Ching-Ming Cheng

Dr. Ching-Ming Cheng not only has been a recipient of the Top Music Teacher Award from Steinway & Sons every year since 2016, but in 2023, she was inducted into the Steinway & Sons Teacher Hall of Fame, a prestigious designation recognizing the work of North America’s most committed and passionate piano educators. Being a full professor at CSU San Marcos and currently the chair of the Music Department, Dr. Cheng was the recipient of the CSUSM President’s Outstanding Faculty Award in Service Leadership in 2021.

Originally from Taiwan, Dr. Ching-Ming Cheng started playing the piano at the age of five and won her first prize in the Taipei Music Competition in her early teens. She won a silver medal in the International Keyboard Odyssiad Piano Competition and a semi-finalist in the Second Chinese International Piano Competition in New York City, representing Taiwan. Dr. Cheng holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Performance from National Taiwan Normal University, a Master of Music degree and a Doctoral of Musical Arts degree in Accompanying and Chamber Music, both from University of Miami.

Dr. Cheng is an active performer, both as a soloist and a collaborative pianist. She toured with Poway Symphonette to China, toured with world renowned saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky in southern California, and completed a solo recital tour in Taiwan during her sabbatical. Besides numerous solo recitals around the world, Dr. Cheng’s concerto performances include programs with Humboldt Symphony, Palomar Symphony, Poway Symphony and CSUSM ensembles.

Dr. Cheng is a member of MTAC and CAPMT, and a frequent adjudicator for musical events and competitions locally and virtually. As a committed faculty member, Dr. Cheng dedicated herself to growing and expanding the music department at CSUSM. She helped form the music major, successfully raised funds to build a smart music lab and acquire a Steinway grand piano and has established the first All-Steinway School in the region.

Eugene Drucker

Eugene Drucker is a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet and Music Director of the Bach at New Year’s concerts for The Berkshire Bach Society. He has appeared as a solo violinist with the orchestras of Montreal, Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, Hartford, Richmond, Omaha, Jerusalem, and the Rhineland- Palatinate, as well as with the American Symphony Orchestra, the Aspen Chamber Symphony, and the Las Vegas Philharmonic.

A graduate of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, he served for two years as concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra, which featured him several times as a soloist. He made his New York debut as a Concert Artists Guild winner in the fall of 1976, after having won prizes at the Montreal Competition and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels.

He has recorded the complete unaccompanied works of Bach (Parnassus Records), the complete sonatas and duos of Bartók (Biddulph Recordings), and (with the Emerson Quartet) works ranging from Bach and Haydn to contemporary repertoire, mostly for Deutsche Grammophon. A nine-time Grammy and three-time Gramophone Magazine Award winner, he is a visiting professor of chamber music at Stony Brook University.

In 2008, his original setting of four Shakespeare sonnets was premiered by baritone Andrew Nolen and the Escher String Quartet at Stony Brook. The songs later appeared as part of the two-CD release Stony Brook Soundings, issued by Bridge Recordings. Additional compositions include Madness and the Death of Ophelia, based on four scenes from Hamlet; At The Edge of The Cliff, a setting of five poems by Denise Levertov, for soprano and string quartet; and Series of Twelve, a string quartet commissioned by the New Music for Strings Festival, which premiered in Copenhagen and Reykjavik in August 2018. The Escher Quartet gave the official U.S. premiere of this 12-movement Suite in November 2021, and reprised it in New York City in March 2022.

Mr. Drucker’s first novel, The Savior, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007 and subsequently appeared in a German translation called Wintersonate. A second novel, Yearning, was published in the fall of 2021.

Katie Kim

Katie Kim is a flutist and private instructor based in San Diego, California. As a soloist, Ms. Kim has been a prize winner of many competitions, including the 2018 Lansum International Competition and the 2018 Grossmont Scholarship Competition. As an orchestral and ensemble musician she has performed alongside the Red Note Ensemble and has made appearances as guest principal flute of the Heisenberg Ensemble in St. Andrews, Scotland. She has performed in many notable venues in Scotland, including Usher Hall and Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, and the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow. She currently serves as principal flute of the Poway Symphony Orchestra.

