Jonathan Shames leads a wide-ranging musical career as pianist, conductor and artist-teacher. Since 2004 the Director of Orchestral Studies and Artistic Director of OU Opera at the University of Oklahoma, Mr. Shames has introduced Oklahoma audiences to a wide range of contemporary works, including Lori Laitman’s Scarlet Letter, Luigi Nono’s Il Canto sospeso, and Louis Andriessen’s De Tijd.  He has premiered orchestral and piano works of Joël-François Durand, Betsy Jolas, Stephen Hartke and Daniel Asia; his recordings of Asia’s Scherzo-Sonata for Piano, dedicated to him, and of Anthony Brandt’s opera The Birth of Something, which he recorded with Houston’s Musiqa Ensemble, are available on Amazon Music. Mr. Shames has collaborated frequently with the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, including a staging of Tate’s masque Clans with costuming by Chickasaw designers at the Chickasaw Nation’s Te Ata Theater in Ada, Oklahoma, and with Mr. Tate as vocal soloist. Mr. Shames also shares the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Recording for his work on William Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Mr. Shames’ work as a teacher occupies an important place in his musical life. He taught piano at Oberlin, Rutgers, and Cornell and conducting at the University of Michigan and (currently) University of Oklahoma, led the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras and Marrowstone Music Festival for eight years, and continues to work as often as possible with youth orchestras, pianists and conductors. At the University of Oklahoma, he conducts opera and orchestra performances, tours with the OU Symphony Orchestra and often collaborates with OU’s School of Dance in works such as Balanchine’s ballets on Prokofiev’s Prodigal Son, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. His conducting students have won international conducting prizes and positions in universities and music festivals both in the U.S. and abroad, and OU Opera has been recognized by the National Opera Association. 

Mr. Shames’ own development included piano studies with Theodore Lettvin and Leon Fleisher, and a conducting fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he worked with Seiji Ozawa and Bernard Haitink. At age 19, he was invited to join the Opera Company of Boston as opera coach, pianist and conductor by the great impresario, stage director and conductor Sarah Caldwell. He later toured Russia with Ms. Caldwell, performing as pianist in Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk. Mr. Shames has performed and recorded as pianist with orchestras throughout the U.S. and Europe, among them the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, the Cologne Radio Symphony, the Belgrade Radio and Television Symphony, Boston Pops, and Seattle, Indianapolis and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras. Music directorships have included the Olympia and Wyoming Symphonies. Mr. Shames was a laureate of several competitions including the 1982 Moscow International Tchaikovsky Competition; interviews and performances of his are featured in the widely-viewed documentary of the event. Mr. Shames studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Yale University.

Upcoming projects for Mr. Shames include piano recitals and concerto appearances in California, Kansas and Michigan in February and March of 2026; and recordings of Beethoven and Schubert piano works in May, 2026.

Heralded by the Los Angeles Times as “. . .a shining example of podium authority and musical enlightenment,” NEAL STULBERG has garnered consistent international acclaim for performances of clarity, insight and conviction. Since 2005, he has served as Director of Orchestral Studies at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. From 2014 to 2018, he served as chair of the UCLA Department of Music,  and currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Music Performance and Artistic Director of UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.

In North America, Mr. Stulberg has led the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Mexico City, National, New Jersey, New World, Oregon, Pacific, Phoenix, Saint Louis, San Antonio, San Francisco, Utah and Vancouver symphonies, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet. A former assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Carlo Maria Giulini and music director of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, he is a recipient of the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award.

Mr. Stulberg’s European appearances have included performances in Germany with the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln and the orchestras of Augsburg, Bochum, Dortmund, Freiburg, Herford, Jena, Münster, Nürnberg, Oldenburg and Rostock. In Holland, he has conducted the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and led the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, North Holland Philharmonic, Gelders Orchestra and Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam. He has also appeared as guest conductor with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra (Norway), Warsaw Chamber Orchestra, Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra (Lithuania), Athens State Orchestra, London Royal Ballet Sinfonia, Barcelona Liceu Orchestra and Norwegian National Opera Orchestra.

International engagements have also included the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Moscow Chamber Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Taipei Symphony Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, Korea Philharmonic (KBS), Queensland, Adelaide and West Australian symphonies, Haifa Symphony Orchestra, Israel Sinfonietta and Ra’anana Symphonette.

