MUSICIANS
Katherine Collier, piano and music director
Katherine Collier has had a distinguished and versatile career as a soloist, chamber music artist, and accompanist. After her early training in Texas, she studied piano with Cecile Genhart and accompanying with Brooks Smith. She was awarded unanimously the Performer’s Certificate at Eastman. Professor Collier was the first prize winner of the National Young Artist’s Competition and the Cliburn Scholarship Competition and was the recipient of a Rockefeller Award. She won a Kemper Educational Grant to study at
the Royal College of Music in London, England. Collier has been asoloist with orchestras in Cincinnati, Dallas, Eastman-Rochester, and Houston, and is an active collaborator with many renowned musicians including Joshua Bell, Hilary Hahn, Ani Kavafian, Cho-Liang Lin, Andres Cardenes, Erling Bengtsson, David Shifrin, and members of the Tokyo, Emerson, Cleveland, Orion, Vermeer, Miami, Shanghai, and Ying Quartets.
She has performed around the world and appeared at recital halls in Europe such as Wigmore Hall and the Purcell Room (Southbank) in London, the Concertgebouw, the Brahms-Saal, and the Konzertsaal der Staatlichen Hochschule für Musik. She has presented concerts at Merkin Hall, the Phillips Collection, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, and the Y Music Society in Pittsburgh. She performs at the Aspen Music Festival, Interlochen, Meadowmount, and Skaneateles. As an accompanist, Ms. Collier worked in the studios of Dorothy Delay at Aspen and Nathan Milstein and the BBC in London.
Collier tours extensively with her husband, violist Yizhak Schotten. They are founders and music directors of the Maui Classical Music Festival in Hawaii and music directors of the Strings in the Mountains Festival in Steamboat Springs. Ms. Collier appears with her husband on four compact discs on Crystal Records and has recorded with other artists on the Pandora, Pearl, Crystal, and Centaur labels. Ms. Collier previously taught at the universities of Washington, Northern Kentucky, and Wyoming.
Yizhak Schotten, viola and music director
Yizhak Schotten (viola) was brought to the United States by the renowned violist William Primrose, with whom he studied at Indiana University and the University of Southern California. Other studies were with Lillian Fuchs at the Manhattan School of Music. Schotten has concertized in his native Israel, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Holland, Austria, Mexico, England, Canada, and throughout the United States. His solo appearances with orchestras
in this country and abroad have included performances with conductors Seiji Ozawa, Thomas Schippers, Sergiu Commissiona, Joseph Swensen, Arthur Fiedler, and others. His solo recitals have included Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Merkin Hall in New York, Boston’s Jordan Hall, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. He has also had numerous broadcasts on National Public Radio.
As a member of the Trio d’Accordo, Schotten won the Concert Artists Guild International Competition in New York. He regularly collaborates with renowned musicians and has appeared in concerts at Bargemusic in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Boston’s Symphony Hall, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Abroad he has performed at the Taipei Philharmonic Festival in Taiwan, the Festival Internacional de Musica Clasica in Mexico, the Amsterdam Kamermuziek Festival, the Festival de Musique de Chambre de Montreal, and at Domaine Forget in Quebec.
Formerly a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Schotten has been principal violist of the Cincinnati and Houston symphony orchestras. He was the artistic director of the XIV International Viola Congress and has been a featured artist at six other International Congresses. In 1997, he represented the U.S. as a judge and performer at the Tertis International Viola Competition in England. He has recorded seven discs for Crystal Records and his C.R.I. recording was chosen as “Critics’ Choice” for three months in HIGH FIDELITY Magazine. Pearl Records included his playing on its anthology, History of the Recording of the World’s Finest Violists.
Schotten has been on the faculties and performed at the Aspen Music Festival, Banff, Meadowmount, Interlochen, Tanglewood, Chamber Music Northwest, Montreal, Chautauqua, Skaneateles, Montecito, Juneau, and Fairbanks Festivals. He is also music director of the Maui Classical Music Festival in Hawaii and was director of Strings Music Festival in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and SpringFest in Ann Arbor.
Schotten was also on the American Federation of Musician’s Congress of Strings faculty. He is very active giving master classes in the U.S. and throughout the world. He has given classes in England at the Tertis International Viola Competition at the Isle of Man, the Menuhin School in Surrey, and the Guildhall School of Music, Royal College of Music, and the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has also given master classes in Spain at the Conservatrio Superior de Musica, Oviedo; in Israel at the Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem Academies of Music; in Australia at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; in Canada at the Banff School of Music, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the Glenn Gould School, and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto; in Korea at the College of Music at Seoul National University; and in Taiwan at the Hsing Tien Kong Culture Foundation in Taipei. He has also been on the faculties of Rice University and the University of Washington.
