Violinist Robert Zubrycki is Concertmaster of the New York City Chamber Orchestra, a member of Orchestra Lumos, the American Symphony Orchestra, Assistant Concertmaster of Orchestra Moderne NYC and principal violin and frequent soloist with the Amici New York Orchestra. He has recently performed as Concertmaster for the New York Choral Society at Carnegie Hall, Encores! at City Center, Opera Orchestra of New York and the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic. He performs with the American Ballet Theater orchestra. A veteran of dozens of Broadway shows, Bob is in the orchestra of Carousel, and formerly in She Loves Me and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. He can be heard on the recent cast recordings of She Loves Me, An American in Paris and Paint Your Wagon (violin and mandolin). He has won an Emmy Award for his musical contribution to the documentary The Curse of the Bambino.

As a chamber musician, Robert is the first violinist of the Queen’s Chamber Band and the Queen’s Chamber Trio. The Trio’s recordings of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven are available on the Lyrichord label. Robert toured the United States with the Abaca String band, including performances at the Chautauqua Institute and the White House. He is currently the director for Concerts Around the Corner and the Cultural Arts Coalition in Brewster, NY. Bob is also an avid gardener.

He recently became a US Masters Swimming Adult Learn-to-Swim Instructor and is an American “Red Cross” certified lifeguard.

A member of Orchestra Lumos since 1984, Laura Bald has performed with numerous orchestras including the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Amici New York, the American Symphony, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Northeast Pennsylvania Philharmonic, and the OK Mozart Festival for fifteen seasons. She has served as guest concertmaster with the Connecticut Grand Opera and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. As an avid chamber musician, Laura was a founding member of the Victoria String Quartet while living in Hong Kong. In addition to making several tours of China, the quartet’s concerts were frequently broadcast on live radio. Recipients of an Exxon grant, the quartet was chosen to perform at the Government House for the American Consul General and Hong Kong’s last governor, Christopher Patten. The Victoria String Quartet has received critical acclaim and appeared in feature articles in the South China Morning Post and Hong Kong Elle. At home, Laura has made several tours of Northeast Oklahoma with the Amici New York String Quartet, performing in educational and community outreach programs, television appearances and numerous concerts. Recently she collaborated with the Vassar dance department to premier a piece for string quartet and dancers.

Laura has performed in Broadway pit orchestras for Ragtime, Boy from Oz, and Sunset Boulevard among others. Recordings include the orchestral soundtrack for the Haydn Planetarium’s Explore: The Universe and Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga’s Grammy Award Winning Cheek to Cheek as well as their PBS Great Performances broadcast.

Eliot Bailen has an active career as an artistic director, cellist, composer and teacher. Strings Magazine writes, “At Merkin Hall ‘cellist Eliot Bailen displayed a warm focused tone, concentrated expressiveness and admirable technical command always at the service of the music.” Founder and Artistic Director of the Sherman Chamber Ensemble, now in its 36th year, whose performances the New York Times has described as “the Platonic ideal of a chamber music concert,” Mr. Bailen is also Founder and Artistic Director of Chamber Music at Rodeph Sholom in New York and Artistic Director of the New York Chamber Ensemble. Principal cello of the New Jersey Festival Orchestra, New York Chamber Ensemble, Orchestra New England, Teatro Grattacielo and the New Choral Society, Mr. Bailen also performs regularly with the Saratoga Chamber Players, Cape May Music Festival, Sebago-Long Lake Chamber Music Festival as well as with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, New York City Opera and Ballet, American Symphony, Orchestra Lumos and New Jersey Symphony. Heard frequently in numerous Broadway shows, in 2015 he was the solo cellist for Allegiance. Among Mr. Bailen’s commissions are an Octet, a Double Concerto for Flute and Cello, Perhaps a Butterfly and the Saratoga Sextet. His musical, The Tiny Mustache, has recently received a third grant for further development from the Omer Foundation. Mr. Bailen has also received over thirty-five commissions for his “Song to Symphony” for schools (subject of a NY Times feature article Sept. 2006 and winner of a Yale Alumni Grant). In 2002, he received the Norman Vincent Peale Award for Positive Thinking. Mr. Bailen received his Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) from Yale University and an M.B.A. from NYU. He is on the cello and chamber music faculty at Columbia University and Teachers College.

