Lauded for her “gleaming artistry, bravura and sensitivity” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), violinist, Annie Fullard joyfully celebrates a life devoted to chamber music playing and is grateful for the deep collaborative bonds developed throughout her multi- faceted career. A leader in the field of chamber music performance, advocacy and education, Annie views the empathy and connectivity of chamber music as a metaphor for the kind of communication that we should strive for between cultures and nations. 

Ms. Fullard is honored to embark on her new position as Director of Chamber Music, Professor and Sidney M. Friedberg Chair at The Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University and also currently serves as Distinguished Artist and Charles and Mary Jean Yates Chair in Chamber Music at The Robert Mc Duffie Center for Strings, Mercer University. On the horizon is a much anticipated book The Art of Collaboration: Chamber Music Rehearsal Techniques & Teambuilding co-authored with Dorianne Cotter-Lockard, PhD to be published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. 

Fullard’s musical journey has included the opportunity to perform and teach extensively through the fifty states and abroad including appearances at The Perlman Music Program, New World Symphony, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Chautauqua, Festival, Kneisel Hall, Violins of Hope, Juilliard Summer Arts Program in Shanghai, Beaujolais (France) Stage 2019-present, and a Mozart Anniversary Tour of Austria and the Czech Republic. 

A founding member of the Cavani String Quartet, she and her colleagues are recipients of The Naumburg Chamber Music Award, The Cleveland Quartet Award (Eastman) and prize winning laureates of the Banff International, Fischoff, Coleman, and Carmel Chamber Music competitions. Described by the Washington Post as “completely engrossing, powerful and elegant” the Cavani Quartet’s artistic excellence, generous spirit, and their fervent ambassadorship for great music has placed them among America’s greatest string quartets. Quartet accolades include The Guarneri String Quartet Award for Artistic Excellence from Chamber Music America, Ohio Governors Award for The Arts, ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, and Musical America Magazine’s Young Artists of the Year. 

She and her colleagues have been featured on NPR’s Performance Today and “Says You” and the short documentary film TOGETHER! Beyond Beethoven with The Cavani Quartet (https://youtu.be/BNesD1FBgAM) Annie has served as a juror for the Washington International Competition, as well as the Fischoff, St. Paul String Quartet, and Chicago Young Artist Chamber Music Competitions. 

During the 2022-2024 school year Annie served as Visiting Artist and Coordinator of String Chamber Music at The University of Michigan and previously served for thirty years as faculty and member of Quartet- in- Residence at The Cleveland Institute of Music where she and her Cavani colleagues directed, in collaboration with Peter Salaff, one of the country’s most well known and respected programs devoted to the serious study of chamber music. Program initiatives included the Apprentice Quartet Program, Intensive Quartet Seminar, New Quartet Project, The Art of Engagement, M.A.P. (Music, Art & Poetry) Program, and Chamberfest Workshop for adult amateur musicians. Ms. Fullard and her Cavani colleagues are delighted to have coached and mentored former and current members (former and present) of the many of the country’s most acclaimed ensembles, including the Aeolus, Afiara, Attaca, Azuri, Biava, Catalyst, Daedalus, Dali, Ehnes, Fry Street, Harlem, Isidore, Ivalas, Jupiter, Linden, Maia, Miro, Omer, Telegraph,Thalea, and Verona String Quartets, as well as members of the New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, ECCO, A Far Cry, The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, KINETIC and DeCoda. 

Recognizing the natural ability of chamber music playing to inspire cognitive and emotional development in children through empathy and interaction, Annie has curated chamber music residencies in communities and neighborhoods around the country and founded Friday Night Chamber Music for pre-college age music students. At the collegiate level, Ms Fullard and her Cavani colleagues have presented The Art of Collaboration Seminar: Coaching Strategies and Techniques-Building Empowered and Collaborative Teams by Applying Principles of Chamber Music Pedagogy at universities, conservatories and business schools around the country including the renowned Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Ms. Fullard and her colleagues are former Artists-in-Residence at Cleveland State University, University of California, Riverside, University of Texas, Austin and Northern Illinois University. 

