Violin 1
Sean Takada (concertmaster)
Rebecca Beerstein*
Ally Cho*
Johannes Eberhart*
Janice Hu
Kayla Lee
Alisa Luera*
Sophia Shih
Kelly Tsai
Isaac Visoutsy
Joce Wang

*= string quartet player

Violin 2
Rubani Chugh (principal)
Mattin Aframian
Jason Chen
Alex Collins
Honor Frisco
Jimin Koo
Nathan Robinson
Bertrand Stone
Mana Tatsuki
Erin Tsui
Jerimiah Youngblood

Viola
Damon Zavala (principal)
Ian Lee
Ellen Lozada*
Jocelyn Pon
James Renk
Layla Shapouri*
Daniel Oviedo

*=string quartet player

Cello
Isabelle Fromme (principal)
Peter Walsh (principal)
Leon Cho
Sarah Clark
Isaac Fromme
Jasmine Lam
Edward Li
Annabelle Lo
Naohiro Nadahara*
Kaya Ralls
Dylan Renk*
Aerie Walker
Aidan Woodruff

*=string quartet player

Double Bass
Skyler Lee (principal)
Zack Hauser
Dawson Lam
Luka Lesko
Leon Simmans
Atticus Simmons

Flute
Katlyn Lang*
John Robert Santiago
Shannyn Sul*

*=piccolo

Oboe
Emma Crawford
Adam Frary*
Tina Shigeyama

*=English Horn

Clarinet
Shiun Choi
Jacob Freiman*
Harrison Garff
Jonathan Recomanta
Yijin Wang

*=Bass Clarinet

Bassoon
Davis Lerner*
Adam Moss
Dani Santana*

*=Contrabassoon

Trumpet
Olivia Achcet
Remy Ohara
Saul Gutierrez-Sandoval
Nick Washburn

Horn
Bryan Chiu
Vincent Jurado
Hannah Lee
Rory O’Regan
Aziel Ressler

Tenor Trombone
Spencer Mar
Gregory Ochotorena

Bass Trombone
Carlos Castaneda

Tuba
Daler Babaev
Errol Rhoden

Percussion
Kevin Needham (principal)
Demitrius Alleyne
Alejandro Barajas
Kobe Sanders
Audrey Sherill

Harp
Jillian Risigari Gai Lopez

Piano
Isabelle Ragsac

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.

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, 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.

Collaborators have included John Adams; Leonard Bernstein; Chris, Dan and Darius Brubeck; Dee Dee Bridgewater; John Clayton; Mercer Ellington; Michael Feinstein; Philip Glass; Morton Gould; David Krakauer; Lar Lubovitch; 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 returns to conduct its symphony orchestra in June 2024.

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.

Chinese-born conductor Gan Xiong has led orchestras including the Case Western Reserve University Orchestra (Cleveland, OH), Tokyo Sinfonia, UCLA Symphony, Miami Music Festival Orchestra, and Bacâu Philharmonic Orchestra (Romania), and has conducted student productions of musicals including “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and “Dear Evan Hansen.” He has led youth orchestras in Shanghai including the Huangpu District Youth Orchestra and Shanghai Kite Youth Orchestra, where he served as faculty in a Baroque summer camp session and conducted its final concert in 2019.

Also a vocalist, Gan was a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus from 2021 to 2022, where he participated in a recording of Shostakovich Symphony No. 3 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in vocal performance from Case Western Reserve University and a Master’s Degree in orchestral conducting from The Boston Conservatory at Berklee. His teachers have included Kathleen Horvath, Bruce Hangen, Charles Gambetta, and Ovidiu Balan; he has participated in masterclasses with Mark Gibson, Arthur Fagen, Apo Hsu, Robert Ryker, and John Farrer. He currently pursues a DMA degree in orchestral conducting at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, studying with Neal Stulberg.

Samuel Chung is an orchestral conducting major in the Masters program at UCLA, studying with Neal Stulberg and leading its ensembles, including UCLA Symphony, UCLA Philharmonia, and uclaFLUX.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Boston University, where his primary teachers were Lucia Lin and Jeremy Yudkin. At B.U., he was conductor of Time’s Arrow, the school’s contemporary music ensemble, and also studied with Joshua Rifkin, Steven Ansell, Peter Zazofsky and others. He received a Boston University College of Fine Arts Scholarship in violin performance and its 2023 Departmental Award in Musicology and Ethnomusicology.

As founder and artistic director of the Magari Ensemble, Chung has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects with organizations such as New England Conservatory’s Blind Glass Ensemble and Schönberg Center Vienna.

In recent summers, Chung studied with Gerard Schwarz as a Conducting Scholar at the Eastern Music Festival and was in residence at the 2023 Montecito International Music Festival as conductor of the festival orchestra. He has also assisted and prepared ensembles for conductors including Paul Phillips (Stanford University) and Larry Livingston (USC Thornton). In 2023, Chung was named Finalist of The Respighi Prize in Conducting, issued by the Chamber Orchestra of New York and Comune di Bologna (Italy).

