Philip Setzer
Edward Arron
Gloria Chien
String Theory, in partnership with Lee University and the Hunter Museum of American Art, will continue its ninth season with a performance featuring violinist Philip Setzer, cellist Edward Arron, and pianist Gloria Chien. The concert will take place on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the museum.
The evening’s performance, sponsored by Pinnacle Financial Partners, will include Tchaikovsky’s impassioned Piano Trio In Memory of a Great Artist, an epic work dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s friend Nikolai Rubinstein, as well as Schubert and Setzer’s Du bist die Ruh, D. 776.
Prior to the concert, “Musical Dialogues” will take place at 6 p.m. from the concert stage. Dr. Chien will lead an in-depth conversation with the musicians on their lives, inspirations, and the masterpieces being performed.
Mr. Setzer began studying violin at the age of five with his parents, both former violinists in the Cleveland Orchestra. He continued his studies with Josef Gingold and Rafael Druian, and later at the Juilliard School with Oscar Shumsky. He is a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, which has received eight Grammy Awards, three Gramophone Awards, and the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. He has also appeared with the National Symphony, Aspen Chamber Symphony, Memphis Symphony, and Puerto Rico Symphony, among others.
As a soloist, Mr. Setzer has appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra, the Aspen Chamber Orchestra, and with the National, Memphis, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Omaha and Anchorage symphonies. He has performed cycles of the complete Beethoven, Bartók, and Shostakovich string quartets in the world’s musical capitals, from New York to Vienna.
Mr. Setzer is a professor of violin and chamber music at Stony Brook University in New York and has given master classes at schools around the world. He has also been a regular faculty member of the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshops at Carnegie Hall and the Jerusalem Music Center.
Mr. Arron has garnered recognition worldwide for his elegant musicianship, impassioned performances, and creative programming. He is currently the artistic director, host, and resident performer of the Musical Masterworks concert series in Old Lyme, Connecticut, as well as the Festival Series in Beaufort, South Carolina, and Chamber Music on Main at the Columbia Museum in Columbia, South Carolina.
He is a graduate of the Juilliard School, where he was a student of Harvey Shapiro. In 2016, Mr. Arron joined the faculty at University of Massachusetts Amherst, after having served on the faculty of New York University for many years. In 2013, he completed a 10-year residency as the artistic director of the critically-acclaimed Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert.
Mr. Arron has performed numerous times at Carnegie’s Weill and Zankel Halls, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully and Avery Fisher Halls, New York’s Town Hall, and the 92nd Street Y, and is a frequent performer at Bargemusic. He has participated in Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, as well as Isaac Stern’s Jerusalem Chamber Music Encounters.
Dr. Chien, a Steinway artist, is a chamber music advocate and the founding director of String Theory at the Hunter. She made her orchestral debut at age 16 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and has appeared as a soloist under the batons of Sergiu Comissiona, Keith Lockhart, Thomas Dausgaard, Irwin Hoffman, Benjamin Zander, and Robert Bernhardt.
She is a prize winner of the World Piano Competition, Harvard Musical Association Award, as well as the San Antonio International Piano Competition, where she also received the prize for the Best Performance of the Commissioned Work. Dr. Chien has presented solo recitals at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Harvard Musical Association, Sanibel Musical Festival, Caramoor Musical Festival, Salle Cortot in Paris, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan.
She has also been a member of the CMS of Lincoln Center since 2012 and frequently plays at numerous venues around the country with the music society. She has emerged in recent years as one of America’s finest young chamber musicians and has been praised by well-known Boston music critic Richard Dyer for her “wondrously rich palette of colors, which she mixes with dashing bravado and with an uncanny precision of calibration.”
Dr. Chien currently serves as an artist in residence at Lee University.
Individual concert tickets are $35 for Hunter members, $45 for non-members, $10 for students with a valid student ID, and $25 for groups of 20 or more people.
For more information on String Theory at the Hunter Museum of American Art or to purchase tickets, call 414-2525 or visit http://stringtheorymusic.org/.