An active chamber musician, Ms. Kim co-founded the Okapi Duo alongside classical guitarist Brian King. The Duo has been the recipient of many awards, including 1st place in the Governor’s Recital Prize for Chamber Music and 2nd place in the Southern Guitar Fest Ensemble Competition. The Duo has performed extensively throughout the United States and Scotland. In 2019, the duo was accepted onto the Live Music Now Scotland program, a non-profit whose mission is to bring chamber music to diverse groups of people who rarely get to experience live music.

Katie Kim has extensive experience as a flute teacher and currently maintains an active private studio of flutists of all levels. In the past, she has taught flute and piano at California Music Lessons and Bach to Rock Music School, and beginning music theory at the Oberlin Community Music School.

Ms. Kim started her musical studies at the age of 8 on piano, taught by her grandmother. She started learning the flute at age 11 and has since earned a Master of Arts in Chamber Music and a Master of Music in Flute Performance from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where she studied under Richard Blake (Scottish Opera) and Ruth Morley (The Red Note Ensemble). Ms. Kim attended Oberlin Conservatory where she earned her B.M. in performance under the tutelage of Alexa Still.

Katie Kim plays a much-loved Oston-Brannen flute and originally hails from sunny San Diego.

Chestnut Brass Company

The Grammy-winning Chestnut Brass Company has earned international acclaim for brilliant performances on modern and historical brass instruments. Since beginning as a street band in Philadelphia in 1977, they have performed in North and South America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia. They are one of a select few touring groups who have performed in all 50 of the United States.

The CBC is active in the performing and commissioning of contemporary music and has introduced numerous new works to audiences around the country. Composers who have written works for the Chestnut Brass Company, or have been commissioned by the Chestnut Brass Company, include Richard Wernick, Peter Schickele, Leslie Bassett, Eric Stokes, Theodore Antoniou, Jan Krzywicki, and Paul Basler. The brass quintet has received awards for commissioning and performance from the NEA, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Chamber Music America, and Meet the Composer.

Interviews and recitals of the Chestnut Brass Company have been featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Radiotimes and Performance Today programs; Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Bavarian State Radio, Korean National Television and numerous radio and television stations across the United States. The Chestnut Brass Company has been featured in performance/masterclasses at the Juilliard School, the Chautauqua Institute, the Ambassador Series, the Boston Museum of Art, Merkin Concert Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and the Yale Collection of Instruments. The CBC Hot Air: The Story of Brass Instruments children's program was selected by the Kennedy Center for broadcast as part of their educational series. They were finalists in the prestigious Naumberg Chamber Music Competition and semi-finalists in the Erwin Bodky Early Music competition.

As curators of the sounds of ancient and antique brasses, the Chestnut Brass Company has been at the forefront of the period-instrument revival with performances on cornetti, sacbuts, keyed bugles and saxhorns. The quintet continues to collect antique brass instruments and research the literature and performance practice of these instruments.

This extraordinary diversity of repertoire and instrumentation enables the Chestnut Brass Company to offer a variety of exciting, entertaining, and innovative programs. They can be heard on the Sony, Newport Classic, Crystal and Musical Heritage/Musicmasters labels. Selections from CBC recordings have been featured on several documentaries ranging from A House Divided for PBS, to Pinehurst, the History of Golf.

Misha Dichter 

Now in the sixth decade of a distinguished global career, MISHA DICHTER remains one of America’s most popular artists, extending a musical heritage from the Russian Romantic School, as personified by Rosina Lhevinne, his mentor at The Juilliard School, and the German Classical style that was passed on to him by Aube Tzerko, a pupil of Artur Schnabel. He also studied composition and analysis with Leonard Stein, a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg.

Born in Shanghai to parents who had fled Poland at the outbreak of World War II, Misha Dichter and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was two; he began studying the piano at five. At the age of 20, while enrolled at the famed Juilliard School in New York City, he won the Silver Medal at the 1966 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, which helped launch an enviable concert career. Shortly thereafter, on August 14, 1966, Mr. Dichter was the guest soloist in a Tanglewood performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a concert that was broadcast nationally on NBC and subsequently recorded for RCA. Two years later, he made his New York Philharmonic debut under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, collaborating on the same concerto. Appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra, the principal London orchestras and every major American orchestra soon followed.

