Young Artist Institute

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, cellist Edward Arron made his New York recital debut in 2000 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since that time, he has appeared in recital, as a soloist with major orchestras, and as a chamber musician throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.

The 2024-25 season marks Mr. Arron’s 12th season as the co-artistic director with his wife, Jeewon Park, of the Performing Artists in Residence series at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Mr. Arron tours and records as a member of the renowned Ehnes String Quartet and he is a regular performer at the Boston and Seattle Chamber Music Societies, the Brooklyn Chamber Music Society, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Bargemusic, Caramoor, Bowdoin International Music Festival, Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, Seoul Spring Festival in Korea, Music in the Vineyards Festival, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, Manchester Music Festival, and the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland. Other festival appearances include Salzburg, Ravinia, Tanglewood, Mostly Mozart, PyeongChang, Bridgehampton, Spoleto USA, Santa Fe, Evian, La Jolla Summerfest, Chamber Music Northwest, Chesapeake Chamber Music, and the Bard Music Festival. Mr. Arron’s performances are frequently broadcast on American Public Media’s Performance Today.

In 2021, Mr. Arron’s recording, Beethoven Complete Works for Cello and Piano with pianist Jeewon Park, was released on the Aeolian Classics Record Label. The recording received the Samuel Sanders Collaborative Artists Award from the Classical Recording Foundation. A graduate of the Juilliard School, Mr. Arron currently serves on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Alyssa Tong has managed the Young Artist Institute of Chamber Music Northwest since its inception in 2022. During the academic year, she is currently the Assistant Director of Enrollment Management at the New England Conservatory, working with the Strings and Contemporary Musical Arts faculty.

In 2018, after sustaining a tendonitis injury while playing violin, she dove into the administrative world, founding String Insiders, an educational non-profit that focuses on providing pre-professional string players access to teachers, resources, and information. Since 2020, String Insiders has hosted the Online Solo Strings Intensive (OSSI) every summer, created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as the first ever online music festival. OSSI gives over 100 students annually the opportunity to work closely with top professors and teachers from around the country. Alyssa formerly hosted the Strings Virtual Summit, an online conference with over 1,000 attendees at each iteration that provided access to interviews with leading music professionals free of charge. Through her work with String Insiders, she has worked with faculty members such as Clive Greensmith, Soovin Kim, Paul Kantor, Ani Kavafian, Paul Katz, Carol Rodland, and many others. She is passionate about increasing accessibility to classical music by revitalizing the concert stage, providing quality music education to youth, and opening conversations around careers and holistic musicianship.

Before working full-time in administration, she obtained her Master’s degree in Violin Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, studying under Simon James. Previously, she studied under Nelson Lee of the Jupiter String Quartet at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Music. When she’s not buried in spreadsheets, you can find her exploring Boston where she lives, or cooking something new.

Artist's Website

Chinese violist Wenting Kang appeared as an “excellent violist” who “possesses a dark glowing sound” in The New York Times after her performance at Carnegie Hall. Kang’s playing also has been lauded as “elegant”, “precise,”  as well as “pure” and “tone-passionate without ever losing a sense of control” in the Boston Musical Intelligencer.

Her debut CD recording with pianist Sergei Kvitko, Mosaic, received many positive reviews, among which Gramophone Magazine noted “Part of the allure is her golden and glowing tone, but the subtlety of her shading is just as transfixing.” It has won the gold medal as a recommended CD on the Melómano Magazine in Spain.

Ms. Kang has appeared as a soloist, collaborating with major orchestras such as Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid, and Malaga Philharmonic Orchestra—working with renowned conductors including Ivor Bolton, Michiyoshi Inoue, and José María Moreno.

Ms. Kang was appointed as Viola Faculty at the New England Conservatory in Boston in September 2024. Since 2016, Kang has been active as assistant professor alongside the renowned Nobuko Imai at the Escuela Superior de Musica Reina Sofia in Madrid. In recent years, Kang has taught masterclasses for viola and chamber music in prestigious institutions such as University Mozarteum, University of Graz, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and Franz Liszt Academy of Music.

Soovin Kim enjoys a broad musical career regularly performing Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin, sonatas for violin and piano ranging from Beethoven to Ives, Mozart, and Haydn concertos and symphonies as a conductor, and new world-premiere works almost every season.

When he was 20 years old, Kim received first prize at the Paganini International Violin Competition. He immersed himself in the string quartet literature for 20 years as the 1st violinist of the Johannes Quartet. Among his many commercial recordings are his “thrillingly triumphant” (Classic FM Magazine) disc of Paganini’s demanding 24 Caprices and a two-disc set of Bach’s complete solo violin works that were released in 2022.

Kim is the founder and artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (LCCMF) in Burlington, Vermont. In addition to its explorative programming and extensive work with living composers, LCCMF created the ONE Strings program through which all 3rd through 5th grade students of the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington study violin. The University of Vermont recognized Soovin Kim’s work by bestowing an Honorary Doctorate upon him in 2015.

In 2020, he and his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, became artistic directors of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon. He, with Chien, were awarded Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 2021 CMS Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music. Kim devotes much of his time to his passion for teaching at the New England Conservatory in Boston and the Yale School of Music in New Haven.

Violinist Jessica Lee has built a multi-faceted career as soloist, chamber musician, pedagogue, former Assistant Concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, and now as Associate Concertmaster of the Oregon Symphony. She was the Grand Prize Winner of the 2005 Concert Artists Guild International Competition and has been hailed as “a soloist which one should make a special effort to hear, wherever she plays.”