An acclaimed pianist, Stulberg has appeared as recitalist, chamber musician and with major orchestras and at international festivals as pianist/conductor. His performances of Mozart concertos conducted from the keyboard are uniformly praised for their buoyant virtuosity and interpretive vigor. In 2011-12, he performed the complete Mozart sonatas for violin and piano with violinist Guillaume Sutre at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall and at the Grandes Heures de Saint Emilion festival in France. In 2018, he performed throughout South Africa on a recital tour with saxophonist Douglas Masek and in 2022, appeared as solo pianist in the world premiere of Inclusion, a new work for pianist and chamber orchestra by Hugh Levick.

Mr. Stulberg has conducted premieres of works by Paul Chihara, Mohammed Fairouz, Jan Friedlin, William Kraft, Alexander Krein, Betty Olivero, Steve Reich, Peter Schat, Lalo Schifrin, Dmitri Smirnov, Earl Stewart, Morton Subotnick, Joan Tower and Peter van Onna, among others, and has also led works by UCLA composers Münir Beken, Bruce Broughton, Kenny Burrell, Mark Carlson, Richard Danielpour, Ian Krouse, David Lefkowitz and James Newton. He conducted the period-instrument orchestra Philharmonia Baroque in a festival of Mozart orchestral and operatic works, and has brought to life several silent movies from the early 1900s, including the Russian classic New Babylon, Shostakovich’s first film score. In August 2022, he conducted the North American premiere of Bas-Sheve, a recently rediscovered and orchestrated 1924 Yiddish-language opera by composer Henekh Kon and librettist Moishe Broderzon, at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto. In 2023, Stulberg led acclaimed performances of Dave Brubeck’s cantata, The Gates of Justice (1969) and the West Coast premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6 (Vessels of Light) (2022) as part of the School of Music’s Music and Justice series, presented in collaboration with the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.  And in May 2025, he conducted West Coast premiere performances of Tod Machover’s 2018 opera, Schoenberg in Hollywood, as part of the celebration of Arnold Schoenberg’ sesquicentennial.

Collaborators have included John Adams; Leonard Bernstein; Chris, Dan and Darius Brubeck; Dee Dee Bridgewater; John Clayton; Omar Ebrahim; Mercer Ellington; Michael Feinstein; Philip Glass; Morton Gould; David Krakauer; Lar Lubovitch; Tod Machover; Peter Martins; Mark Morris; Angel Romero; Cornel West; and Christopher Wheeldon. He has conducted Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten at the Rotterdam Festival and Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face with Long Beach Opera in Los Angeles, and has recorded for Naxos, West German Radio, Donemus, Yarlung Records, Sono Luminus and the Composers Voice label.

Mr. Stulberg has maintained a career-long passion for the training of young musicians. He has conducted and taught at the New World Symphony, Indiana University Summer Institute, Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, New Zealand School of Music, Henry Mancini Institute, Los Angeles Philharmonic Summer Institute, National Repertory Orchestra, Interlochen Arts Academy, American-Russian Youth Orchestra, Turkish Music State Conservatory (Istanbul), National Conservatory of Belarus (Minsk), Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing), Capitol Normal University (Beijing), Shanghai Conservatory of Music and National Taiwan Normal University.  In December 2019, he taught and lectured in Israel at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and Haifa University and returned to conduct its symphony orchestra in June 2024.  In March 2026, he conducts the Carlos Chávez Youth Orchestra in Mexico City.

A native of Detroit, Mr. Stulberg is a graduate of Harvard College, the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School. He studied conducting with Franco Ferrara at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, piano with Leonard Shure, Theodore Lettvin, William Masselos and Mischa Kottler, and viola with Ara Zerounian.

Isaac Fromme is currently a third-year undergraduate cello performance major at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where he studies with Ben Hong.
Isaac began cello studies with his father at age five. Although he planned to pursue a career as a soccer player, it was not until his junior year of high school, when he participated in the San Francisco Youth Orchestra, that he decided to pursue music seriously. The exceptional level of musicianship and passion he encountered there inspired him to pursue a professional career, with the goal of performing in a major orchestra.

During his last year of high school, Isaac studied cello with San Francisco Conservatory of Music faculty member Jennifer Culp. Prior to performing at the Junior Bach Festival Competition concert, he took a lesson with the renowned cellist Bonnie Hampton.
In addition to his academic studies, Isaac has participated in several summer programs, including Summer Music West at SFCM, Philadelphia International Music Festival, Pacific Crest Music Festival, Boulder Cello Festival. He will participate in the Round Top Festival (TX) this summer.