new music, she can be heard as soloist and chamber artist on the CRI,Cambria, North/South Recordings, Albany, and New World record labels, as well as on recent recordings which showcase the music of Oleg Felzer, Victoria Bond, and Ushio Torikai.

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Ms. Jolles is Professor of Violin at the Eastman School of Music, and during the summer she is on the faculty at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. She received her BM and MM from Juilliard, and her teachers have included Lewis Kaplan, Felix Galimir, Jacob Lateiner, and members of the Juilliard, Tokyo, and American String Quartets.

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 Cellist Jia Kim, a recipient of the prestigious 2017 Leonore Annenberg Fellowship, began her cello studies at the age of ten in Korea, where she has won first place in the Korean Music Association Competition, the National Symphony Orchestra Competition of Korea and the Young Musician Foundation's National Debut Concerto Competition. Since then Ms. Kim has taken the stage in cities across the United States, South America, Europe and South Korea. Her performances have been reviewed by the New York Times among others, and have been broadcasted on WQXR, PBS and KMZT Classical.

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As a passionate and active chamber musician, Ms. Kim has worked with renowned artists such as Itzhak Perlman, Frans Helmerson, Robert Mann, Kim Kashkashian, Robert Spano, and Emmanuel Villaume, as well as members of the Juilliard, Cleveland, Takács, Orion String Quartets, among others. She has appeared in performance at venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and many more, both in the U.S. and around the world. She has also participated in festivals such as Académie musicale de Villecroze, Kneisel Hall, White Mountains Music Festival, Sitka Music Festival, and The Perlman Music Program's Chamber Music Workshop, including appearances with Perlman in Israel, Toronto, Mexico City, Miami and New York.

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A devoted educator, Ms.Kim has worked with students from the Juilliard School, Cleveland Institute of Music, Jerusalem Music Center, and American Academy of Jordan, among others. Her teachers and mentors include Ronald Leonard, Toby and Itzhak Perlman, and Joel Krosnick with whom she studied at Juilliard.

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Grammy-nominated violist Melissa Reardon is an internationally renowned performer whose solo and chamber playing spans all musical genres. Lauded by Classical Voice for her “elegant” and “virtuosic” performances, the Massachusetts-born musician won first prize at the Washington International Competition, and is the only violist to win top prizes in consecutive HAMS International viola competitions. As a member of the Ensō String Quartet from 2006 to 2018, she toured both nationally and internationally, and her solo engagements have included performances at the Stevens Center, Kennedy Center, Symphony Hall, and Jordan Hall, including as soloist with Camerata Notturna and the Boston Symphony. In 2006, she was selected as one of four violists internationally to participate in “Chamber Music Connects the World,” in Kronberg, Germany, alongside Gidon Kremer and Yuri Bashmet.

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Ms. Reardon is the new Artistic Director of the Portland Chamber Music Festival in Maine, is also a founding member of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO), and is a sought-after collaborative musician. She has appeared in numerous festivals across the United States, South America, Europe, Canada, India, and Korea, and has toured with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and with Musicians from Marlboro. She holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and the New England Conservatory, and her principal teachers include Kim Kashkashian, Michael Tree, Joseph dePasquale, Karen Tuttle, Samuel Rhodes, and Hsin-Yun Huang, in addition to early chamber music studies with Eugene Lehner. Melissa lives in New York City and is married to the cellist Raman Ramakrishnan.

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 Violinist Sheila Reinhold is the founder and Music Director of Intimate Voices, now in its thirteenth season. She gave her first performance as soloist with orchestra at the age of nine in the Kaufmann Concert Hall of New York's 92nd Street Y. At fourteen, she played for Jascha Heifetz, and was invited to join his master class at the University of Southern California, where she studied with him for five years. She received her B.Mus. from USC, and studied theory and analysis with Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim at Harvard University.

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Ms. Reinhold's engagements have included solo appearances with conductors such as Zubin Mehta and André Kostelanetz, chamber music with Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky, and performances as soloist at the Chautauqua and Ives Festivals. She has also premiered solo and chamber works for both violin and viola, and been a regular participant in chamber music on both violin and viola in series such as the Mohawk Trails Concerts in Massachusetts. She plays music in other genres as well, working on major films and Broadway productions, and appearing with popular artists including Tony Bennett. She has recorded as a chamber musician on the Albany and North/South labels, and is featured on a recent recording of the music of Allen Shawn.

Ms. Reinhold’s lifetime dedication to teaching has led to positions ranging from Resident Musician at Harvard University to chair of the string faculty at the Children’s Orchestra Society in New York, and in the summer she is a member of the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East. She recently taught a course on the Bach works for solo violin through the University of Denver. 

