2026-27 Season Artists
Angella Ahn
Bruce Adolphe
Viano Quartet
Isidore String Quartet
Jeremy Denk
Ji Su Jung
Timothy Chooi
Violin & Artistic Director
Angella Ahn
Korean American violinist Angella Ahn is a recitalist, chamber musician, and educator. As the violinist of the Ahn Trio, Angella has performed in over 35 countries and every state in the U.S., at venues as diverse as Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colon, Vienna’s Musikverein, New York’s Lincoln Center, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Beijing’s Concert Hall, Istanbul’s Aya Irini in Topkapi Palace, and the White House. She has collaborated and been featured with such musical luminaries as Phil Aaberg, Darol Anger, Rachel Barton Pine, Emmylou Harris, and the late John Prine.
In addition to live performances, Angella has an impressive discography with her trio. The nine enthusiastically received albums include Lullaby for My Favorite Insomniac, released by Sony (No. 8 in the Billboard Charts for 26 weeks) and Dvorak, Suk and Shostakovich, released by EMI (winner of Germany’s prestigious ECHO Award).
A graduate of the Juilliard School, Angella leverages her tutelage under foremost violin pedagogue Dorothy DeLay with her decades-long performance career, helping to shape the next generation of young musicians. She is Associate Professor of Violin and Viola at Montana State University and has given masterclasses throughout North America, Asia, and Europe.
Angella is active in the Montana community where she lives, serving her second term on the Montana Arts Council. She is the Artistic Director of Montana Chamber Music, bringing world class chamber music to Montana, and she also serves on the Advisory Board of Opera Montana. She can be seen in “Angella Ahn & Friends” on Montana PBS’ Emmy award- winning 11th & Grant with Eric Funk, as well as in The Hive, a film produced by Tippet Rise Art Center in collaboration with the acclaimed sculptor Stephen Talasnik and director Matthew McKee.
Angella plays on a Pietro Antonio Dalla Costa, circa 1760.
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Composer
Bruce Adolphe
Composer, author, lecturer, and performer Bruce Adolphe — known to millions of Americans from his public radio show Piano Puzzlers, which was broadcast weekly on Performance Today, hosted by Fred Child, from 2002 to 2025 — has created a substantial body of chamber music and orchestral works inspired by science, visual arts, and human rights. Mr. Adolphe has composed several works based on writings by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: Body Loops (piano and orchestra); Memories of a Possible Future (piano and string quartet); Self Comes to Mind (solo cello and two percussionists); Obedient Choir of Emotions (chorus and piano); and Musics of Memory (piano, marimba, harp, guitar). Yo-Yo Ma premiered Self Comes to Mind, with a text written by Antonio Damasio especially for the project, in 2009 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Mr. Adolphe’s other science-based music include Einstein’s Light for violin and piano, recorded by Joshua Bell and Marija Stroke on Sony Classical. Among his human rights works are I Will Not Remain Silent for violin and orchestra and Reach Out, Raise Hope, Change Society for chorus, wind quintet, and three percussionists, both recorded on the Naxos/Milken Archive label. His string octet Thakla, an Arabic word meaning a parent’s grief over the death of a child, was premiered in 2025 by Accordo in Minneapolis (recording on YouTube). Mr. Adolphe is the resident lecturer and director of family concerts for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the author of several books, including Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition (Cambridge, 2023); The Mind’s Ear (third edition, OUP, 2021), and Dreaming and Thinking in Music: Exercises Exploring Inspiration and Imagination in Musical Creativity (OUP, 2025). He contributed the chapter “The Musical Imagination: Mystery and Method in Musical Composition” to the book Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal (OUP, 2019), an anthology of writings by neuroscientists and artists. Mr. Adolphe contributed the chapter “The Sound of Human Rights: Wordless Music that Speaks for Humanity” to The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights (2022).
Viano Quartet
Praised for their “virtuosity, visceral expression, and rare unity of intention” (Boston Globe), the Viano Quartet has quickly soared to international acclaim as one of the most dynamic and in-demand string quartets of their generation. Winners of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2025, the ensemble has captivated audiences worldwide ever since they were awarded First Prize at the 13th Banff International String Quartet Competition, with appearances at renowned venues such as Lincoln Center inNew York, Berlin’s Konzerthaus, Toronto’s Koerner Hall, Hong Kong’s City Hall, and London’s Wigmore Hall. The Viano Quartet are Bowers Program Artists at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from 2024-2027.
