Nicholas Kitchen, violin
www.nicholaskitchen.com

photo: Christian Steiner

Violinist Nicholas Kitchen, a native of Durham, N.C., has been active as a soloist and chamber musician since making his first professional appearances
at age 12. Since then, his performances have taken him to more than 20 countries, where he has been presented in such halls as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Opera Bastille in Paris, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Wigmore Hall in London, and Carnegie Hall and Jordan Hall in the U.S.
 
His solo appearances have included collaborations with such conductors as Michael Tilson-Thomas, Otto-Werner Mueller, and Enrique Batiz.
 
Since 1989, Kitchen has performed extensively as first violinist of the Borromeo String Quartet. He has participated in the Caramoor, Spoleto, Vancouver, and Orlando festivals, among others.
 
Among Kitchen’s many awards, he has received the Albert Schweitzer Medallion for Artistry and was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts.
 
His interest in contemporary music has resulted in his premiering Stephen Jaffe’s Violin Concerto with the Greensboro Symphony, and working as an artist member of "Music from the Copland House." Kitchen is Artistic Director of the Cape & Islands Chamber Music Festival, and has the honor of playing on the A.J. Fletcher Stradivarius, a violin purchased for long-term loan to him by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation of Raleigh, NC.
 
B.A., Curtis Institute; Artist Diploma with Borromeo String Quartet, NEC. Violin with James Buswell, Giorgio Ciompo, David Cerone, Szymon Goldberg. (2012)
 
Pi-Hsien Chen 陳必先, piano

 

photo: Benjamin Cheung

Ms. Pi-Hsien Chen was born in Taiwan and came to Cologne when she was nine years old. One year later, she was admitted in the class of Hans-Otto Schmidt-Neuhaus. At the age of 21, she won the first prize at the ARD-International-Piano-Competition in Munich, later on the first prizes at the A.Schönberg-Competition in Rotterdam and at the J.S.Bach-Competition in Washington D.C.
 
She performed with important orchestras, such as the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC-Symphony-Orchestra, the Concertgebouw-Orchestra, the Zurich-Tonhalle-Orchestra and all German Radio-Symphony- Orchestras. Conductors, with whom she has worked, were Bernhard Haitink, Paul Sacher, Sir Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, Marek Janowsky, Hans Zender and Peter Eötvös. She was partner of Hermann Baumann, Pierre-Laurant Aimard, Wolfgang Meyer and Augustin Dumay a.o.
 
Ms. Pi-hsien Chen took part in numerous music-festivals: she gave performances in the Schwetzinger Festspiele, the London Prom's, Huddersfield Festival, the Osaka Festival, the Hong-Kong-Arts-Festival, the Festival d'Automne Paris, Musica Strasbourg, the Festival Wien Modern, the Triennale Cologne, in the German Pavillon of the EXPO 2000 in Hannover, the L'Antheron Piano Festival in France and at the Sao Raimundo Nonato in Piavi, Brasil.
 
Her increasing interest and engagement for contemporary music grew in the co-operation with composers as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Kurtág, John Cage and Elliott Carter. Since 1983, Pi-hsien Chen was a professor for the piano at the Musikhochschule, Köln and continues teaching at the Musikhochschule Freiburg since 2004. Regularly she is giving international master classes like in Boston, US (Walnut Hill Festival) or Helsinki, Finland (Sibelius Academy). In 2012, she performed Music of Changes by John Cage and Second Sonata by Pierre Boulez to celebrate Cage’s 100 year anniversary in Berlin. In 2013, she performed the all Schoenberg piano works and works by Lei Liang in Ultraschall Festival in Berlin. She was artist in residence in the 2nd Contemporary Music Festival in Taipei, where she premiered four programs of contemporary music. She appeared in Lucerne Festival with George F. Haas.
(8-2014)