Good Friends, Great Music! A Piano Quartet Concert

HELEN KIM, VIOLIN
Violinist Helen Kim enjoys a versatile career as performer and teacher. She is currently the Associate Principal Second Violin with the San Francisco Symphony. From 2011 to 2016, she was a member of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, making solo appearances in both the 2013 and 2014 seasons. Ms. Kim received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California and her master’s degree from the Yale School of Music. She has spent her summers teaching and performing at festivals including Aspen Music Festival and School, Yellow Barn Festival, Luzerne Music Festival, and the Innsbrook Institute . In her free time, she enjoys cooking, reading, and exploring the many outdoor activities the Bay Area has to offer.

CHRISTINE GROSSMAN, VIOLA
Born to a musical family and raised in New York City, Christine Grossman began playing the violin at the age of five, piano at the age of ten, and viola at sixteen. She received both her Bachelors and Masters degrees in viola performance from the Juilliard School where she studied with Heidi Castleman, Misha Amory, and Hsin-Yun Huang. Past teachers also include Roberto Diaz, Karen Ritscher, Patti Kopec, Isaac Malkin, and Dorothy Roffman.

Before moving to Kansas City, Ms. Grossman previously held positions with the Pacific Symphony, Delaware Symphony, and was a member of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, FL. An avid chamber musician, Ms. Grossman was formerly in the California Quartet, based in San Diego. Other performances and festival appearances include Portland Chamber Music Festival (ME), Laguna Beach Music Festival (CA), Great Lakes Music Festival (MI), Festival Mozaic (CA), Emerald City Music Festival (WA), and Missouri River Festival of the Arts in Boonville, MO. Ms. Grossman has served as the Principal Violist with the Kansas City Symphony since 2008. She has enjoyed several solo appearances with the orchestra, including Berlioz’ Harold in Italy, an arrangement of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody featuring solo viola as Freddie Mercury, and most recently, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante.

Ms. Grossman teaches viola and violin privately, and in January 2018, was featured as an “Artist to Watch” in KC Studio Magazine.

SUSIE YANG, CELLO
Susie Yang made her solo debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of 11. The performance was broadcast on PBS in Chicago and the classical radio station, 98.7 FM. She has appeared as a soloist with many other orchestras in the greater Chicago area as well, such as the Midwest Young Artists Orchestra, Highland Park Strings, Fox Valley Symphony, and the Skokie Valley Symphony.

As an avid chamber musician, she won a top prize in the Senior Division of the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and has participated in the Juilliard Quartet Seminar and the Beethoven Intensive Quartet Seminar at the New England Conservatory of Music. She has collaborated with many of the top chamber musicians in the world, such as Donald Weilerstein, Roger Tapping, the Borromeo Quartet, and the Peabody Trio.

Susie was also a fellow of the New World Symphony and was a rotating principal under music director, Michael Tilson Thomas. After winning the concerto competition, she performed the Dvořák Cello Concerto with the New World Symphony in 2007. In April 2016, she performed the same concerto as a classical subscription soloist with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.
Susie has performed as a soloist, orchestral, and chamber musician at many music festivals,including Sarasota, Schleswig-Holstein, Music Academy of the West, Spoleto Italy and USA, Taos, Yellow Barn, Britt Festival, Artosphere, Crested Butte and Festival Mozaic.
Originally from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Susie holds degrees and numerous scholarship awards from The Juilliard School and New England Conservatory of Music, studying with Andre Emelianoff and Laurence Lesser.

Susie moved to Kansas City in the Spring of 2010 to join the Kansas City Symphony as Associate Principal Cello. She holds a private studio of cello students that she loves to teach and is on the faculty of Heartland Chamber Music Festival. She has soloed with the Kansas City Symphony, as well as the Northland Symphony and Heritage Philharmonic. She enjoys cooking, tennis, meditating, and eating good food around Kansas City.

TANYA GABRIELIAN, PIANO

Hailed by the London Times as “a pianist of powerful physical and imaginative muscle,” Tanya Gabrielian has captivated audiences worldwide with her gripping performances. She has performed on four continents in acclaimed venues including Carnegie Hall in New York, Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Sydney Opera House, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, and the Salle Cortot in Paris, with such orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, New London Sinfonia, and the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra.

Tanya shot onto the international stage at the age of twenty with back-to-back victories in the Scottish International Piano Competition and Aram Khachaturyan International Piano Competition. Since then, performance engagements have included Alice Tully Hall and the 92nd Street Y in New York, Dame Myra Hess Concert Series in Chicago, Edinburgh International Festival, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, and a return recital engagement at Wigmore Hall in London. Tanya’s Southbank debut recital in the Purcell Room in London, presented by the Philharmonia Orchestra, was chosen as “Performance of the Year” by Seen and Heard International. She has also been featured on the cover of the magazine Clavier.

In addition to the traditional concert stage, Tanya is passionate about inspiring new generations of musicians and music lovers in diverse settings, dedicated to community engagement, education, and activism through art. Projects have included collaborations with the National Alliance on Mental Illness in programs featuring composers with mental illnesses, highlighting the stigma around mental health issues; founding an interactive performance series for patients at the New York State Psychiatric Institute; an installation with the artist Fran Bull for the exhibit In Flanders Fields: A Meditation on War; and a multidisciplinary collaboration combining Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross with final statements from executed death row inmates. For her work, Tanya was awarded the Pro Musicis International Award, McGraw-Hill Robert Sherman Award for Music Education and Community Outreach, Salon de Virtuosi Career Grant, and the S&R Washington Award, and she has held Artist-in-Residencies at Guild Hall and 23Arts.

Tanya’s interests have always been diverse. Admitted to Harvard University to study biomedical engineering at the age of sixteen, Tanya instead pursued a career in music, completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the Royal Academy of Music in London, originally studying both piano and viola. She received the prize for the best final recital for all six years of study and received a DipRAM, the highest performance award given by the Royal Academy of Music. Tanya then finished her studies at The Juilliard School as the only candidate accepted for the prestigious Artist Diploma, an extraordinarily selective post-graduate residency program. She has studied with Matti Raekallio, Ursula Oppens, Robert McDonald, Hamish Milne, and Alexander Satz. Tanya is an Assistant Professor of Piano at Boston University and a Shigeru Kawai Recording