Join us for the Inaugural Festival of Music at the Peace Center Concert Hall featuring the Young Artist Orchestra, GCYO’s top level ensemble, and special guest artist, violinist Ida Kavafian, who will perform Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Mr. Neil Casey conducts the concert. As part of the festival, during her residency, Ida Kavafian will perform an education concert for groups and classes in the morning, and give a masterclass for YAO students. Don’t miss this special performance with a world class guest artist. It will be a generational concert experience.
Greenville County Youth Orchestra, celebrating more than 50 years of music making, is an educational program for students in Greenville who play an orchestral instrument. Find out more information at gcyo.net. Auditions are held every spring in May. GCYO rehearses weekly during the school year at the Fine Arts Center and at League Academy.
Greenville County Youth Orchestra Association is a local arts non profit organization that receives support from the Greenville County School District, Metropolitan Arts Council, the South Carolina Arts Commission, and private donations from friends of the organization. Thank you for making this concert possible!
Internationally acclaimed as both violinist and violist, Ida Kavafian was Artistic Director of the acclaimed festival, Music from Angel Fire in NM for 35 years. For over fifty years, she has been a frequent performer with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and is a founder of such groups as Tashi, Opus One and Trio Valtorna, as well as the festival, Bravo! Vail, which she ran for ten years. During her tenure with the renowned Beaux Arts Trio, the group was Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year and received a Grammy Nomination. She has toured and recorded with diverse greats such as Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis and Mark O’Connor, and had a feature on CBS Sunday Morning. Ms. Kavafian has premiered many new works including a concerto written for her by Toru Takemitsu as well as Michael Daugherty’s “Fire and Blood”, which she also recorded with the Detroit Symphony. Recently she gave the World Premiere of a new concerto written for her by the acclaimed composer, Richard Danielpour. As violist, she has performed with the Guarneri, Orion, Harlem, Shanghai, Harlem and American String Quartets.
Ms. Kavafian holds the Nina von Maltzahn Chair in Violin Studies at the Curtis Institute, where she has taught for more than twenty-five years and was awarded the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Born in Istanbul, Turkey of Armenian parentage, she began her studies with Ara Zerounian, continued with Mischa Mischakoff, then graduated with honors from the Juilliard School with Oscar Shumsky. She was presented in her debut by Young Concert Artists with pianist Peter Serkin and received a coveted Avery Fisher Grant. Married to violist Steven Tenenbom, Ms. Kavafian has found great success in another field, the breeding, training, hunting and showing of prize-winning Hungarian Vizsla dogs under the prefix, “Opus One”.