Highlights of the Viano Quartet’s 2026/2027 season include debut performances at Chamber Music Houston, Austin Chamber Music Center, Chicago Chamber Music Society, Montana Chamber Music, thePhillips Collection in Washington DC, the Los Angeles Music Guild, the Royal Concertgebouw, Coast Recital Society, Caramoor Center for the Music and Arts, Schubert Club in St. Paul MN, and Chamber Music Charleston. The quartet also makes return appearances at Chamber Music Tulsa, Society of the Four Arts, Music at Evergreen in Baltimore, Cecilian Chamber Series, and a tour through Oregon with Chamber Music Northwest. The quartet looks forward to visiting residencies this season at University of California Santa Barbara, Washington University in Saint Louis, the University of Victoria, Music in the Vineyards in Napa Valley, and Vancouver Academy of Music Chamberfest. This season also features exciting collaborations with pianist Sir Stephen Hough, pianist Illia Ovcharenko, tenor Nicholas Phan, bassist Nina Bernat, and guitarist Jason Vieaux.
Equally committed to both beloved masterworks and contemporary repertoire, the Viano Quartet actively collaborates with today’s leading composers, including Sir Stephen Hough, Gavin Bryars, Kevin Lau, Chris Rogerson, and Caroline Shaw. Most recently, they premiered a newly written string quartet by Indian American composer Reena Esmail in July of 2026.
The quartet’s recent discography highlights the ensemble’s range across both traditional and modern repertoire. Their first full-length album, Voyager, was released in summer 2025 on Apple Music’s Platoonlabel. Inspired by humankind’s enduring spirit of exploration that connects music and people across vast boundaries, the album features Beethoven’s Op. 130 alongside Alistair Coleman’s Moonshot. Gramophone praised the album as “a gripping voyage into the sublime.” Their debut EP, Portraits, was released in 2023 as one of the first albums launched on the Curtis Studio label, featuring works by Schubert, Florence Price, Tchaikovsky, and Ginastera.
Passionate about sharing their love for chamber music with the next generation of musicians, the quartet has worked with some of the most talented young artists at the world’s leading universities and music institutions, including Northwestern University, University of Buffalo, Music@Menlo Chamber Music Institute, the Colburn Academy, Duke University, and Indiana University South Bend. They have also collaborated with many of the world’s finest artists, including Emanuel Ax, Inon Barnatan, Fleur Barron, Mahan Esfahani, Marc-André Hamelin, James Ehnes, Bridget Kibbey, Paul Neubauer, David Shifrin, and Pinchas Zukerman.
The Viano Quartet was formed in Los Angeles at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in 2015. Each member of the quartet is grateful for the unwavering support from their mentors at the Curtis Institute and Colburn Conservatory, including members of the Dover, Guarneri, and Tokyo string quartets.
“Viano” is a portmanteau that symbolizes how the four individual instruments of a string quartet—each beginning with the letter “v”—work harmoniously as one, like a piano, creating a unified instrument called the “Viano.”
Isidore String Quartet
The New York City–based Isidore String Quartet, winner of the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition (2022) and recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant (2023), is committed to rediscovering and reinvigorating the string quartet repertoire. Formed at the Juilliard School in 2019 and coached by members of the Juilliard String Quartet, the ensemble carries forward Juilliardʼs lineage of “approaching the established as if it were brand new, and the new as if it were firmly establishedˮ—a philosophy that continues to shape its curiosity-driven approach to both canonical and contemporary works.
The Isidore String Quartet—violinists Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon, violist Devin Moore, and cellist Joshua McClendon—has been praised for a sound that is at once refined, flexible, and intensely communicative. Critics have highlighted the groupʼs rare cohesion and clarity, with Washington Classical Review describing “exquisitely unified playing… the intonation and blend near faultless, revealing some gorgeous motivic interplay and harmonic sweetness.ˮ Chicago Classical Review similarly noted the quartetʼs “polished sonority and well-balanced, tightly synchronized ensemble,ˮ adding that “it is heartening to know that chamber music is in good hands with such gifted young ensembles as the Isidore Quartet.ˮ
Following their Banff victory, the quartet served as the Peak Fellowship Ensemble-in-Residence at Southern Methodist University before rapidly expanding onto the international stage. Now performing in more than 125 cities each season, Isidore has appeared across major cultural centers including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, Brussels, and Zurich, among many others.. The quartet has collaborated with leading artists including James Ehnes, Jeremy Denk, Anthony McGill, and members of the Miró, Brentano, and Juilliard String Quartets.
