Shadow and Light: Piano Trios of Beethoven and Brahms

Piano trios of Beethoven and Brahms

with Mark Peskanov, Nicholas Tzavaras, and Rita Sloan

• Biographies
  • Mark Peskanov
  • A native of East Harlem in New York City, cellist Nicholas Tzavaras has toured the globe as a chamber musician, soloist, and educator for more than two decades. He has performed more than 1600 concerts worldwide, from Cartagena Columbia to the Tonhalle in Zurich to Nagasaki Japan.  Since 2000, Tzavaras has been the cellist of the internationally renowned Shanghai Quartet. Recent festival engagements have included the Brevard, La Jolla and Taos festivals, the Casals festival in Prades France, the Melbourne Music Festival in Australia and the Marlboro Festival.  Tzavaras has held the esteemed title of guest principal cellist of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra since 2009. He has recorded more than 25 albums for the Naxos, Delos, Bis, Centaur, Camerata, and New Albion labels, including the complete Beethoven string quartet cycle and Bright Sheng’s songs for pipa and cello with Wu Man.  Tzavaras can be seen in the Academy Award nominated documentary “Small Wonders,” the motion picture “Music of the Heart” and with the Shanghai Quartet in “Melinda Melinda.”

    Tzavaras began the violin at age 2 with his mother, Roberta Guaspari and moved to the cello when he was 7.  A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he went on to receive degrees from the New England Conservatory and the State University of New York at Stony Brook working exclusively with Laurence Lesser and Timothy Eddy. From 2002 to 2021, Tzavaras was the coordinator of the String Department and Artist-in-Residence at Montclair State University’s John J. Cali School of Music.  In addition, he was on the cello and chamber music faculty at the Longy School of Music in Boston from 2015 to 2020.

  • Rita Sloan is acknowledged internationally as a leading teacher of piano, collaborative piano and chamber music. In 1999, she was appointed a piano faculty member and director of the collaborative piano program at the University of Maryland. As an Artist Faculty Member at the Aspen Music Festival, Ms. Sloan founded their Collaborative Piano Program. She has performed as soloist with both the Aspen Festival Orchestra and Chamber Symphony as well as in chamber music with many of Aspen’s distinguished guest artists including pianists Wu Han and Orli Shaham, violinists Sarah Chang and Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg, cellist Gary Hoffman, bassist Edgar Meyer and  flutist Emmanuel Pahud. Teaching residencies and master class presentations have included Tainan National University of the Arts and National Normal University in Taiwan, China Conservatory in Beijing, China, leading universities in Seoul, Korea, London’s Royal College of Music, American universities and conservatories including numerous visits to the Juilliard School in New York. Ms. Sloan has performed with orchestra, in recital, and in chamber music throughout the U.S., Europe, South America and Japan. She has been a guest in many chamber music venues and has performed with members of the Emerson and Guarneri String Quartets. Born in Russia to Polish parents, Ms. Sloan graduated from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Martin Canin and Rosina Lhévinne. Further studies were with Leon Fleisher, Aube Tzerko, Herbert Stessin and Vladimir Ashkenazy.