2025-26 Season Artists
Angella Ahn
Attacca Quartet
Kenji Bunch
Xavier Foley
Julie Gosswiller
Monica Ohuchi
Caroline Shaw
Volterra Project Trio
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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Attacca Quartet
Amy Schroeder – Violin
New York based violinist and pedagogue Amy Schroeder is a founding member of the GRAMMY award winning Attacca Quartet and has been hailed by the Washington Post as ‘an impressive artist whose playing combines imagination and virtuosity.’ She has soloed with orchestras including the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Amherst Symphony, the Clarence Symphony, the Hilton Head Symphony, and the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra. As a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet, Ms. Schroeder has soloed with the Spanish National Orchestra with composer John Adams conducting, and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra with Marin Alsop conducting. Since its inception the Attacca Quartet has won an array of awards including the grand prize in the Osaka International String Quartet Competition, the National Federation of Music Clubs Centennial Chamber Music Award, the Arthur Foote Award from the Harvard Musical Association, and the Lotos Prize in the Arts from the Stecher and Horowitz Foundation. The quartet has also held prestigious residencies including one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and currently at Texas State University in San Marcos. With the Attacca Quartet Ms. Schroeder can be heard on several critically acclaimed recordings produced by Azica Records: “Fellow Traveler” the complete works of John Adams, Haydn: “Seven Last Words,” “Songlines,” works of Michael Ippolito, and most recently on Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records the GRAMMY award winning album, Shaw/Attacca Quartet ‘Orange.’ In 2016 the Quartet completed a six year project in which they performed all 68 of Haydn’s String Quartets.
Ms. Schroeder is proud to serve as music faculty member at Vassar College. She also recently formed the Schroeder Umansky Duo with her husband Felix Umansky, internationally celebrated cellist and member of the Harlem Quartet. In 2002 she was the recipient of the Henrietta and Albert J. Ziegle Jr. Scholarship, which provided the tuition for her studies at Juilliard where she was a student of Sally Thomas and the Juilliard String Quartet. Growing up in Buffalo, NY Ms. Schroeder began her violin studies with Karen Campbell and Thomas Halpin. She currently plays on two different violins, a Fernando Gagliano made in 1771 on loan to her from the Five Partners Foundation, and a violin made by Nathan Slobodkin in 2012. In New York Ms. Schroeder teaches violin and piano to students of all ages, and in her spare time she enjoys composing, traveling with her husband, and scuba diving.
Domenic Salerni – Violin
Violinist Domenic Salerni is active as a chamber musician, composer and arranger, and freelance musician. As the newest member of the Grammy Award-winning Attacca Quartet, he looks forward to a full season of international concerts and tours ranging from Japan to Germany England to Brazil, including performances of the full cycle of Beethoven String Quartets at Trinity Church Wall Street in June. Domenic will be joining the Chiarina Chamber Players again this season for their Beethoven celebration, performing six of the major Piano Trios with pianist Efi Hackmey and cellist Carrie Bean Stute. Domenic is also pleased to join the PostClassical Ensemble for a number of concerts, as well as the Baltimore Symphony for their performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony.
From 2016-2020 Domenic was the first violinist of the Dalí Quartet, Quartet-in-Residence at West Chester University and recipient of the Atlanta Symphony’s Aspire Award. In 2016, as a member of Foundry, he was a laureate of the first inaugural M Prize at the University of Michigan. Prior to his tenure with Dalí, he was first violinist of the Vega Quartet, Quartet-in-Residence at Emory University, from 2010-2016, where he received ArtsATL’s “30 Under 30” award. In 2010, Domenic composed the film score to Giuseppe de Liguorno’s “Dante’s Inferno” (1911). It was premiered at the Yale Dante Symposium that year with Samuel Carl Adams on bass, and was given its second performance at Emory University through a collaboration between the Department of Italian and French, the Center for Creative Studies, and the Department of Film, with Adam Bernstein on bass.
In 2009, Domenic was a laureate of the Sion-Valais International Violin Competition, and in 2008, he joined violist Ayane Kozasa in Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante” at the prize-winning concert for the Cleveland Institute Concerto Competition Summer festival appearances include Highlands-Cashiers, Brevard Institute, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and MIMIR. He holds degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he graduated with academic honors, and the Yale University School of Music, where he was the recipient of the Yale Chamber Music Society Award. Domenic started violin at the age of three in the Suzuki Method with Linda Fiore. Previous teachers include Linda Cerone, Naoko Tanaka, Diane Monroe, Lee Snyder, Geoffrey Michaels, and William Preucil. He can be found on the Delos, Naxos, Artek, Canary, Innova, and DoMilo labels.