Ms Fullard has the honor of collaborating with some of today’s most distinguished and innovative artists including Alisa Weilerstein, Kim Kashkashian, Tessa Lark, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, Josh Henderson, Itzhak Perlman, Stephanie Blythe, Sergei Babayan, and poet and Director of Pan African Studies at Kent State University, Mwatabu Okantah, as well as members of the Cleveland, Juilliard, Takàcs, Ying, Emerson, Borodin, Ehnes, Amadeus, and St. Lawrence String Quartets. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, she pursued additional studies at Yale University, and Indiana University, Annie counts among her musical mentors, Josef Gingold, Donald Weilerstein, Dr. Ronald Crutcher, Peter Salaff, as well as members of the Juilliard, Tokyo and Cleveland String Quartets. She plays an 1846 Vuillaume violin copied from Paganini’s Guarneri del Gesu “Il Canone” and is an avid listener to Ella Fitzgerald and Beethoven. cavanistringquartet.com

Jesse Holstein graduated from Oberlin where he studied with Marilyn McDonald and then received his Master’s with James Buswell at the New England Conservatory. Prior to Oberlin, he studied violin with Philipp Naegele in Northampton, Massachusetts. Jesse would be remiss if he did not send a huge thank you to his wonderful Suzuki teacher Diana Peelle who started him at age 5 and was extremely patient with his slouching posture for years.

An active recitalist, orchestral and chamber musician, Jesse is currently concertmaster of the New Bedford Symphony. In recent summers, he has performed at the Bravo! Festival in Vail Colorado, the Montana Chamber Music Festival in Bozeman, the Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, Maine, the Apple Hill Festival in Sullivan, New Hampshire, the South Coast Chamber Music Series, among others.

While an undergraduate, Jesse taught for the Oberlin Preparatory Program in the Lorain, Ohio public schools. Also at Oberlin, he served as Assistant Concertmaster and later as Music Director of the Royal Farfissa Disco Juggernaut, the premier disco orchestra in the greater-Cleveland area in the mid-1990s.

Currently, Jesse is a teacher and resident musician for Community MusicWorks and was a founding member of the Providence String Quartet. Jesse performed with the Muir, Borromeo, Miro, Apple Hill, Orion, Turtle Island, and St. Lawrence Quartets, as well as pianists Jonathan Biss and Emanuel Ax, cellist Matt Haimovitz; Cleveland Orchestra Principal Oboe, Frank Rosenwein, and violist Kim Kashkashian, among many others. Jesse also has attended the Violin Craftsmanship Institute in Durham, New Hampshire, where he learned about instrument repair. He manages all of the instruments at Community MusicWorks and the program’s 150 students.

Jesse has been a Violin Professeur at L’Ecole de Musique, Dessaix Baptiste in Jacmel, Haiti and is currently on the faculty at Brown University. Some of his life forces are mindfulness, running, animals, and visiting Donegal, Ireland with his wife, violinist Ealaín McMullin.

He has a cat, Lord Nelson who is an ordained on-line minister (this is true) and is available for weddings and services (this is probably not true).

The New York Times has hailed cellist Andrew Janss for his “glowing tone”, “insightful musicianship”, and “sumptuous elegance”. Andrew began his career as founding cellist of the Escher Quartet, winning the 2010-12 Bowers residency at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Since then, Janss has performed and recorded around the world alongside legendary classical artists including Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, Itzhak Perlman, and Pinchas Zukerman; as well as chart-topping artists Norah Jones, Paul McCartney, Lana del Rey, and Bruce Springsteen. His principal teachers include Andrew Cook, David Geber, Clive Greensmith, and David Soyer. 

As a non-profit arts leader for nearly two decades, Janss has spearheaded and launched multiple ground-breaking music education and music medicine initiatives, most recently while Executive and Co-Artistic Director of the non-profit organization Project: Music Heals Us. These initiatives include Music For The Future, a college-accredited music composition program for incarcerated individuals; and the Vital Sounds Initiative, a 1-on-1 virtual bedside concert (VBC) program for isolated hospital patients, the first iteration of produced over 15,000 individual VBC concerts across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic (for which he was nominated by Yo-Yo Ma for a prestigious Emerson Collective Fellowship). He continues to develop VBC work in his dual roles as President of the Amplify Foundation, and Music Advisor to the Stanford School of Medicine. 