Lauded by The Washington Post for playing “…with intelligence, poetry and proportion,” pianist Tanya Bannister has made a versatile career that is immersed in tradition combined with an entrepreneurship that seeks to create projects that inspire genuine connections between music and the world we live in. As co-founder and Artistic Director of AlpenKammerMusik in Austria, Ms. Bannister has created an intimate musical experience in which music lovers and students from around the world can spend 12 days in a small Alpine village engaged in the study of chamber music with world class faculty. Ms. Bannister has also co-founded Roadmaps Festival in New York City, an artistic, humanitarian and cultural venture. This year’s festival centered around the crisis in Syria. Ms. Bannister has been a winner of Concert Artists Guild International Competition and the New Orleans International Piano Competition confirming her status among the leading pianists of her generation. Receiving further distinction as an “Artist to Watch” on the cover of SYMPHONY Magazine, Ms. Bannister’s career has already brought her to many of the world’s great concert halls, with recitals at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Salle Cortot in Paris, Teatro Communale in Bologna, Tokyo’s Nikkei Hall, London’s Queen Elizabeth and Wigmore Halls, The Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.

With a history of philanthropy , in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which occurred soon after Ms. Bannister’s victory in New Orleans, she joined forces with three previous winners of that competition to form “Pianists for New Orleans.” These artists have performed together across the US to achieve their ambitious mission to raise $100,000 to help support the classical music community of New Orleans. Ms. Bannister also has a live recital CD that she created together with renowned ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox following the devastating tsunami in Japan to raise funds to support children that survived in the devastated remote island of Oshima.

Passionate about chamber music, Ms. Bannister has recently performed with quartets including Parker, Enso and Daedalus quartets and musicians such as Randall Scarlata, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Josef Spacek, Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, Martin Chalifour, Tessa Lark, Trey Lee and Wendy Warner.

Orchestral highlights of Ms. Bannister’s recent seasons include Liszt’s Concerto No. 1 with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and Brevard Symphony, Chopin’s Concerto No. 2 in e minor with the Greenwich (CT) Symphony, Erie Philharmonic and Reno Chamber Orchestra and Mozart’s Concerto in E-flat, K. 449 with the Arcadiana Symphony in Louisiana. Upcoming and recent appearances, warmly praised by the New York Times, include the highly regarded Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival, Reno Chamber Music Festival, Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., Look and Listen Festival in New York, Scottsdale Arts and AlpenKammerMusik in Austria, where she also serves as Artistic Director.

In addition to mastering the traditional repertoire, she has a deep affinity for contemporary music and has premiered numerous works written for her, including Christopher Theofanidis, David del Tredici, Suzanne Farrin, Harold Meltzer and Sidney Corbett. She has released several CDs, including a CAG release of piano concerti of Mozart, Chopin and Schubert arranged with string quintet, which was selected for special mention by the New York Times.

Ms. Bannister’s debut recording, featuring three late piano sonatas of Muzio Clementi, was released in 2006 on the Naxos label. BBC Music Magazine declared: “Barenboim’s EMI Beethoven sonata cycle is readily brought to mind. Yet although she possesses enviable articulate and accurate fingers, she is also sensitive to the music’s many lyrical asides.” Her recording for Albany Records, This is the story she began, features solo piano music of American composers David Del Tredici, Christopher Theofanidis, Suzanne Farrin and Sheila Silver; the New American Record Guide complemented her as “exceptionally talented…with a scintillating tone and subtle sense of chording.”
Born to an English father and Japanese mother, Ms. Bannister started her musical education in Hong Kong and continued in London, Italy, Germany and the USA. Ms. Bannister holds degrees from the Royal Academy of Music in London under Christopher Elton and Hamish Milne, Yale University, where she studied with Claude Frank, and New York’s Mannes School of Music, where she received an Artist Diploma as one of a handful of pianists selected to study with Richard Goode.