Violinist Aaron Berofsky, violinist Kathryn Votapek, violist Lynne Ramsey and cellist Felix Wang have spent the summer thus far training students and will now showcase their own skills to Chautauquans. These four School of Music faculty members will debut as a newly formed quartet at 4:15 p.m. Saturday in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall.
With Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s String Quartet in A Major, K. 499 and Antonín Dvořák’s String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 51 on the program, the quartet will whisk the audience away with these 18th and 19th century pieces.
During the academic year, Berofsky serves as a professor of music at the University of Michigan. As part of the Chester String Quartet, the resident quartet at UMich and Indiana University, South Bend, he is the group’s first violinist since 1992. At the International Festival Deia in Spain, Berofsky has performed the complete cycle of Mozart violin sonatas.
Also a member of the Chester String Quartet and School of Music chamber music chair, Votapek is a colleague of Berofsky’s at the UMich where she is a clinical assistant professor of music in the chamber music department. She is an active soloist and guest artist, performing nationwide and in Canada and Europe in chamber music festivals.
Ramsey serves as a member of the viola faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Since 1989, she has played as the first assistant principal violist for the Cleveland Orchestra, and in December 1985, she was the first foreigner to play with the Beijing Philharmonic in Beijing’s new concert hall.
Wang, professor of cello at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, is a founding member of the Blakemore Trio. The trio includes two other Blair School of Music professors who all connected in 2002 at the university. He also plays as the co-principal cellist of the Iris Orchestra, whose mission is to serve the community through using music as mentorship, medicine and meaning.