Nathan Schram – Viola
Hailed by the New York Times as an “elegant soloist” with a sound “devotional with its liquid intensity,” Nathan is a composer, entrepreneur, and violist of the Attacca Quartet. Nathan has collaborated with many of the great artists of today including Björk, Itzhak Perlman, Sting, David Crosby, Becca Stevens, David Byrne, Trey Anastasio, Joshua Bell, Simon Rattle, and others. He has premiered music by Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, Timo Andres, Elliot Cole and Gabriel Kahane. Nathan is also a violist in the Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall, Decoda and an Honorary Ambassador to the city of Chuncheon, South Korea.
Apart from performing, Nathan is the Founder and Executive Director of Musicambia. Founded in 2013, Musicambia brings music learning and ensemble performance to prisons throughout the United States. Through working closely with incarcerated individuals on performance, music theory, ear training and composition, Musicambia’s professional musicians build artistic communities that nurture the humanity of all involved. Musicambia currently runs a music conservatory in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York with other programs in Indiana and South Carolina. In addition to their work in the U.S., Musicambia has collaborated with projects in Venezuela and Scotland.
Schram is a prizewinner of the 2007 Primrose International Viola competition, the 2006 Corpus Christi Concerto Competition and a First Prize winner of the 2008 ASTA National Solo Competition. He studied viola at Indiana University with Alan de Veritch and at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain with Diemut Poppen and Yuval Gotlibovich. Afterwards, as an Ensemble Connect Fellow, he was documented by radio journalist Jeff Lunden for a 2-year, four-part series for NPR’s Weekend Edition.
Andrew Yee – Cello
Cellist Andrew Yee has been praised by Michael Kennedy of the London Telegraph as “spellbindingly virtuosic”. Trained at the Juilliard School, they are a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet who have released several albums to Critical acclaim including Andrew’s arrangement of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” which Thewholenote.com praised as “ . . .easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” They were the quartet-in-residence at the Met Museum in 2014, and have won the Osaka and Coleman international string quartet competitions. Their newest recording of the string quartets of Caroline Shaw won a GRAMMY for best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance.
As a soloist last season Andrew performed John Taverner’s The Protecting Veil and Strauss Don Quixote. In 2019 they won the first prize at Oklahoma University’s National Arts Incubation Lab for their pitch of a wearable garment that translates sound into vibrations for the hard of hearing. They like making stop-motion videos of food, drawing apples, cook like an Italian Grandma and has developed coffee and cocktail programs for award-winning restaurants (Lilia, Risbobk, Atla) in New York City.
Their solo project “Halfie” draws on their experience as a bi-racial and non-binary person, having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them. The works commissioned and on the concerts will feature a wide range of composers all for solo cello.
They play on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan fro the Five Partners Foundation.
Kenji Bunch
Over the past thirty years, Kenji Bunch has established himself as one of America’s most engaging, influential, and prolific composers, with genre-defying music that has been performed on six continents and by over seventy American orchestras. Cited by Alex Ross in his seminal book “There Rest Is Noise” and dubbed “One of the new faces of new music” by the NY Times (A. Tommasini), Bunch’s unique compositional voice has earn acclaim from audiences, performers, and critics alike.
Influenced by his mother’s experience as a Japanese immigrant, his father’s as a political/social activist, and his childhood spent in the meditative natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, Bunch combines his interests in history, philosophy, nature, and intergenerational and cross-cultural dialogue with the intention to entertain, inspire, and facilitate healing with his music- at times with vulnerable sincerity, irreverent humor, dazzling virtuosity, or by confronting difficult issues of trauma from our shared histories.
As the 2021 Composer in Residence for the Moab Music Festival, Bunch collaborated with actor/activist George Takei to create Lost Freedom: A Memory, interweaving music for chamber ensemble with Takei’s narration of his own WWII-era childhood incarceration in America. Other recent works include commissions and premieres from the Seattle Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Lark Quartet, Britt Festival, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Music From Angel Fire, Chamber Music Northwest, Eugene Ballet, Third Angle New Music, and Grant Park Music Festival. All-Bunch concerts have been mounted in New York City, Boston, Denver, Nashville, Mobile, and Portland, as well as at the Perpignon Conservatoire in southern France, the Stamford Festival in England, and the Oranjewoud Festival in The Netherlands. His dance collaborations include work with such renowned choreographers as David Parsons, Toni Pimble, Nai-Ni Chen, Kate Skarpetowska, Paul Vasterling, and Darrell Grand Moultrie. Bunch’s film credits include The Bellman Equation and The Argentum Prophecies, and his extensive discography includes many recordings, now streaming on all platforms.