GLEN WHITEHEAD, D.M.A. As a trumpet artist Whitehead’s background includes international appearances as a solo artist along with the EcoSono Ensemble, Wai, Psychoangelo, the Bottesini Ensemble, Nexus Brass and more. He has composed for professional theatre and dance, most notably in several projects with the Ormao Dance Co. He’sc ommissioned works from the world’s finest composers including concertos by Matthew Burtner with Grammy Award winner, trumpeter Cuong Vu and Dr. George E. Lewis.

He released the Ecoacoustic solo recording Pale Blue on Neuma Records in Spring 2023 to rave reviews and international airplay. His recording, “the Living Daylights” (2018) on pfMENTUM remained on the top 10 of radio playlists across the U.S. for over a year. With Michael Theodore, Psychoangelo’s release panauromni was listed on the top ten cd’s by Chicago Time Out. He recorded two cd’s with O’Keefe / Stanyek / Walton / Whitehead –“Tunnel” and “Unbalancing Acts” on Circumvention and 9Winds Records, performed solo trumpet on the opera “Tania” by Anthony Davis on Kotch Int, and was principal trumpet on the soundtrack for the video game, Everquest.

As an interdisciplinary sound artist Whitehead explores the intersection between science and music in ecoacoustics, improvisational phenomena, interactive communication and environmental collaboration between living cultures, technologies and the natural world.

Whitehead is a Professor of Music, Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, and Co- Director of the Bachelor of Innovation degree at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Whitehead received his Bmus in Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music, and M.A. and D.M.A from the University of California, San Diego.

Grammy-nominated pianist and Steinway Artist SUSAN GRACE is associate chair, artist-in-residence, and senior lecturer at Colorado College. Grace was awarded the 2020 Gresham Riley Award, the Alumni Associations’ highest honor for service to Colorado College, and the 2023 Jane Cauvel Cultivating Collaboration and Community Presidential Leadership Award. Grace is music director of the renowned Colorado College Summer Music Festival, now in its 40th season.

Grace records for Bridge Records. She is a member of Quattro Mani, an internationally acclaimed two-piano ensemble with New York pianist, Steven Beck. Bridge Records recently released two new CDs by Quattro Mani, featuring American composer Fred Lerdahl and another including American and European composers. Giorgio Koukl’s EarRelevant review of their latest CD, Hallelujah Junction says “..their incredible array of capacities is strong enough to place them precisely on the top of the piano duos of today.” Fanfare’s Carl Roberts writes that “Quattro Mani is one of the most enduring and leading keyboard duos anywhere” and the Boston Globe printed “Quattro Mani proved itself fearless and equal to every challenge.”

Rich and powerful musical language and a strong sense of drama have made Scottish-American composer THEA MUSGRAVE one of the most respected and exciting contemporary composers in the Western world. Her works are performed in major concert halls, festivals, and radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic. Known for the clarity of her invention, the skill of her orchestrations, and the power of her musical communication, Musgrave has consistently explored new means of projecting essentially dramatic situations in her music. Frequently altering and extending the conventional boundaries of instrumental performance by physicalizing their musical and dramatic impact: both without programmatic content and others with specific programmatic ideas including the famous Greek legends in Orfeo, Narcissus, Helios, and Voices from the Ancient World; – all extensions of concerto principles. In some of these, to enhance the dramatic effect, the sonic possibilities of spatial acoustics have been incorporated.

Her ten large-scale and several chamber operas of the past 40 years beginning with The Voice of Ariadne (1972) and followed by Mary, Queen of Scots (1977), A Christmas Carol (1979), Harriet, The Woman Called Moses (1984), Simón Bolivar (1992), Pontalba (2003) are in every sense the true successors to these instrumental concertos. Two major retrospectives in recent years have shown the immense diversity of her music: the BBC’s Total Immersion weekend in 2014 and the Stockholm International Composer Festival 2018, in which fifteen of her orchestral and chamber works in four concerts- the largest profile of her music to date.

Musgrave has been featured at many other major festivals including Edinburgh, Warsaw Autumn, Florence Maggio Musicale, Venice Biennale, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham and Zagreb. Musgrave has been the recipient of many notable awards including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Ivors Classical Music Award 2018, and The Queen’s Medal for Music. She was awarded a CBE on the Queen’s New Year’s Honour List in 2002.