Finally, in an effort to combat deforestation issues created by the flood of cheap, single-use bows in music education (bows that can’t be re-haired, and have to be thrown out after a single school year), Janss teamed up with a New York City bowmaker and a Stanford University engineer to launch the world first viable self-rehairable bow, utilizing a cartridge-based re-hair system that allows a player or teacher to change out old hair for new in under 60 seconds. To learn how you can get these into your local schools, visit Janssbow.com.

A violinist of great range and energy, Salley Koo has performed internationally as a solo, chamber, and orchestral musician.  Recent performances include appearances at the Musikverein in Vienna, Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, Central Park, Music from Salem, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, the National Cathedral and National Gallery in Washington D.C., Columbia Museum of Art, the Harris Theater in Chicago, the Nasher Series in Dallas, the Peoples Symphony Concerts, the Ojai, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Skaneateles, and Caramoor Festivals, and on tour alongside artists ranging from Bela Fleck to Dawn Upshaw to Gil Shaham.  Salley soloed with the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra and recently returned a third time to Lebanon as artist in residence with the IMAGINE Workshop and Concert Series at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon.  She is regularly invited as a guest artist with groups such as the Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, East Coast Chamber Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Knights. 

Dr. Koo’s engagement with the chamber music community in particular has yielded collaborations with world-renowned musicians including Peter Frankl, Yo Yo Ma, and Colin Carr, as well as with members of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Peabody Trio, Emerson Quartet, and Takacs Quartet.  Her expansive musical interests range from early music to contemporary compositions.  In the former vein, she has performed in period groups and recorded for Centaur; in the latter, she has worked closely with composers like Julia Wolf, Mario Davidovsky, Steven Mackey, Osvoldo Golijov, as well as members of the So Percussion Quartet.  Salley is also a familiar face at numerous festivals including the Chamber Music Silicon Valley, Yellow Barn Music Festival, Taos School of Music, the Tanglewood Music Center, Pacific Music Festival, and Thy Chamber Festival in Denmark.  

Despite a performance itinerary that has covered North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, Dr. Koo has established a thriving teaching career.  She is currently the violin professor at both Adelphi University in NY and Montclair State University in NJ, and is also a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana this year.  Previously, Dr. Koo has served as the violin professor and coordinator of chamber music at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, CT; other faculty appointments include the Green Lake Chamber Music Festival in WI, Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire, Dwight-Englewood String Society in New Jersey, Vermont’s Young Artist Program at Yellow Barn, the Opus 118 We Want Music! program in East Harlem, New York, Elm City ChamberFest, and the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, Connecticut.  Salley also maintains a limited private studio in New York City.   

Hailing from Chicago, where she studied with Almita and Roland Vamos at the Music Center of the North Shore (now Music Institute of Chicago), Salley then earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University in English and American Literature, continuing her violin studies with Lynn Chang.  She subsequently received a Master of Music and pursued Artist Diploma work from the Yale School of Music under the tutelage of Peter Oundjian.  She completed her Doctor of Musical Arts in violin performance at Stony Brook University under Pamela Frank and Philip Setzer.  Over the course of her extensive training, Dr. Koo has studied with numerous other luminaries, including David Taylor, Sylvie Koval, and Dorothy Kitchen.  

Salley currently performs on a violin made for her by Mario Miralles.  When she’s not playing the violin, she’s likely to be found cooking or planning where to eat next with her husband, Alex, or playing with their dogs in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

​Four-time Grammy Award-winning cellist Nick Photinos is a champion of the new, with programs that subvert and delight in equal measure. An ardent advocate of new music, he served for 24 years as the founding cellist of Eighth Blackbird, and has worked closely with many of today’s foremost composers and has premiered hundreds of works throughout his career. He has received Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year Award, the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, the inaugural Chamber Music America Visionary Award, the Naumburg Award, and the Concert Artists Guild Grand Prize. He currently serves as Professor of Chamber Music and Eminent Scholar at the University of Cincinnati as well as cellist of the Grossman Ensemble at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition and faculty since 2007 of the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival.