Also recognized as a groundbreaking violist, Bunch was the first student to receive dual degrees in viola and composition from The Juilliard School and was a founding member of influential ensembles Flux Quartet (1996-2002), Ne(x)tworks (2003-2011), and Nurse Kaya String Quartet (2002-2005), as well as the bluegrass band Citigrass (1998-2013). Committed to a multi-style approach to the instrument that includes improvisation and modalities of playing beyond the conventions of western classical art music, Bunch has worked with a diverse array of prominent artists including Ornette Coleman, Lenny Kravitz, Mike Gordon (Phish), and vocalist Joan La Barbara.
After several decades in New York City, Bunch returned to his hometown of Portland, Oregon in 2013 with his wife, pianist Monica Ohuchi, with whom he co-directs the new music group Fear No Music. Additionally, Bunch directs MYSfits, the Metropolitan Youth Symphony’s multi-style string ensemble, and teaches viola, composition, and music theory at Portland State University, Reed College, and for the Portland Youth Philharmonic. Most of all, he and Monica enjoy time with their two children and their dogs Marcie and Nutmeg.
Xavier Foley
Xavier Foley, bassist, was First Prize winner of the 2014 Sphinx Competition, the Young Concert Artists Auditions 2016, and a winner of the Astral Artists National Auditions 2014. As such, he has appeared as soloist with the Sphinx and Atlanta symphony orchestras, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Nashville Symphony. He made his Carnegie Hall solo debut with the Sphinx Virtuosi, with which he was also soloist on East and West coast tours. This season he appears in several concerts with the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, the Impromptu concert series, and the St. Vincent College concert series. The First Prize winner of the 2009 (Junior Division) and 2011 (Senior Division) International Society Bassist Competition, he performed in Carnegie Hall as principal bass of the New York String Seminar Orchestra.
Also a composer, he is a 2016 graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied both composition and performance with Edgar Meyer and Hal Robinson. Xavier Foley strives to become a world artist on the double bass as he continues to incorporate all styles of music, whether it be cultural, national, or folk music.
Julie Gosswiller
One of Julie Gosswiller’s greatest passions in life is making music with other musicians, and for that she is in high demand. Ms. Gosswiller has collaborated with many of her colleagues at Montana State University and with renowned musicians such as soprano Elizabeth Croy, Adam Barnett Hart of the Escher String Quartet, the Ahn Trio, Dallas Brass, and more.
Ms. Gosswiller’s other passion is teaching at Montana State University, where she received the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award. Her university students have won the Montana State University Concerto competition, and her private students have won the Montana Music Teachers Association Competition at the elementary, junior, and senior levels.
Her students have also won honors at the regional level and gold medals in Musicfest Northwest. A sought-after clinician, Ms. Gosswiller and her students have presented at the Montana Music Teachers Association Fall Festival. Her students have also presented nationally at the Conference for Undergraduate Research.
Ms. Gosswiller earned a master’s degree in piano performance from the University of Colorado, where she studied with Angela Cheng, Robert Spillman, and Doris Lehnert. She paid her way through school on an accompanying assistantship and went on to be a student coach accompanist at the Aspen Music Festival. There she served as rehearsal pianist for voice faculty, in addition to her work with peers. After graduating, she served as pianist for Colorado Children’s Chorale on regional tours and for sold out shows in Boetcher Concert Hall in Denver before moving to Bozeman, MT with her family.
Monica Ohuchi
Monica Ohuchi’s “commanding pianism”, performing “with beauty, clarity and drive…[offering a] warmth…expressiveness [that’s] irresistible and deeply moving” allows her an active international career as a piano soloist, chamber musician, and pedagogue. Her “scintillating” playing, combined with “an overt virtuosity [and] deep sensitivity that makes her lines sing” has taken her around the globe, from Lincoln Center in New York City, to the remote village of Kovachevitsa, Bulgaria, the coastline in Gijon, Spain, the Banff Centre of the Arts in Canada, and multiple concert halls across Japan.
A pianist “dutifully and gracefully” attentive to musical depth and detail, Ohuchi is a frequent soloist with orchestras; recent engagements include the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and the Marin Symphony Orchestra. Locally in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, Ohuchi performs with the internationally acclaimed artists of Chamber Music Northwest, is a frequent artist on All-Classical Portland radio, and enjoys soloing with regional orchestras.