A recognized champion of Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony #2, Age of Anxiety, Misha Dichter performed this great work with David Zinman and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the 2016 Ravinia Festival. During the 2017-18 season, he collaborated on Age of Anxiety with Maestro Zinman and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, David Itkin and the University of North Texas Symphony Orchestra and Ward Stare and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.

Misha Dichter has performed and recorded with some of the most illustrious conductors of the 20th and 21st centuries, among them Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis, Lawrence Foster, Valery Gergiev, Carlo Maria Guilini, Bernard Haitink, Mariss Jansons, Kiril Kondrashin, Erich Leinsdorf, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Neville Marriner, Kurt Masur, Riccardo Muti, Eugene Ormandy, Carlos Prieto, André Previn, Simon Rattle, Gerard Schwarz, Robert Shaw, Leonard Slatkin, Robert Spano, William Steinberg, Michael Tilson Thomas, Hans Vonk, Edo de Waart, David Zinman and Pinchas Zukerman, while notable chamber music collaborations have included violinists Itzhak Perlman, Mark Peskanov and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, cellists Lynn Harrell and Yo-Yo Ma and the American, Argus, Cleveland, Emerson, Guarneri, Harlem, St. Petersburg, Tesla and Tokyo string quartets. With his wife, pianist Cipa Dichter, he has toured North America and Europe, presenting both masterworks and neglected scores of the two-piano and piano-four-hand repertoires. Mr. Dichter has been seen frequently on national television and was the subject of an hour-long European television documentary.

Misha Dichter’s discography on the Philips, RCA, MusicMasters and Koch Classics labels are legendary, iconic and musically omnivorous, encompassing the major scores of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Gershwin, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Schubert, Schumann, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. A noted exponent of Liszt’s piano works and a champion of the composer’s forward-looking contributions to the development of music, Mr. Dichter was honored in 1988 with the “Grand Prix International du Disque Liszt,” presented for his Philips recording of the master’s piano transcriptions. His first recording with Cipa Dichter is a three-CD set of Mozart’s complete piano works for four hands and is available on the Nimbus label. American Record Guide called the album “an unmitigated delight,” and Music Web International named it a 2005 “Record of the Year.”

In 2007, Misha Dichter took a three-month hiatus from the concert stage to deal with the onset of Dupuytren’s Disease, a contracting of one or more fingers. After successful surgery and physical therapy, Mr. Dichter returned to public performance and became a supporter of, and spokesperson for, the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. A brief audio/video presentation, “Dupuytren’s Contracture: Misha Dichter - A Pianist Reborn,” is accessible on YouTube.

Misha Dichter is an accomplished writer, having contributed articles to many leading publications, including The New York Times. He is also a talented sketch artist, and in 2012 an e-book of his music-related illustrations, “A Pianist’s World in Drawings,” was released by Rosetta Books. Available on Amazon.com, BN.com and from iTunes, the e-book compiles over 50 original drawings that were created over the span of Mr. Dichter’s half-century career. (For more information, visit www.apianistsworldindrawings.com)

Fiercely dedicated to extending his artistic traditions to new generations of pianists, Misha Dichter conducts widely attended masterclasses at major conservatories, universities and music festivals, including Aspen, Curtis, Eastman, Harvard, Juilliard, Yale and Holland’s Conservatorium van Amsterdam.

Misha Dichter and his wife, Cipa Dichter, reside in New York City, in a household ruled over by Baxter, their amiable Springer Spaniel. They have two sons and five grandchildren. He remains an avid tennis player and jogger.

www.mishadichter.com

Víctor Díaz Guerra 

Spanish clarinetist Víctor Díaz Guerra (Cáceres, 1996) has most recently appeared as a soloist with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tung-Chieh Chuang, and other orchestras such as the Extremadura Youth Orchestra, with maestro Andrés Salado. Víctor received 1st prize in several solo and chamber music competitions around Spain; as well as the High School Solo Competition 1st Prize from the International Clarinet Association in Assisi, Italy (2013); Young Clarinet Competition 1st Prize from European Clarinet Association, in Katowice, Poland (2014) and 1st Prize from the Pasadena Showcase Instrumental Competition in California (2016).