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Violist Carol Rodland enjoys a distinguished international career as a concert and recording artist and teacher. First prize winner of the Washington International Competition and the Artists International Auditions, she made her solo debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra as a teenager. Critics describe her playing as "larger than life, sweetly in tune, infinitely variegated", and "delicious" (Fanfare Magazine). Her recent chamber music collaborations have included appearances with the Boston Chamber Music Society, the Central Chamber Music Series, and the Henschel Quartett. Festival appearances have included the Musikfestpiele Saar, the Schwetzinger Festspiele, the Heifetz International Music Institute, the Killington Music Festival, the Chautauqua Music Festival, and the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival. She is also a passionate advocate for contemporary music, and has commissioned, premiered, and recorded new works by Kenji Bunch, Dan Coleman, Adolphus Hailstork, David Liptak, Christopher Theofanidis, and Augusta Read Thomas.

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Ms. Rodland is Professor of Viola and Chamber Music at the Juilliard School. She is also an artist-faculty member at the Perlman Music Program, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the Karen Tuttle Coordination Workshop. She received her B.Mus. and M.Mus. from Juilliard where she studied with Karen Tuttle and was the winner of the Juilliard Concerto Competition and the Lillian Fuchs Prize. She also earned an Aufbaustudium Diplom from the Musikhochschule Freiburg, Germany, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar and Beebe Fund Grantee with Kim Kashkashian. Ms. Rodland is the founder and artistic director of If Music Be the Food… (www.ifmusicbethefood.com), a benefit concert series created in 2009 to increase awareness of and support for the hungry.

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Acclaimed by The New York Times as an "extraordinary violist" of "immense flair," violist Dov Scheindlin is a member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and an associate member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He has also been violist of the Arditti, Penderecki and Chester String Quartets. His chamber music career has brought him to 28 countries around the globe, and won him the Siemens Prize in 1999. He has appeared as soloist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Berlin, the Paris Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic. Mr. Scheindlin has recorded extensively for EMI, Teldec, Auvidis, Col Legno, and Mode, and won the Gramophone Award in 2002 for the Arditti Quartet's recording of Sir Harrison Birtwistle's Pulse Shadows. As a member of the Arditti Quartet, he gave nearly 100 world premières, among them new works by Benjamin Britten, Elliott Carter, György Kurtág, Thomas Adès, and Wolfgang Rihm. He has also been broadcast on NPR, BBC, CBC, and on German, French, Swiss, Austrian, Dutch and Belgian national radio networks.

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Mr. Scheindlin was raised in New York City, where he studied with Samuel Rhodes and William Lincer at the Juilliard School. He has taught viola and chamber music at Harvard University, Wilfrid Laurier University, and Tanglewood, and he has regularly participated in summer festivals such as Salzburg, Luzern, and Tanglewood, and has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Met Chamber Ensembles. His chamber music partners have included members of the Juilliard, Alban Berg, Tokyo, and Borodin String Quartets, as well as concertmasters of many major symphony orchestras.

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Pianist and harpsichordist Carsten Schmidt made his professional debut with the Essen Philharmonic in Germany in 1984, and has performed extensively throughout Europe, North America, and Japan. Active both as a pianist and harpsichordist, his repertoire ranges from the early seventeenth century to contemporary works, of which he has premiered more than one hundred. He has appeared at such venues as the German Mozart Festival, Ravinia Festival in Chicago, Schubert Festival in Amsterdam, Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Merkin and Weill Recital Halls in NYC, the Moscow Conservatory, and the Kuhmo Festival in Finland. Since 2003 he has also been increasingly active as a conductor, leading productions of operas by Handel and Purcell, and orchestral repertoire ranging from Marais to Mahler.

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Carsten Schmidt graduated with distinction from the Folkwang Institute in Germany, and subsequently received an Artist Diploma from Indiana University and a doctorate from Yale. He joined the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College in 1998, and is artistic director of the Staunton Music Festival in Virginia.

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Championing musical works from all periods, cellist James Wilson performs on Baroque as well as modern cello with repertoire ranging from the late-17th century to new works especially written for him. As recitalist and chamber musician, he has appeared in Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, the Musikverein in Vienna, the Koelner Philharmonie, the National Concert Hall in Taipei, and the Sydney Opera House. He has performed at music festivals around the world such as the Hong Kong Arts Festival, the City of London Festival, the Deutches Mozartfest in Bavaria, the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland, the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York City and the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado.

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Mr. Wilson is a member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, serving also as one of its Artistic Directors, and he has frequently served as principal cellist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. As a former member of the Shanghai and Chester String Quartets and the Da Capo Chamber Players, he has recorded and toured extensively in the United States and around the world. His performances have been broadcast on West German Radio and Bavarian Radio in Germany, CBC radio in Canada, Radio Shanghai, Radio Helsinki, and CBS television and National Public Radio in the United States. A resident of both New York City and Staunton, Virginia, Mr. Wilson is currently the Artistic Director of the Richmond-based Chamber Music Society of Central Virgina.

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