Ms. Ohuchi is the pianist and Executive Director of the new music ensemble, Fear No Music, “…a classical ensemble with unimpeachable performance credentials, a love for local and contemporary composers, and a mature sense of social justice and responsibility.” Co-directed ogether with her Artistic Director husband, Kenji Bunch, the ensemble’s annual concert series is defined by bold and innovative programming, making an impactful contribution to the classical music landscape of Portland.
Since capturing first prize at the Chinese International Piano Competition at the age of five, Ms. Ohuchi has been awarded top prizes in over twenty national and international piano competitions, including the William Garrison International Piano Competition, the Wayne Nadeau International Piano Competition, and the Dorthy A. Anderson International Piano Competition. Ms. Ohuchi is two-time U.S. national champion of the Music Teacher’s National Association Piano Competition, and a New York Steinway Hall Recital Award Recipient, as well as the Artist International Presentations Carnegie Hall Award Recipient.
Ms. Ohuchi performed the world premiere of Kenji Bunch’s Piano Concerto with the Colorado Symphony, conducted by Jeffrey Kahane, to critical acclaim. Of these world premiere concerts, Kahane describes Ms. Ohuchi as “…a pianist of the first rank… possesses a ravishing palette of color and who dispatches the most difficult passages with effortless grace.”
Ms. Ohuchi’s debut album, titled Monica’s Notebook was released on Helicon Kleos Classical Records in 2011. A set of twelve performance etudes written especially for her by Kenji Bunch, each etude in Monica’s Notebook examines a particular facet of contemporary piano technique, including the stylistic inflections of vernacular idioms, such as jazz, blues, and rock all the while paying homage to the rich tradition of performance etudes in the classical cannon. Ms. Ohuchi has also recorded for the Navona and Pentatone labels.
Strongly committed to music education, Ms. Ohuchi is a much sought after piano pedagogue. She is currently the Director of Music Performance at Reed College, where she also teaches Piano and Chamber Music. She is a frequent guest clinician and competition adjudicator.
Ms. Ohuchi began her piano studies at the age of two with her mother, Sumiyo Ohuchi. Ms. Ohuchi holds advanced degrees in Piano Performance from The Juilliard School where she studied with Julian Martin. Her past teachers include Marc Durand, Martin Canin, Bela Siki, and David A. Brown.
Ms. Ohuchi currently resides in the lush green forests of Portland, Oregon with her husband Kenji, their two children, and two pitbull-mix rescue dogs. In her spare time, she can be found running in the rain, devouring her daughter’s culinary creations, spending endless hours cheering on her son’s soccer games, and dancing in her kitchen.
Caroline Shaw
Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Shaw is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, an honorary doctorate from Yale, four Grammys, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has written and produced for iconic artists and ensembles across the musical spectrum, including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Tiler Peck, Nas, Kanye West, the LA Phil, the NY Phil, and others. Recent tv/film/stage scoring projects include “Leonardo Da Vinci” (Ken Burns/PBS), “Julie Keeps Quiet (Leonardo Van Dijl), “Fleishman is in Trouble” (FX/Hulu), “The Sky Is Everywhere” (Josephine Decker/A24), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), “The Crucible” (Lyndsey Turner/National Theatre), “Partita” (Justin Peck/NYC Ballet), “Moby Dick” (Wu Tsang), and “LIFE” (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust). Current touring projects include shows with Sō Percussion, Ringdown, Attacca Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, Graveyards & Gardens, Gabriel Kahane, and Kamus Quartet. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.
Volterra Project Trio
The Volterra Project Trio reimagines classical guitar trio music, drawing inspiration from European impressionism, Mediterranean folk melodies and cinematic scores.
Antigoni Goni, an internationally celebrated Greek guitarist, is admired for her exquisite sound and distinguished solo and chamber career. Italian-born Luca Isolani, a researcher and performer with a deep focus on folk influences, bridges the worlds of classical, jazz, and contemporary music. Maarten Vandenbemden, a Belgian guitarist, arranger and pedagogue, is lauded for his creative energy and commitment to education and outreach. As a trio, they merge their diverse expertise to breathe fresh life into the repertoire, treating the guitar as a miniature orchestra, exploring its unique sounds, dynamics, and colors.
In 2022, the trio released “Medio Siglo,” an album dedicated to the renowned luthier José Luis Romanillos, recorded using his last four guitars. The album has been praised by Soundboard Magazine for “the deep use of colors and the dazzling arrangements”.
In June 2023, the Volterra Project Trio made its US debut at the 50th Guitar Foundation of America Convention in New York, after playing extensively in Europe.
Their new album, Parole in Musica, will be released in May 2025 and will be followed by an international tour, touching both Europe and US.