2026 Vivace International Music Festival Faculty

Eastman School of Music

Marina Lomazov

Vivace Co-Artistic Director

Eastman School of Music

Joseph Rackers

Vivace Co-Artistic Director

New England Conservatory

Julie Albers

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Edward Arron

CELLO FACULTY

Yale School of Music

Boris Berman

The Juilliard School

Tema Blackstone

Guest Artist

Michael Stephen Brown

Hailed by The New York Times as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers,” pianist-composer Michael Stephen Brown performs recitals and concertos worldwide and is commissioned by leading orchestras, soloists, and chamber music organizations. A 2026 Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award winner, 2025 MacDowell Fellow, and 2024 Yaddo Artist, his honors also include an Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. He has appeared as soloist with the Seattle, Phoenix, North Carolina, Albany, and Maryland Symphonies, as well as the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra, and has given recitals at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Louvre, Wigmore Hall, and Beethoven-Haus Bonn.

A frequent artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brown tours internationally with longtime duo partner Nicholas Canellakis and collaborates regularly with artists including Pinchas Zukerman and Arnaud Sussmann.Selected by András Schiff for an international recital tour, he also made acclaimed debuts at Zurich’s Tonhalle and New York’s 92nd Street Y.

As a composer, Brown’s latest composition, The Carnival of Endangered Wonders: A Zoological Fantasy, is a large-scale chamber work co-commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, CMS Palm Beach, La Musica (Sarasota), Music@Menlo, Friends of Music (Kansas City), and Premiere Performances of Hong Kong, which premiered in 2026. He recently served as Composer and Artist-in-Residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and is a recipient of the Copland House Residency Award.

A devoted educator, Brown gives masterclasses and lectures around the world, bringing students a perspective shaped equally by the concert stage and the composing desk. He earned dual degrees in piano and composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Jerome Lowenthal, Robert McDonald, and Samuel Adler and received the Petschek Piano Award.

Brown recently released Twelve Blocks, an album of original music written for friends and longtime collaborators. Upcoming recordings include the complete 13 Nocturnes of Gabriel Fauré and Mendelssohn+, a project pairing music of Felix Mendelssohn and Delphine von Schauroth. He lives in New York City with his two beloved 19th-century Steinways, Octavia and Daria, and is known to audiences for his colorful musical commentary and an unusually distinguished collection of socks.

Curtis Institute of Music

Nicholas Canellakis

Curtis Institute of Music & Manhattan School of Music

Michelle Cann

UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

Che-Yen Chen

The Juilliard School

Hung-Kuan Chen

Guest Artist

Stella Chen

Oberlin College & Conservatory

Angela Cheng

2021 Gramophone Artist of the Year

James Ehnes

VIOLIN FACULTY

San Francisco Conservatory of Music

Simon James

VIOLIN FACULTY

Eastman School of Music

Alexander Kobrin

Texas State University School of Music

Jason Kwak

Cleveland Institute of Music

Jaime Laredo

The Juilliard School

Jerome Lowenthal

Robert McDuffie Center for Strings

Amy Schwartz Moretti

CUNY Graduate Center & Mannes College of Music

Ursula Oppens

Private Studio

Gregg Pauley

Cleveland Institute of Music

Sharon Robinson

Peabody Conservatory

Boris Slutsky

UNC School of the Arts

Dmitri Vorobiev

String Faculty

Alexi Kenney

iolinist Alexi Kenney is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart. He is equally at home creating experimental programs, commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras around the world, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated artists of our time.

Alexi has appeared as soloist with orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Houston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, and l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. He has been featured in a play/lead role with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Lapland Chamber Orchestra, and New Century Chamber Orchestra, and has played recitals at Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Frick Collection, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 

A fierce advocate for new music and always searching for collaborations across art forms, Alexi will give the US premiere of Gabriella Smith’s violin concerto in 2027, as well as continuing to tour Shifting Ground, a recital program in collaboration with the new media artist Xuan, which weaves together pieces for violin and electronics by J.S. Bach, Rafiq Bhatia, Matthew Burtner, Mario Davidovsky, Salina Fisher, Nicola Matteis, Angélica Negrón, and Paul Wiancko. He also frequently explores his love for period instruments and playing, performing and recording the complete Schumann Violin Sonatas on gut strings with Amy Yang on fortepiano and appearing with Philharmonia Baroque.

Chamber music continues to be a major part of Alexi’s life, performing at festivals including Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, La Jolla, Ojai, Marlboro, Ravinia, Seattle, and Spoleto. He is a founding member of Owls—an inverted quartet hailed as a “dream group” by The New York Times—alongside violist Ayane Kozasa, cellist Gabriel Cabezas, and cellist-composer Paul Wiancko. Alexi is also an alum of the Bowers Program at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Born in Palo Alto, California, Alexi is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied with Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried. Previous mentors in the Bay Area include Wei He, Jenny Rudin, and Natasha Fong. The recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, as well as winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition, Alexi has been profiled by The New York Times and has written for The Strad. He plays a violin made in London by Stefan-Peter Greiner in 2009 and a bow made in Port Townsend, Washington by Charles Espey in 2024.

Outside of music, Alexi enjoys hojicha, modernist design and architecture, baking for friends, and walking for miles on end in whichever city he finds himself, listening to podcasts and Bach on repeat.