“Divertimento”: String Trios of Mozart and Beethoven

• Mozart Divertimento in E-flat Major, K. 563
  • Allegro
  • Adagio
  • Menuetto: Allegretto
  • Andante
  • Menuetto: Allegretto
  • Allegro
• Beethoven String Trio in G Major, Op. 9, No. 1
  • Adagio – Allegro con brio
  • Adagio ma non tanto e cantabile
  • Scherzo. Allegro  – Trio
  • Presto

with Mark Peskanov, violin; Chauncey Patterson, viola; Julian Schwarz, cello

• American virtuoso violinist and artistic visionary Mark Peskanov was born in Odessa, U.S.S.R. (now Odesa, Ukraine). Peskanov sang before he could walk or talk, and soon became a star violin student at the famed Stolyarsky school. At fifteen, he emigrated to the United States, where he was immediately accepted at the Aspen Music Festival and the Juilliard School.

  His phenomenal facility and musicianship won him both the Aspen and Juilliard concerto competitions, bringing him to the notice of Isaac Stern and Mstislav Rostropovich and rocketing him into the top echelons of the music world. Upon his debut with the Chicago Symphony, the Chicago Tribune called him a “sensational soloist.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer proclaimed, “Violinist Adds Glory to Odessa” and the New York Times declared, “Mark Peskanov is a tremendous young violinist and his Friday evening concert at Carnegie Hall was a triumph…He has it all—technique, temperament, and taste.”

  Peskanov is a staunch champion of American composers. He premiered the John Williams Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony, and the Stanley Wolfe Concerto (written for Peskanov) with the New York Philharmonic. He has performed more than fifty concertos with virtually every major U.S. orchestra and in Europe, the Middle East, Australia, South America and Japan. Peskanov’s major accolades include the Avery Fischer Career Grant, the first Frederick R. Mann Award, and Carnegie Hall’s first Isaac Stern Award.

  Peskanov inaugurated Tokyo’s Suntory Hall with Yo-Yo Ma and Stern, and Weill Recital Hall with Stern, Midori and Gil Shaham. Collaborating with these colleagues prompted Peskanov to turn intensively to the chamber music repertoire’s more intimate, complex, and dialogical possibilities. His delight in chamber music, his independent artistic vision, and his desire to mentor promising musicians as he had been mentored, led to Peskanov’s present role. Since 2005, he is president and artistic/executive director of Bargemusic, New York City’s cultural icon in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Over more than three decades of artistic involvement with Bargemusic, Peskanov has curated in the neighborhood of five thousand chamber concerts, encompassing a vast range of genres and styles in hundreds of concerts annually. Under his leadership Bargemusic continues to evolve as an innovative, influential, and integral component of New York City’s cultural world.

  Peskanov is known for his openness to an astonishing range of music and artists at all stages of their careers. Muses the New York Times, “One reason that openness seems to come so easily to Mr. Peskanov is that few proposals crossing his desk are likely to outpace his own vision of what Bargemusic can be.”

• Chauncey Patterson is principal violist for Palm Beach Symphony, solo violist for Florida Grand Opera, violist for the Bergonzi String Quartet at the University of Miami, and member of the Nu Deco Ensemble. He has been principal violist of the Denver and Buffalo Symphonies and, for 15 years, was the violist with the Miami String Quartet, an internationally renowned and extensively recorded ensemble.

  Patterson started playing the viola at age seven in the public school system of Burlington, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the Curtis Institute, where he studied with Ann Woodward, Robert Vernon, Karen Tuttle, and Michael Tree respectively. He began his professional career at age 23 as assistant principal viola of the Denver Symphony. He was eventually appointed principal viola by Music Director Philippe Entremont. His next post was principal viola of the Buffalo Philharmonic under the direction of Semyon Bychkov. During his stay in Buffalo, Patterson accepted the viola position in the award-winning Miami String Quartet. During his 15-year tenure, the MSQ garnered awards in the quartet competitions of London and Evian and became the first string quartet to win the Concert Artist Guild New York Competition. The quartet recorded a number of CD’s, most notably, The Ginastera Quartets, The Quartets of Pēteris Vasks, and The Saint-Saens and Faure String Quartets for the BMG Conifer label. The MSQ toured the U.S. extensively, playing at virtually every high-profile venue, including Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl. International performances (both with and without the MSQ) have taken Patterson to Mexico, Canada, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Panama, Brazil, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, and the Netherlands.

  Mr. Patterson has shared the chamber music stage with such distinguished artists as: Gil Shaham, Garrick Ohlsson, Cho-Liang Lin, Robert Chen, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, Paul Neubauer, Aaron Rosand, Menahem Pressler, Peter Wiley, Andre-Michel Schub, Bill Preucil, Ida Kavafian, Lynn Harrell, Arto Noras, Mark Johnson, Eugene Druckman, and Robert Vernon. Following his tenure with the MSQ, Patterson served as interim violist of the world-renowned Fine Arts Quartet. Education has been a major component of Patterson’s career.

