The SYMF Masterclass Series was launched in the fall of 2019 to provide our Festival/Competition Winners the opportunity to play for world renowned artists.
Upcoming Masterclasses
Violin Masterclass with Mr. Martin Beaver
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Application Form: https://form.jotform.com/250384811430147
Mr. Beaver was First Violin of the world-renowned Tokyo String Quartet from June 2002 until its final concert in July 2013. As such, he appeared to critical and public acclaim on the major stages of the world, including New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Berliner Philharmonie, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, and the Sydney Opera House.
As a member of the Tokyo String Quartet, Mr. Beaver was privileged to perform on the 1727 Stradivarius violin from the “Paganini Quartet” set of instruments on generous loan to the quartet from the Nippon Music Foundation. Recordings of the Tokyo String Quartet during his tenure notably include the complete Beethoven string quartets on the Harmonia Mundi label.
Mr. Beaver’s concerto and recital appearances span four continents with orchestras such as the San Francisco Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège, and the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra and under the batons of Kazuyoshi Akiyama, Raymond Leppard, Gilbert Varga, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, among others. Chamber music performances include collaborations with such eminent artists as Leon Fleisher, Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell, Sabine Meyer, and Yefim Bronfman.
Mr. Beaver is a regular guest at prominent festivals in North America and abroad. Among these are the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, La Jolla SummerFest, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, and Pacific Music Festival in Japan. Additionally, he was a founding member of several notable chamber ensembles, including Triskelion and the Montrose Trio.
Mr. Beaver’s discography includes concerti, sonatas, and chamber music on the Harmonia Mundi USA, Biddulph, Naim Audio, René Gailly, Musica Viva, SM 5000, Toccata Classics, and Naxos labels. His recorded repertoire ranges from Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms to the music of 21st-century composers Alexina Louie, Gerard Schurmann, and Joan Tower.
Following his early studies with Claude Letourneau and Carlisle Wilson, Mr. Beaver was a pupil of Victor Danchenko, Josef Gingold, and Henryk Szeryng. He is a laureate of the Queen Elisabeth, Montreal, and Indianapolis competitions. Subsequently, he served on the juries of major international competitions, including the Queen Elisabeth and Montreal violin competitions, the Osaka International Chamber Music Competition, and the Banff International String Quartet Competition.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Beaver has been the grateful recipient of generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts. This includes Arts Grants for his studies at Indiana University, Career Development Grants, and the 1993 Virginia-Parker Prize. In 1998, through the generosity of an anonymous donor, the Canada Council awarded Mr. Beaver the loan of the 1729 “ex-Heath” Guarnerius del Gesù violin for a four-year period.
A devoted educator, Mr. Beaver has conducted masterclasses throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He has held teaching positions at the Royal Conservatory of Music, the University of British Columbia, and the Peabody Conservatory. More recently, he served on the faculty of New York University and as Artist in Residence at the Yale School of Music, where he was awarded its highest honor–the Sanford Medal.
Mr. Beaver joined the faculty of the Colburn School in Los Angeles in August 2013 as Professor of Violin and served as Co-Director of String Chamber Music studies from 2013 to 2018.
Past Masterclasses
Piano Masterclass with Prof. Fabio Bidini
Saturday, December 9, 2023
Fabio Bidini today is recognized as one of the most important pianists and pedagogues. Bernard Holland of the New York Times stated: “He is capable of an admirable simplicity…truly touching.”
At the age of five he was given his first piano lessons and, a half year later, he had his first public performance. In the following years he won 11 of the most important Italian piano competitions, including always the Audience Prize as well as all the special prizes.
He made his final graduation as “Magna cum Laude” and was one of the youngest graduates ever of the prestigious “Conservatorio Santa Cecilia” in Rome. Pianists who made a significant contribution to his artistic development were Orazio Frugoni and Maria Tipo.
After winning top prizes in the most famous international piano competitions, his sensational success at the Busoni and at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition opened him the door to a constantly growing international career.
His outstanding piano playing that combines technical wizardry with poetic lyricism and his fascinating culture of the attack of the keyboard brought him to have a glowing London debut in the Barbican Center with the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas in the presence of Sir Georg Solti. Shortly after, he performed at the United Nation as a soloist of the BBC Wales and had his highly acclaimed North American debut with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under Joel Levi.
Since then Mr. Bidini has been a frequent guest of the most prominent orchestras worldwide (San Francisco Sympony, Dallas Symphony, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, The Philharmonia Orchestra of London, BBC Orchestra Wales) playing in the world´s most famous concert halls (Carnegie Hall, Kimmel Center Philadelphia, Kennedy-Center Washington, Royal Festival Hall, Davies Hall, Tonhalle Zürich, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Rudolfinum, Auditorio Nacionál-Madrid, Auditorio de Zaragoza, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, among others).