Described as a “commanding soloist” (ClevelandClassical.com) whose “virtuoso cello playing is scintillating” (Chicago Classical Review) and “outstanding for his exquisite precision” (SFCV.org), Photinos has collaborated and toured with an incredible array of artists including rock/pop artists Björk, Wilco, Bryce Dessner, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, film composer Gustavo Santaolalla, and a wide array of classical artists, including Dawn Upshaw, Philip Glass, Paul Watkins, Philip Setzer, Annie Fullard, the Ariel String Quartet, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. He has appeared as soloist with numerous orchestras including the Cleveland, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Toronto, Utah, and Atlanta Symphonies, the last with whom he recorded Jennifer Higdon’s On a Wire. He has performed across the globe including the Sydney Opera House, the Barbican in London, KBC Hall in Seoul, Carnegie Hall in New York City, Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, and Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver. Photinos recently gave solo debuts in Australia, Romania, and Canada, as well as solo and chamber concerts throughout the United States. In 2019 he reached millions of listeners on “Live from Here” with Chris Thile and on Netflix’s original movie The Two Popes.

Photinos’ recordings span the Cedille, Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, Greenleaf, and Naxos labels. He recorded for Wilco on their Grammy-nominated album The Whole Love, and with Autumn Defense on their album Once Around. His debut solo album, Petits Artéfacts, deemed “a bold solo debut from one of the most notable artists in contemporary music today” by PopMatters, was released on the New Amsterdam label in 2017 and features first recordings of the most acclaimed names in new music (David Lang, Bryce Dessner, David T. Little, Andrew Norman) as well as a younger generation of groundbreaking composers (Pascal Le Boeuf, Molly Joyce, Florent Ghys, Angelica Negrón).

During Photinos’ 24-year tenure as the founding cellist and co-Artistic Director of Eighth Blackbird, he performed over 1000 concerts and premiered hundreds of new works, including Steve Reich’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Double Sextet and works by Andy Akiho, Michael Gordon, Amy Beth Kirsten, David Lang, David T. Little, Nico Muhly, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Julia Wolfe, and Pamela Z, among many others. Eighth Blackbird held multi-year residency positions at the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Chicago, and at the University of Richmond.

Photinos currently serves as Professor of Chamber Music and Eminent Scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and previously served on the faculties of the Longy School of Music of Bard College, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Richmond. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. For more information, go to nickphotinos.com.

Praised for his versatility, Gregory Sauer performs in many different musical arenas. He has appeared in recital at the Old First Concert Series in San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Brightmusic Concert Series in Oklahoma City, at universities and schools of music such as the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt, the Shepherd School at Rice University, the University of Iowa and the University of Tennessee, among many others. Mr. Sauer was a prizewinner in the Hudson Valley Philharmonic and Ima Hogg National competitions and has performed concertos with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony, the New American Chamber Orchestra, the Quad City Symphony, Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Columbus (GA) Symphony, the Tallahassee Symphony, and the Missoula Symphony, among others. 

Greg served as cellist in the Carpe Diem String Quartet in 2019-2020, playing concerts in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, Siena, Italy, and in the group’s first China tour. Along with his brother, Thomas Sauer, he serves as co-Artistic Director of Chamber Music Quad Cities in their hometown of Davenport, Iowa. Other chamber music ventures have resulted in appearances at the Austin Chamber Music Center, the Snake River Music Festival, the Victoria Bach Festival, the Texas Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival, and the Garth Newel Music Center. 

In 2006, Greg was appointed to the music faculty at Florida State University. Prior to that he taught eleven years at the University of Oklahoma, where he was named Presidential Professor.  Other teaching/performing positions have been a visiting professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles, summer programs such as the Texas Music Festival, the Duxbury Music Festival, the Foulger International Music Festival, the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, Red Lodge Music Festival, and the Hot Springs Music Festival. 

Sauer has recorded for MSR Classics, Harmonia Mundi, Albany, and Mark Records.  

Gregory Sauer attended the Eastman School of Music and the New England Conservatory.  His teachers included Ada Marie Snyder, Charles Wendt, Paul Katz, Laurence Lesser, Bonnie Hampton, and Colin Carr.