  His faculty affiliations include: The Cleveland Institute of Music, Blossom School of Music, Kent State University, Hartt School of Music, Encore School for Strings, Eastern Music Festival, University of Charleston (W.V.), University of Denver, New World School of the Arts, Florida International University, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. Patterson currently lives in Miami, Florida.

•  Julian Schwarz has been heralded from a young age as a cellist destined to rank among the greatest of the 21st century, Julian’s powerful tone, effortless virtuosity, and extraordinarily large color palette are hallmarks of his style.

  After making his concerto debut at the age of 11 with the Seattle Symphony, he made his US touring debut with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2010. Since being awarded first prize at the inaugural Schoenfeld International String Competition in Hong Kong, he has led an active career as soloist, performing with the symphony orchestras of Annapolis, Arizona, Boise, Buffalo, Charlotte, Columbus, Delaware, Des Moines, Hartford, Jacksonville, Louisville, Memphis, Modesto, Omaha, Puerto Rico, Richmond, Rochester, San Antonio, San Jose, Sarasota, Syracuse, Toledo, Tucson, Virginia, West Virginia, Wichita, and Winston-Salem, among many others. Internationally, he made his Australian debut with the Queensland Symphony, his Mexican debuts with the Boca del Rio Philharmonic in Veracruz and the Mexico City Philharmonic with frequent collaborator Jorge Mester.

  As a chamber musician, Mr. Schwarz performs extensively in recital with pianist Marika Bournaki. In 2016 Schwarz & Bournaki were awarded first prize at the inaugural Boulder International Chamber Music Competition’s “The Art of Duo”, and subsequently embarked on an extensive 10-recital tour of China in March 2017. Mr. Schwarz is a founding member of the New York based touring ensemble “Frisson” and was recently appointed the newest core member of the Olmos Ensemble in San Antonio, TX. He is a member of the Palladium Chamber Players (St Petersburg FL), the Alaria Ensemble (New York NY), and has given over 100 performances at Brooklyn’s Bargemusic. He has appeared at the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, Josef Gingold Chamber Music Festival, Verbier Festival, and the Salzburg Mozarteum. In addition, he runs programming for the Tuesday evening chamber music series at the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, NC.

  Mr. Schwarz is deeply committed to the future of American music, and will present the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s first Cello Concertro with a large consortium of orchestras spring 2026. His championing the cello music of Arthur Foote will result in the first commercial recording of Foote’s Cello Concerto (1894) with the Buffalo Philharmonic, to be released on the Delos label. Past commissioning projects include concertos by Lowell Liebermann (recorded with the Annapolis Symphony for release in 2025), Richard Danielpour, and Samuel Jones (recorded with the All Star Orchestra for public television in 2012, subsequently released as a DVD on Naxos). Other premieres include recital works by Paul Frucht, Scott Ordway, Jonathan Cziner, Gavin Fraser, Alex Weiser, Ofer Ben-Amots, Michael Ippolito, chamber music by Adolphus Hailstork, Henri Lazarof, Jonathan Newman, Bright Sheng, and the US Premiere of Dobrinka Tabakova’s Cello Concerto. Of special note is Mr. Schwarz’s ongoing commitment to the music of Jewish experience, including projects with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (music of Joachim Stutschewsky and his circle), the Defiant Requiem Foundation (music of Holocaust composers and their influence) Central Synagogue (yearly feature on Jewish Broadcasting), the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music—for which he has recorded the complete cello/piano works of Ernest Bloch, and a new association with South Florida Public Broadcasting to raise awareness of the history of Jewish music.

  A devoted teacher, Mr. Schwarz serves as Associate Professor of Cello and String Area Coordinator at Shenandoah Conservatory of Shenandoah University (Winchester, VA), and on the artist faculty of NYU’s Steinhardt School of Music. In the summer, he teaches and performs at the Eastern Music Festival and the Josef Gingold Festival. In 2023, he was one of the first cellists to record pedagogical tutorials for the online teaching platform Tonebase, including comprehensive examinations of the Elgar Concerto, Piatti Caprices, tone production, and vocal elements in cello playing. As a writer, he has contributed frequently to Strings Magazine’s Artist Blog, has written learner’s guides for The Violin Channel, and has edited a series of Ernest Bloch editions with written prefaces for Carl Fischer Publishing. Past faculty appointments include artist-in-residence at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance (Nova Scotia, Canada) and faculty teaching assistant to Joel Krosnick at The Juilliard School.

  Born in Seattle, WA in 1991 to a multigenerational musical family, Mr. Schwarz studied at the Academy of Music Northwest and the Lakeside School. He continued to the Colburn School in Los Angeles under Ronald Leonard, and then moved to New York City to study with mentor Joel Krosnick at The Juilliard School (BM 14, MM 16). Other influential teachers include the late David Tonkonogui, the late Toby Saks, the late Lynn Harrell, Neal Cary, and chamber music mentors Andre Roy, Arnold Steinhardt, Jonathan Feldman, Toby Appel and Paul Coletti. Julian plays a Neapolitan cello made by Gennaro Gagliano in 1743 and American bows by Paul Martin Siefried. A Pirastro and Melos artist, he endorses and plays the “Perpetual” medium and edition sets of cello strings and Melos light rosin.