The 2025-26 season marks a period of significant expansion and creative focus. Debuts at the Philharmonie de Paris and Londonʼs Wigmore Hall underscore the quartetʼs growing international presence. In close partnership with composer Billy Childs, the ensemble premieres his String Quartet No. 4—written for the ISQ—at Middlebury College, with subsequent performances at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Shriver Hall Concert Series in Baltimore, and the 92nd Street Y in New York. The quartet also gives the world premiere of James Lee IIIʼs Humanityʼs Essential Gems at Peoplesʼ Symphony
Concerts, featuring clarinetist Anthony McGill.
Other season highlights include piano quintets with finalists of the 2025 Honens International Piano Competition; a tour with the Miró Quartet celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohnʼs Octet; a debut at the Library of Congress performing on its historic Stradivari instruments alongside violist Misha Amory and cellist Nina Lee of the Brentano Quartet; and a collaboration with cellist Sterling Elliott.
The ensembleʼs debut recording, Adorations (Delos, March 2026), has been hailed as a profound meditation on the very essence of chamber music. The album artfully weaves the works of Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, Samuel Barber, and Florence Price into what the quartet describes as “a tapestry of joy, human connection, and the enduring resonance of lives intertwined,ˮ with each composition offering a unique testament to wonder, reverence, and shared humanity.
Beyond the concert stage, the Isidore String Quartet is deeply invested in expanding access to live music and rethinking what classical performance can look like in contemporary life. The group works regularly with youth, elderly audiences, and communities with limited access to live performance, approaching music as a “playgroundˮ for shared discovery rather than a one-way presentation. As the inaugural Arts Leadership Ensemble for Project: Music Heals Us, the quartet has brought performances into hospitals, prisons, disability centers, and homeless shelters—experiences that continue to inform its artistic perspective as much as any major concert hall.
The ensembleʼs name honors violinist Isidore Cohen, an early member of the Juilliard String Quartet, and reflects its direct artistic lineage through coaching with Joseph Lin, Astrid Schween, the late Joel Krosnick and Roger Tapping, and training with Joseph Kalichstein, Laurie Smukler, and Misha Amory, among other distinguished mentors. And in a lighter nod to its namesake, “Isidoreˮ also playfully recalls a folkloric Greek monk said to have devised an early recipe for vodka in the Grand Duchy of Moscow—an origin story the quartet is happy to let remain part legend, part good humor, and entirely in keeping with its sense that music-making should be both serious and alive.
Piano
Jeremy Denk
Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists, hailed by the New York Times as “a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs”, and celebrated for performances of vast imagination, beauty, profundity, and wit. A New York Times bestselling author, Denk is the recipient of both the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In the 2026/27 season, Denk marks the bicentennial of Beethoven’s death with a series of recitals across the United States, including appearances at Boston’s Vivo Performing Arts, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and New York’s 92nd Street Y. The programs center on a selection of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas alongside works by Hélène de Montgeroult and Unsuk Chin. He also performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at Carnegie Hall with the New York String Orchestra, led by Michael Stern; Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Vancouver Symphony; and Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 2, including performances with the St. Louis Symphony and Dinis Sousa.
Denk continues his longstanding relationship with Scotland’s Lammermuir Festival, where he performs a cycle of six Mozart Piano Concertos, Schubert’s Winterreise, and Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared. He also continues his collaboration with the Takács Quartet, with performances including at Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and Santa Monica’s BroadStage.
Denk performs frequently at Carnegie Hall, and has worked with such orchestras as Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony, and appeared in such halls as the Köln Philharmonie, Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall, and Boulez Saal. Denk has also performed extensively across the UK, appearing with the City of Birmingham Symphony, London Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Britten Sinfonia, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Northern Sinfonia.
Denk is also celebrated for his original and insightful writings on music, which New Yorker critic Alex Ross praised for its “arresting sensitivity and wit.” His New York Times bestselling memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine was published to universal acclaim by Random House in 2022, with features on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR’s Fresh Air, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He also wrote the libretto for a comic opera presented by Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Aspen Festival, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.