A passionate chamber musician, he has collaborated with artists such as Denis Bouriakov, José María Villegas, Vivian Fan, Fabiola Kim, HyeJin Kim, Rodolfo Leone, Elsa Silva, Joachim Becerra, Albert Cano Smit and António Saiote in venues around Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Víctor has been regularly invited to perform solo recitals and give masterclasses in Spain and Portugal. In 2016, he performed for the King and Queen of Spain at the Palacio Real ‘El Pardo’.

Under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas, Stéphane Denève, Matthias Pintscher, Ludovic Morlot, or James Conlon between others; Víctor has perfomed as member of the Colburn Symphony Orchestra, Extremadura Symphony Orchestra, European Union Youth Wind Orchestra, International Clarinet Orchestra ‘Príncipe de Asturias’ and Extremadura Youth Orchestra.

He has received master classes from clarinetists as Michel Arrignon, Martin Fröst, Wenzel Fuchs, Burt Hara, Florent Héau, Harri Mäki, Nuno Pinto, and Valdemar Rodríguez.

Víctor started his clarinet studies at the age of 7 with professor Alejandro Parejo at the Conservatory of Cáceres, Spain. After graduating at the age of 16 and receiving the Final Year Award and the High School National Music Award, he attended the ‘Escola Superior de Música, Artes e Espectáculo’ in Porto, Portugal, where he obtained Bachelor of music degree at the age of 19 with professor António Saiote. Víctor obtained his Master of Music degree in 2018 at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, California, in the class of professor Yehuda Gilad, and is now continuing at the school to pursue an Artist Diploma.

Misha Vayman

Violinist Misha Vayman, grandson of the Soviet violinist Mikhail Vaiman, began his musical studies at the age of four in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has studied with a number of prominent pedagogues, including Kurt Sassmannshaus, Mauricio Fuks, ISO concertmaster Zachary DePue, and acclaimed concert violinist Joan Kwuon.

Misha has won a large number of fellowships and has performed as recitalist and chamber musician at many prestigious festivals in the USA and internationally. In 2016 he added a faculty position at Benefic Chamber Music Festival to his summer schedule, involving himself in coaching and private teaching, as well as having the opportunity to perform with the internationally renowned American Piano Trio. He has been named the first prize winner at the ENKOR International Violin Competition, the Paris Grand Prize Virtuoso International Music Competition, and the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, and Symphony of the Lakes concerto competitions.

Misha has performed as a soloist with a great number of orchestras, including the Starling Chamber Orchestra at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, China, the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, and Symphony of the Lakes Orchestras, Indiana, the Lake Charles Symphony, Louisiana, and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Russia. His performances have been broadcast nationally and internationally.

Both his live and recorded appearances have been met with critical acclaim. North Star called his playing “Poetic and sincere” “Lyrical… with serious technical gifts.” Journal Star noted that “The crowd rose to its feet”. Steven Trinkle, artistic director and conductor at Trinkle Brass Works, Inc. said that Misha demonstrated “Some of the best string playing I’ve ever heard.”

In 2011 Misha starred in the music video “Stronger” with groundbreaking string trio Time for Three. The video was featured on CNN in 2012.

Misha earned his BM from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and is now a MM candidate at the Colburn Conservatory of Music, where he studies with renowned violinist and pedagogue Martin Beaver.

Daniel Grab

As a private teacher in Southern California, Daniel has worked with beginning students through college graduates.  His students have performed with local orchestras, and have won scholarships to such programs as Crossroads School, Colburn Music Academy, Center Stage Strings, and Aspen Music Festival.

In Summer of 2014, Daniel was on the cello faculty at Luzerne Music Center in upstate New York.  There, he performed chamber music with principal players of the Sarasota Orchestra, soloist and music center president Elizabeth Pitcairn, and assistant concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic Michelle Kim.  

Holding a bachelor degree and graduate certificate from the University of Southern California, and master's from California State University Northridge, Daniel has studied under the nation's finest teachers including Dr. Richard Naill, Ron Leonard, Eleonore Schoenfeld, and Alexander Suleiman. 

During his three-semester tenure as cellist of the Midori Chamber Music Seminar at USC, Daniel rehearsed and performed multiple works with the internationally renowned concert artist.  

As an active performer throughout Southern California, Daniel can be heard appearing with local bands, in recital, or soloing with area orchestras. In his free time, he enjoys exploring the Southern California Coastline in pursuit of uncrowded waves.