Celebrated Piano Trios

Catherine Cho

Catherine Cho draws upon her experiences as a soloist, chamber musician, pedagogue, and artistic director to support and mentor artists in their quests to engage and enrich their high values as creative thinkers and communicators. She is devoted to fostering the next generation of performers, teachers, and leaders through the development of artistic excellence, curiosity, and clarity of vision through a holistic view of the artist.

She has appeared as a soloist with the Detroit, National, Edmonton, Montreal, National Arts Center, Barcelona, Haifa, New Zealand, Buenos Aires, KBS, Seoul, and Daejon orchestras, and has appeared in recitals and chamber music performances at the Kennedy Center, Ravinia, 92nd St. Y, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Casals Halls among others. She has appeared in 12 national tours with Musicians From Marlboro and participated in the festivals of Aspen, Chamber Music Northwest, Four Seasons, Heifetz Institute, Santa Fe, and Vivace. She was a member of the Johannes String Quartet and La Fenice and was awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant as well as top prizes in the Montreal (1987), Queen Elisabeth (1989), and Joachim (1991) Competitions.

Her work as a teacher in the Juilliard Chamber Music Community Engagement Seminar highlights her passion for community connection through art and communication. She is a Music For Food artist, the artistic director of the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival, a member of the Perlman Music Program faculty (since 2007), and the artistic advisor for the Starling-Delay Symposium at Juilliard.

Cho received her BM and MM degrees at Juilliard, where she studied with Dorothy Delay, Hyo Kang, and Felix Galimir. Her mentors include Ruggiero Ricci, Franco Gulli, and Michael Avsharian Jr.

Ms. Cho lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, Todd Phillips, and their three cats, Orso, Livie, and Ella. She is the proud mother of Brandon Phillips, the stepmom of three lovely stepkids: Lia, Eliza, and Jason Phillips, and Halmoni (Korean grandma) to the delightful Theo and Mila Stahl. When she is away from work, you may find her catching up with her reading list, practicing yoga or Pilates, or tending to her Zen garden.

Marcy Rosen

Marcy Rosen has established herself as one of the most important and respected artists of our day. Los Angeles Times music critic Herbert Glass has called her “one of the intimate art’s abiding treasures” and The New Yorker Magazine calls her “a New York legend of the cello”. She has performed in recital and with orchestra throughout Canada, England, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South America, Switzerland, and all fifty of the United States. She made her concerto debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of eighteen and has appeared with such noted orchestras as the Dallas Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, the Caramoor Festival Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, the Jupiter Symphony and Concordia Chamber Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall, and the Tokyo Symphony at the famed Orchard Hall in Tokyo. In recital, she has appeared in New York at such acclaimed venues as Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street “Y” and Merkin Concert Hall; in Washington D.C. at the Kennedy Center, Dumbarton Oaks, the Phillips Collection and the Corcoran Gallery, where she for many years she hosted a series entitled “Marcy Rosen and Friends.” Sought after for her riveting and informative Master Classes, she has been a guest of the Curtis Institute of Music, the New England Conservatory, the San Francisco Conservatory, the Central Conservatory in Beijing, China, the Seoul Arts Center in Korea and the Cartagena International Music Festival in Colombia. In 2024, she was appointed Artistic Director of the Evnin Rising Stars program at the Caramoor Center for the Arts.

Recent recordings released by Bridge Records include the Complete Works for Cello and Piano by Felix Mendelssohn with the pianist Lydia Artymiw and the Sonatas of Richard Strauss and Edvard Grieg with pianist Susan Walters.