He has also collaborated with leading conductors of our time, including Michael Tilson Thomas, Ivan Fischer, Andrey Boreyko, Zoltan Kocsis, Eri Klas, GianAndrea Noseda, Barry Wordsworth, Yoel Levi, Pavel Kogan, Louis Lane, Tadaaki Otaka, Mathias Bamert, Jesus Lopez Cobos, JoAnn Falletta, Jerzy Maksymiuk, Max Valdes, Keri-Lynn Wilson, Michael Christie, Carlos Prieto, Rossen Milanov among others.
He has been repeatedly invited to perform at prestigious festivals, such as the Tuscan Sun Festival Cortona/ Napa, Festival Radio France Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, La Roque d’Anthéron International Piano Festival, Stern Grove Festival, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli International Piano Festival, Festival dei Due Mondi, Grant Park Festival Chicago.
Mr. Bidini is also greatly in demand as a chamber music partner. He has enjoyed artistic collaboration with the American String Quartet, the Janacek Quartet, the Brodsky Quartet, the Szymanowski Quartet, the Modigliani Quartet, Zoltan Kocsis, Nikolaj Znaider, Johannes Moser, Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt, Paula Robison, Corey Cerovsek, Wendy Warner, Eva Urbanova, Eva Mei, Nina Kotova, Alexis-Pia Gerlach, Maria Bachmann, Dimitri Ashkenazy e Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker. He has formed a formal duo with Ms. Hopcker, and, with the publication of their debut CD of sonatas of S.Prokofieff and R.Strauss, they have laid the foundations for extensive collaborations with the US American label True Sounds.
Mr. Bidini’s discography comprises of 14 CDs of leading recording companies such as BMG, Naxos, Classichord, Musikstrasse, EPR, True Sounds, among others.
In 2005 Mr. Bidini accepted a professorship in the piano departement of the “Universität der Künste – Berlin”. In 2009 he won one of the most important chairs for piano in Germany at the “Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler” in Berlin.
In 2015 the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles founded the Carol Colburn Grigor Piano Chair for Fabio Bidini and he currently serves as faculty at the prestigious conservatory.
He is an official Steinway Artist.
Piano Masterclass with Dr. Dmitry Rachmanov • California State University, Northridge
Sunday, May 1, 2022
Dr. Dmitry Rachmanov is Chair of Keyboard Studies at California State University, Northridge. A sought-after performer, master class clinician, adjudicator and lecturer, Dr. Rachmanov has served on the faculties of Manhattan School of Music and Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, and has been a guest artist/lecturer/clinician at The Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, Eastman School of Music, Royal Northern College of Music (UK), Shanghai and Beijing Central Conservatories.
Rachmanov has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, London’s Barbican and South Bank Centres, at venues across Europe and Asia, and has collaborated as a soloist with the Ukraine National Symphony, National Orchestra of Porto, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra and San Luis Obispo Symphony, among others. He has recorded for Naxos, Parma, Master Musicians and Vista Vera labels.
An active member of the American Liszt Society, Dmitry Rachmanov served as the Artistic Director of the 2016 ALS Festival “Liszt and Russia” hosted by Cal State Northridge. He is the president of the society’s Southern California chapter.
A proponent of Russian repertoire, Rachmanov gave the US premiere of Boris Pasternak Piano Sonata, broadcast by the NPR, and his recital “The Art of the 19th Century Russian Character Piece” was noted by the New York Times for “considerable color and focus” he brought to each work. He is a founding member of the Scriabin Society of America; his April 2014 Scriabin program at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, part of the world recital tour commemorating Scriabin’s 100th memorial anniversary, was described as “a ‘poem of ecstasy’ in every sense: giant in conception, quantity, quality, execution, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity” by the New York Concert Review. He has since embarked on a project of recording a video anthology of Alexander Scriabin’s piano works.
Dr. Rachmanov is a graduate of The Juilliard School (BM & MM) and Manhattan School of Music (DMA). His teachers include Nadia Reisenberg, Arkady Aronov, Alexander Eydelman and Ada Traub. He is a recipient of numerous awards, among them “Jerome Richfield Memorial Scholar” at CSUN and receiving an “Outstanding CAPMT Member State Recognition Award” by California Association of Professional Music Teachers. In 2018 Dr. Rachmanov was selected as the 2018-19 Academic Affairs Research Fellow in the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication at CSUN. In January 2019 he was a Co-Director of the ChamberFest @ CSUN Festival, with its sequel scheduled for the spring of 2022. In the summer of 2019 he was a resident at the Brahmshouse in Baden-Baden, Germany.
SYMF-2022-Masterclass-Flyer-8CELLO • FLUTE
VIRTUAL • ONLINE
Summer 2021
PIANO
VIRTUAL • ONLINE
Fall 2020
PIANO & VIOLIN
Fall 2019