Winners of the renowned 2018 International Wigmore Hall String Competition and the 2018 Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, the Goldmund Quartet was selected by the European Concert Hall Organisation as Rising Stars of the 2019/20 season. Since 2019, they have been performing on Antonio Stradivari's Paganini Quartet of instruments, provided by the Nippon Music Foundation. In addition, the Quartet was awarded the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Music Prize in March 2020 and the Freiherr von Waltershausen Prize in December 2020. In 2016, the Quartet won the Bavarian Arts Promotion Prize and the Karl Klinger Prize of the ARD Competition.

Praised for his “ravishing and simply gorgeous” performances in The Washington Post, pianist David Fung is widely recognized for interpretations that are elegant and refined, yet intensely poetic and uncommonly expressive. He garnered international attention as laureate of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in Brussels and the Arthur Rubinstein Piano International Masters Competition in Tel Aviv, where he was further distinguished by the Chamber Music and Mozart Prizes. Mr. Fung is the first piano graduate of the Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles, where he studied with John Perry, and later worked with Claude Frank and Peter Frankl at Yale University, and Arie Vardi at the Hannover Hochschüle für Musik. He is also a Steinway Artist.

Kristina Mascher-Turner is an internationally acclaimed hornist and former principal horn of the Brussels Philharmonic. Since 2009, she has been a member of the American Horn Quartet, touring six continents, performing at major international festivals, and recording extensively. A committed chamber musician, she is a core member of Luxembrass and co-founder of the Virtuoso Horn Duo, with recordings on Naxos and MSR Classics. A former Vice President of the International Horn Society, she received its Punto Award for outstanding service to the international horn community. Kristina is on the artist faculty of the Rafael Méndez Brass Institute and Summit Brass, and in 2025 joined the faculty of the KASK Conservatorium in Ghent, Belgium.

Praised for her “seductive artistry” and “rare grace” (Classical Voice North America), violinist Clara Neubauer is establishing herself as a deeply expressive and authentic artist. She is a recipient of the Kovner Fellowship from the Juilliard School, as well as winner of the Peter Mennin Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music. Clara received the Ana Chumachenco Award at the Kronberg Academy Masterclasses and was chosen to perform as soloist with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn. Clara received her BM from The Juilliard School, as a student of Li Lin and Itzhak Perlman, and is currently pursuing her MM as a student of Catherine Cho and Itzhak Perlman.

Violist Paul Neubauer’s exceptional musicality and effortless playing have earned him praise as “a master musician” from The New York Times. In 2025, he will release two albums for First Hand Records, each featuring the final works of two great composers: an all-Bartók album, which includes the revised version of the Viola Concerto, and a Shostakovich album, featuring the monumental Viola Sonata.

At age 21, Mr. Neubauer was appointed principal violist of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held for six years. He has since appeared as a soloist with over 100 orchestras, including the New York, Los Angeles, and Helsinki Philharmonics, the Chicago, National, St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas, San Francisco, and Bournemouth Symphonies, and the Mariinsky, Santa Cecilia, English Chamber, and Beethovenhalle Orchestras.

Korean-born pianist Jeewon Park made her debut at the age of twelve performing Chopin’s First Concerto with the Korean Symphony Orchestra and came to the U.S. in 2002 after having won all the major competitions in Korea. Since that time, she has performed in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the 92nd Street Y, and Seoul Arts Center in Korea. Ms. Park is a graduate of The Juilliard School and Yale University, and she holds the DMA degree from SUNY Stony Brook. Her teachers include Young-Ho Kim, Herbert Stessin, Claude Frank, and Gilbert Kalish. She currently teaches piano at the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Artistic director Peter Rejto is committed to presenting the finest chamber music, both well-loved works and new, unfamiliar ones, performed by some of the world’s finest musicians. Highlights of his international career as a cellist include the world premiere of Gerard Schurmann’s Gardens of Exile with the Bournemouth Symphony broadcast live over the BBC, and the recording of Miklós Rózsa’s Cello Concerto in Hungary. Mr. Rejto is a founding member of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet and a former professor of the University of Arizona School of Music as well as professor emeritus at the Oberlin College Music Conservatory. He has directed the programming and selected the musicians for every Festival, beginning with the first in 1994.

At the age of seventeen, Axel Strauss won the silver medal at the Enescu Competition in Romania and has been recognized with many other awards, including top prizes in the Bach, Wieniawski, and Kocian competitions, and in 1998 he won the international Naumburg Violin Award in New York. Later that same year he made his American debut at the Library of Congress and his New York debut at Alice Tully Hall. Mr. Strauss studied with Dorothy DeLay at The Juilliard School, and since 2012 he has been Professor of Violin at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University in Montreal. He previously took part in our twenty-sixth Festival in 2019, and this year marks his eighth Festival appearance.

A recipient of Yale University’s Aldo Parisot Prize for gifted cellists, Jakob Giovanni Taylor is recognized for performances that combine fearless technique with deep musical insight. As a soloist, he is the winner of both the Yale School of Music and Shepherd School of Music concerto competitions. An avid chamber musician, he has collaborated with artists such as Benjamin Beilman, Robert McDonald, Wu Han and Matthew Lipman.

Dedicated to expanding audiences for classical music, he is the co-founder of Politics & Prokofiev, an innovative chamber music series fostering vibrant, intimate concert experiences. Jakob is a graduate of the Yale School of Music, where he completed his Master of Musical Arts with Paul Watkins of the Emerson Quartet. He received his MM at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music under Desmond Hoebig and his BM at The New England Conservatory with Paul Katz and is currently completing his Artist Diploma at the Colburn School under Clive Greensmith.