Her international appearances include solo performances with the Plzen Philharmonic, Gangnam Symphony, Malaysia Festival Orchestra, and at the Rudolfinum in Prague. At home, she has appeared with orchestras such as the Houston, Grand Rapids, and Spokane symphonies. Jessica has performed in recital at venues including Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Ravinia “Rising Stars”, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and the Kennedy Center.

A long-time member of the Johannes Quartet as well as of The Bowers Program (formerly the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Two), Jessica has also toured frequently with ‘Musicians from Marlboro’, including appearances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston’s Gardner Museum, and with the Guarneri Quartet in their farewell season.

Her chamber music festival appearances include Chamber Music Northwest, Bridgehampton, Santa Fe, Seoul Spring, Caramoor, Olympic, and Music@Menlo.  She also put together a six-video chamber music series during the pandemic which was a collaboration between the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Clinic to bring chamber music from iconic spaces in Cleveland to the greater Cleveland community.

Jessica has always had a passion for teaching and has served on the faculties of Vassar College, Oberlin College, and as Head of the Violin Department at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music at age fourteen following studies with Weigang Li, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree under Robert Mann and Ida Kavafian. She completed her studies for a master’s degree at the Juilliard School.

Raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, David studied classical performance at the University of Auckland and Te Kōki New Zealand School of Music. He is a member of the National Band of New Zealand, and has performed with Aotearoa’s leading professional musical ensembles, including New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Royal New Zealand Navy Band and Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. He has extensively toured the country both as part of ensembles and as a soloist, including with the Rodger Fox Big Band on their album tour of “RFBB plays Hone Tuwhare,” a collection of music from New Zealand composers inspired by the poetry of the late Hone Tuwhare.

Community music is at the core of David’s musical journey. Music performed together and for each other helps each of us construct clearer versions of our own identities and our relations with others. This idea resonated through David’s core involvement in the brass band movement in New Zealand, one of the largest community music organizations in the country, and through being a member of the National Brass Band of New Zealand. He taught brass playing and led youth brass bands across his regional community in Auckland. This love of community music inspired musicological research into the strength of these constructions of identity, with David being recently invited to present his research at the ICTMD 2025 Ethnomusicology World Conference.

With the help of the Kiwi Music Trust, and as a Judith Clarke Memorial Fellow, David moved to Boston, Massachusetts in the summer of 2023 to pursue a Master in Music in Trombone Performance under James Markey of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, graduating in the Spring of 2025 with full honors.

Boston-based violist Maureen Sheehan is thrilled to be returning to CMNW’s Young Artist institute for a second year. A recent Master’s graduate of the New England Conservatory (NEC), Maureen performs regularly around the northeast, including appearances with Grammy-nominated A Far Cry Chamber Orchestra and Palaver Strings. An avid chamber musician, she also enjoys playing with her quartet, the Calandra Quartet, which earned distinction as an NEC Honors Ensemble this year. Maureen’s summers have involved performances at Manchester Music Festival, Carmel Bach Festival, and Festival Napa Valley, among others.

In addition to her work at CMNW, Maureen has enjoyed mentoring younger musicians at Harpa International Music Academy in Lakeside Chautauqua, Ohio and Madison Conservatory near her hometown in Wisconsin. Maureen holds Bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology and Viola Performance from Oberlin College and Conservatory, where she was a student of Peter Slowik. When not playing viola, Maureen can be found with a fiddle in her hand at an Irish session around Boston.

Peter Stumpf is professor of cello at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Prior to his appointment, he was the principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 9 years following a 12-year tenure as Associate Principal Cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He received a bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music and an artist’s diploma from the New England Conservatory of Music.

A dedicated chamber musician, he is a member of the Weiss-Kaplan-Stumpf Trio and has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, in Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Cologne. He has performed with the chamber music societies of Boston and Philadelphia, and at numerous festivals including Marlboro, Santa Fe, Bridgehampton, Spoleto, and Aspen. He has toured with The Musicians from Marlboro, and with pianist Mitsuko Uchida in performances of the complete Mozart Piano Trios. As a member of the Johannes Quartet, he collaborated with the Guarneri String Quartet on a tour, including premieres of works by Bolcom and Salonen.

Concerto appearances have included the Boston Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Aspen Music Festival. He has also performed solo recitals at Jordan Hall in Boston, on the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society series, on the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series in Los Angeles, and at the Philips and Corcoran Galleries in Washington D.C. His awards include first prize in the Washington International Competition.

He has served on the cello faculties at the New England Conservatory and the University of Southern California.

Violist Hannah Wendorf (she/they) sees music as an essential expression of the human experience. She especially values the creativity of living composers, and has performed with contemporary ensembles such as New Century Chamber Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Post:ballet, and the IU and SFCM New Music Ensembles, as well as premiered over a dozen new works.

Over the past few years, Hannah has collaborated with a variety of esteemed artists, including Lara Downes, Alexi Kenney, Lauryn Hill, Conrad Tao, Joshua Bell, and Steven Osgood. With a deep love for chamber music, Hannah was most recently coached by the Pacifica Quartet in the advanced quartet seminar at Indiana University, and was a finalist in the 2022 Saint Paul String Quartet Competition. Also an experienced orchestral musician, Hannah has performed with the Richmond and Terre Haute symphonies, and was recently principal viola of the IU chamber orchestra. Previous summer festival experiences include ENCORE Chamber Music Institute, Brevard Music Center, and Bowdoin International Music Festival, where she will return this year after her time at CMNW.

Hannah holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Dimitri Murrath, and is currently earning a Master of Music at Indiana University under the tutelage of Atar Arad.