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