A consummate soloist, Ms. Rosen’s superb musicianship is enhanced by her many chamber music activities. She has collaborated with the world’s finest musicians including Jonathan Biss, Jeremy Denk, Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, Andras Schiff, Peter Serkin, Mitsuko Uchida, Isaac Stern, Robert Mann, Sandor Vegh, Miriam Fried, Kim Kashkashian, Jessye Norman, Lucy Shelton, Charles Neidich and the Juilliard, Emerson, and Orion Quartets. She is a founding member of the ensemble La Fenice, a group comprised of Oboe, Piano and String Trio, as well as a founding member of the world-renowned Mendelssohn String Quartet. With the Mendelssohn String Quartet, she was Artist-in-Residence at the North Carolina School of the Arts and for nine years served as Blodgett-Artist-in Residence at Harvard University. The Quartet which disbanded in January of 2010, toured annually throughout the United States, Canada and Europe for 31 years.

She performs regularly at festivals both here and abroad, including the Caramoor, Four Seasons, Lake Champlain, Santa Fe, Ravinia and Saratoga Chamber Music Festivals, the Seattle International Music Festival, the Lockenhaus Kammermusikfest in Austria and the International Musicians Seminar in England. A long-time participant at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont she has taken part in 25 of their “Musicians from Marlboro” tours and performed in concerts celebrating the 40th, 50th and 60th Anniversaries of the Festival.

Since 1986 Ms. Rosen has been Artistic Director of Chesapeake Chamber Music in Maryland. That organization houses the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival, an International Chamber Music Competition, a Jazz Festival and YouthReach, an educational program that provides free lessons to beginning string players. She is also an artist member of Music for Food, a musician led initiative to fight hunger in our local communities.

The recipient of many awards and prizes, Marcy Rosen twice won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, in 1981 with the Mendelssohn String Quartet and again in 1986, as a soloist. She was further honored by YCA with the Walker Fund Prize and the Mortimer Levitt Career Development Award. She is also the winner of the Washington International Competition for Strings and was the first recipient of the Mischa Schneider Memorial Award from the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation.

Marcy Rosen was born in Phoenix, Arizona and her teachers included Gordon Epperson, Orlando Cole, Marcus Adeney, Felix Galimir, Karen Tuttle and Sandor Vegh. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music. Ms. Rosen is currently Professor of Cello at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and on the Faculty at the Mannes College of Music in New York City. She has also served on the faculties of the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Eastman School of Music, the New England Conservatory and the University of Delaware.

Her performances can be heard on numerous recordings from the BIS, Bridge. Deutsche Grammophon, Sony Classical, CBS Masterworks, Musical Heritage Society, Phillips, Nonesuch, Pro Arte, and Koch labels among others. Please visit her website at www.marcyrosen.com.

Efi Hackmey

Pianist Efi Hackmey is Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Chiarina Chamber Players, together with cellist Carrie Bean Stute. Mr. Hackmey is an active soloist and chamber musician in NYC and in the DC area. In 2013 he released an album on the Naxos label, which includes several world premiere recordings (Polish Violin Music with violinist Kinga Augustyn). Efi has performed at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Rose Studio, Kennedy Center, Bargemusic, Arion Chamber Music, and the Friends of Mozart series in NYC. He performed many additional concerts in Alabama, California, DC, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Montana, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming. In his native Israel he performed as soloist with the Haifa Symphony Orchestra, as well as at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Jerusalem Music Center, and in special concerts presented by the Arthur Rubinstein International Music Society. He has performed on Israeli TV Channel 2, and his recordings have been broadcast on the Israeli National Public Radio,and in the US on WTSU, WRWA and WTJB. A review of one of his New York performances quotes “excellent Israeli musician... under his fingers the piano sounded noble, and each phrase was full of character”, and further praises his “highly personal, thought through interpretation.” (Roman Markowicz, “Nowy Dziennik”).

Mr. Hackmey has served on the piano faculty at DePauw University, and he also taught at the Indiana University system, Montgomery College in Rockville, MD, and Levine School of Music in Washington, DC. He holds a Doctor of Music degree in piano performance from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and degrees in piano and conducting from Tel Aviv University. He studied with Menahem Pressler, Pnina Salzman and Dina Turgeman, and has had additional coaching with Lazar Berman, Emanuel Ax, Richard Goode, Janos Starker, David Zinman, Richard Stoltzman and Jaime Laredo.