The music of ELLA KAALE [Kah-lee] (b. 2003) is perpetually chasing cathartic release, characterized by collagism, abstraction, and polarity. Kaale is an alumna of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America’s Composer Apprenticeship, where she was mentored by Sean Shepherd. Her music has been performed by the USC Thornton Symphony, TAK Ensemble, CORVUS, Hub New Music, Pacific Chamber Orchestra, Dolce Suono Ensemble, the New York Youth Symphony Jazz Ensemble, the Bergamot Quartet, Schroeder Umansky Duo, harpist Bridget Kibbey, and flautist Mimi Stillman. Her honors include a Semi-Finalist for the American Composers Orchestra EarShot Readings with ROCO, Most Valuable Player for the USC Composition Department, a YoungArts Merit Award, a Luna Composition Lab Honorable Mention, the Texas Music Scholar Award, the American Festival for the Arts Composition Faculty Excellence Award, the Parent-Teacher Association Reflections Fine Arts Competition National Award of Excellence, and an Honorable Mention for the NextNotes High School Music Creator Award. Additionally, Kaale is a composition Teaching Artist Assistant with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) Meet the Music program. She is currently a junior in the B.M. Composition program at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, studying with Christopher Trapani, Ted Hearne, and Andrew Norman.

JACK VAN ZANDT (b. 1954) is a Grammy-winning composer of music for concerts, film and TV, and a music educator and writer. He is based in Los Angeles and Ireland. He attended UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies and Cambridge University, and studied composition with Alexander Goehr, Thea Musgrave, Peter Maxwell Davies and Peter Racine Fricker. He was recently a music faculty member at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and California Institute for the Arts (CalArts). He is a new music concert producer in Los Angeles, and a founder and co-director with Anne LeBaron of the Beyond Opera Collective. His music is published by Composers Edition in Oxford, U.K. His book with Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors and Models, was published by Carcanet in December 2023

More information at www.jackvanzandt.com or composersedition.com/jack-van-zandt/

“Radiant and transcendent”, the music of JUHI BANSAL weaves together themes celebrating musical and cultural diversity, nature and the environment, and strong female role models. Her music draws upon elements as disparate as progressive metal, Hindustani music, spectralism, sound design and choral traditions to create deeply expressive, evocative sound-worlds. As an Indian composer brought up in Hong Kong, her work draws subtly upon both those traditions, entwining them closely and intricately with the gestures of western classical music.

Recent projects include Love, Loss and Exile, a song cycle on poetry by Afghan women commissioned by Songfest; Songs from the Deep, a new orchestral work inspired by humpback whale songs commissioned by the Oregon Mozart Players; Waves of Change, a digital experience on womanhood, identity and clash of cultures inspired by the story of the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club; and Edge of a Dream, an opera about Ada Lovelace, daughter of infamous poet Lord Byron and a 19th Century pioneer in computing commissioned by Los Angeles Opera. Recent seasons have included commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Beth Morrison Projects, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre, the Oakland East Bay Symphony, AIDS Quilt Songbook 20th Anniversary project and more. Her music is regularly performed throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia and available on the Naxos, Albany and Roven Records labels.

juhibansal.com

AKARI KOMURA (b.1996) is a Japanese composer-vocalist. She grew up in Tokyo and spent her teenage years in Jakarta, Indonesia. From an early age, Akari has been involved in performing arts through playing the piano, singing, and dancing modern ballet. Her interest in somatic practice and embodied consciousness is central to her creative process. Akari imagines her score as an invitation for the performers to contemplatively engage with listening and soundmaking. She is interested in curating a participatory performance space that invites a community of performers and audience for a collective and ritualistic act of listening and soundmaking. Akari’s artistic exploration is oriented towards heightening awareness and transforming our perception of the sonic environment. The works of Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, and Hildegard Westerkamp are especially influential to her creative process. Her breadth of work spans chamber ensemble, multimedia electronics, and interdisciplinary collaborations with dancers, visual artists, and architects.

Akari’s works have been presented at the Atlantic Music Festival, Composers Conference, International Composition Institute of Thailand, New Music Gathering, Nief-Norf, MATA Festival, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab (Canada), Penn State New Music Festival, soundSCAPE (Italy), soundpedro, and VU Symposium.

Recent highlights include receiving a commission by the Kinds of Kings as a 2020 Bouman Composer Fellow and premiered by the Rubiks Collective. In 2023 spring, Akari was selected by American Composers Orchestra EarShot Reading to work with The Next Festival of Emerging Artists on a new string orchestra piece, Inhabited by air.

Akari holds an M.M. in Composition from the University of Michigan (recipient of the EXCEL Enterprise Fund and Sonic Scenographies Research Grant) and a B.A. in Vocal Arts from the University of California, Irvine. Akari is currently a Ph.D. composition student at the University of California San Diego.

GEORGE LEWIS is an American composer, musicologist, and trombonist. He is Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music and Area Chair in Composition at Columbia University, and Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work is presented by ensembles worldwide, published by Edition Peters. A Yamaha Artist, Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of computer programs that improvise in concert with human musicians.

His widely acclaimed book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis is the co-editor (with Harald Kisiedu) of the bilingual edited volume Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023), as well as (with Benjamin Piekut) the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College of Florida, and Birmingham City University, among others.