Rohan De Silva, piano
Pianist Rohan De Silva was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
His partnerships with violin virtuosos Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Cho-Liang Lin, Midori, Joshua Bell, Benny Kim, Kyoko Takezawa, Vadim Repin, Gil Shaham, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Julian Rachlin, James Ehnes and Rodney Friend have led to highly acclaimed performances at recital venues all over the world. With these and other artists he has performed on the stages of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, Philadelphia Academy of Music, Ambassador Theater in Los Angeles, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Wigmore Hall in London, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, La Scala in Milan and in Tel-Aviv, Israel. Mr. De Silva’s festival appearances include Aspen, Ravinia, Interlochen, Seattle Chamber Music, Manchester, Schleswig-Holstein, Pacific Music Festival and the Wellington Arts Festival in New Zealand. He has performed chamber music in Beijing with the American String Quartet and has appeared in recital worldwide with Itzhak Perlman.
Alongside Mr. Perlman, Mr. De Silva has performed multiple times at the White House, most recently in 2012 at the invitation of President Barack Obama and Mrs. Obama for Israeli President and Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Shimon Peres; and at a State Dinner in 2007, hosted by President George W. Bush and Mrs. Bush for Her Majesty The Queen and His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh. A native of Sri Lanka, Mr. De Silva was invited in 2015 by the Prime Minister of his country to perform at a luncheon for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on his historic visit to Sri Lanka.
In recent seasons, Mr. De Silva has toured with Mr. Perlman in sold-out concerts throughout Asia and to Europe in their first appearances as a duo in London (Barbican Centre), Paris (Philharmonie de Paris) and Munich (Gasteig). In North America, he has performed with Mr. Perlman at notable venues including Los Angeles’ Disney Hall, San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, Chicago’s Lyric Opera, West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center and Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center, to name a few. Over the summer, at the invitation of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mr. De Silva performed for an exclusive guest list at the Supreme Court with Mr. Perlman in Washington D.C. Mr. De Silva also performed at Center Stage for Strings in Michigan, Innsbrook Institute in Missouri and Maui Music Festival in Hawaii.
Mr. De Silva began his piano studies with his mother, the late Primrose De Silva, and with the late Mary Billimoria. He spent six years at the Royal Academy of Music in London as a student of Hamish Milne, Sydney Griller and Wilfred Parry. While in London, he received many awards including the Grover Bennett Scholarship, the Christian Carpenter Prize, the Martin Music Scholarship, the Harold Craxton Award for advanced study in England, and, upon his graduation, the Chappell Gold Medal for best overall performance at the Royal Academy. Mr. De Silva was the first recipient of a special Scholarship in the arts from the President’s Fund of Sri Lanka. This enabled him to enter the Juilliard School, where he received both his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees, studying piano with Martin Canin, chamber music with Felix Galimir, and working closely with violin pedagogue Dorothy DeLay. He was awarded a special prize as Best Accompanist at the 1990 Ninth International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and received the Samuel Sanders Collaborative Artist Award as presented to him by Itzhak Perlman at the 2005 Classical Recording Foundation Awards Ceremony at Carnegie Hall.
Mr. De Silva joined the collaborative arts and chamber music faculty of the Juilliard School in 1991, and in 1992 was awarded honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music. In 2015, he was awarded the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music. In 2001, he joined the faculty at the Ishikawa Music Academy in Japan, where he gives masterclasses in collaborative piano. Mr. De Silva additionally has served as a faculty member at the Great Wall International Music Academy in Beijing, China, and at the International String Academy in Cambridge, U.K. since 2011. He was on the faculty of the Perlman Music Program from 2000 to 2007. Radio and television credits include PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center and the Colbert Report with Itzhak Perlman, The Tonight Show with Midori, CNN’s “Showbiz Today”, NHK Television in Japan, National Public Radio, WQXR and WNYC in New York, Berlin Radio, and the 2000 Millennium Grammy Awards. Mr. De Silva has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Universal, CBS/SONY Classical, Collins Classics in London and RCA Victor.
Amir Eldan, cello
Amir Eldan performs as a soloist, chamber musician, and as guest principal cellist. In 2011-12, he served as principal cellist of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra by invitation from Zubin Mehta and a year later, as guest principal cellist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. At age 22, he became the youngest member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York, when he won the position of associate principal cellist and was invited by James Levine to perform with the MET Chamber Ensemble in Carnegie Hall. As the winner of the Juilliard Competition, Eldan made his New York debut with the Brahms Double Concerto in Lincoln Center and has performed the six Bach Cello Suites in a series of concerts worldwide.
Eldan has collaborated in chamber music performances with members of the Cleveland, Guarneri, and Juilliard String Quartets and the Beaux Arts Trio, pianist Richard Goode, and cellists Lynn Harrell and Steven Isserlis.
Music festivals appearances include Bowdoin, Giverny (France), La Jolla (California), Pilsen (Czech Republic), Prussia Cove (England), and West Cork (Ireland). He also participated in the Marlboro music festival and toured with Musicians From Marlboro.
In 2006, while working on his doctorate, Eldan was appointed cello professor at the Oberlin Conservatory and served as chair of the String Department from 2015-19. He was a member of the Oberlin Trio and performed with the Trio throughout the U.S. and South Korea.
Professor Eldan holds a DMA and MM, both from Juilliard where he also served as a guest teacher. His performances have been featured on public television and radio in the U.S., Europe, and in Israel.
He was appointed a professor of cello at the University of Michigan in 2019.