Denk is known for his interpretations of the music of American visionary Charles Ives, and in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, Nonesuch Records released a collection of his Ives recordings in 2024. His album of Mozart piano concertos, released in 2021 on Nonesuch Records, was deemed “urgent and essential” by BBC Radio 3. His recording of the Goldberg Variations for Nonesuch Records reached No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Charts, and his recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 111 paired with Ligeti’s Études was named one of the best discs of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, and The Washington Post, while his account of the Beethoven sonata was selected by BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library as the best available version recorded on modern piano.
Marimba
Ji Su Jung
Born in South Korea, Ms. Jung began studying marimba at age three, a rarity among percussionists. Since launching her career as a soloist, she has performed concertos with such leading orchestras and conductors as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with Marin Alsop, the Sarasota Orchestra with Giancarlo Guerrero, Milwaukee Symphony with Ryan Tani, the Houston Symphony with Daniel Hege, the Aspen Festival Orchestra with Michael Stern, the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra with Peter Oundjian, the Colorado Springs Philharmonic with JoAnn Falletta, the Grand Rapids Symphony with Marcelo Lehninger, and the Boise Philharmonic with Eric Garcia and many others.
“Ji Su Jung’s performance of the Kevin Puts Marimba Concerto was dazzling—filled with breathtaking virtuosity but also beautifully shaped with extraordinary color and nuance,”
remarked conductor JoAnn Falletta about Ms. Jung’s performance with the Colorado Springs Philharmonic. Ms. Jung has recorded the Marimba Concerto of Puts, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, with the Baltimore Symphony and Marin Alsop, released on the Naxos label in early 2023. In the 25-26 Season, Ms. Jung will be touring with the “Boundless Horizon” recital program, music of Female Composers, and the orchestra tour within the United States.
Equally at home as a concerto soloist, recitalist, and collaborative artist, Ms. Jung has performed solo recitals in such venues as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ newly renovated David Geffen Hall. An active chamber musician, she frequently performs with The Percussion Collective, an all-star collection of young percussionists, of which she has been a core member since its inception. As part of The Percussion Collective, she has recorded Garth Neustadter’s Seaborne, anticipated to be released in 2024. As a collaborative artist, she has also appeared at Yellow Barn and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, where she performed with notable artists such as Gilbert Kalish and the late Roger Tapping.
The recipient of numerous awards and competition prizes, in 2022, she received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, becoming the first percussionist to receive the award. She won both First Prize and the Audience Choice Award at the 2018 Ima Hogg Competition of the Houston Symphony, as well as a top prize at the 2015 International Marimba Competition in Linz, Austria. She has also appeared as a young artist in residence with American Public Media’s highly popular radio program Performance Today, hosted by Fred Child.
Recognized internationally as a pedagogue, Ms. Jung serves on the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music and the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. She has taught master classes at New York University’s Steinhardt School, the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, Tanglewood Music Center, Florida State University, Michigan State University, and Beijing Central Conservatory in China, among other schools. Ms. Jung holds a bachelor’s degree from the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, where she attended thanks to a generous grant from The Brookby Foundation. She also holds a master’s degree and an artist diploma from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Robert van Sice.
Ji Su is a musical ambassador for Adams Percussion, Pearl/Adams, Zildjian, and Vic Firth percussion companies.
Violin
Timothy Chooi
Internationally acclaimed violinist Timothy Chooi has mesmerized global audiences with his virtuosity and emotional depth. He’s celebrated for his extensive repertoire, connecting with millions worldwide. Chooi’s accolades include First Prize at the Joseph Joachim International Violin Competition and the “Yves Paternot Prize” at the Verbier Festival. He’s graced renowned orchestras and prestigious venues, earning glowing reviews.
In the upcoming year, Chooi embarks on a thrilling tour, collaborating with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and returning to the Toronto Symphony. He also debuts with the European Union Youth Orchestra, Brucknerhaus Orchester, and at the Wimbledon Music Festival in London.
Chooi’s music resonates globally, with notable recordings and broadcasts. Born in Canada, raised in the US to Chinese-Indonesian parents, he rose to prominence at sixteen, performing with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Currently, he’s a Professor of Violin at the University of Ottawa, playing two exceptional violins: the Titan Guarneri Del Gesu violin from 1741, on loan from CANIMEX INC. in Drummondville, Quebec, Canada, and the 1714 “Dolphin” Stradivarius violin, on loan from the Sasakawa Music Foundation in Japan.