CLAUDIA CHUDACOFF, VIOLIN

Claudia Chudacoff is the former concertmaster of the U.S. Marine Band’s White House Chamber Orchestra. Following her military retirement in 2015, she joined the National Symphony Orchestra as a full-time violin section member for three years. Since then, she has continued her work as concertmaster of the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra and the National Gallery Orchestra and has also added responsibilities as concertmaster of the Wolf Trap Opera Orchestra and the Apollo Orchestra.

Ms. Chudacoff is a member of both the Sunrise Quartet and the National Gallery Quartet, and has performed regularly on several area chamber series, including the Embassy Series, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, National Musical Arts, the Contemporary Music Forum, and with the Fessenden Ensemble.

Ms. Chudacoff helped to found the College Park Youth Orchestra in 2006 and is the director of its Chamber Ensemble. She also coaches chamber music for the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestra program, the NSO’s Youth Fellowship Program and the Summer Music Institute at the Kennedy Center.

Ms. Chudacoff has served on the faculty of the University of Louisville, Indiana University (Southeast Campus), the DC Youth Orchestra Program and the Northern Virginia Youth Symphony Association. She was also a teaching assistant to Sylvia Rosenberg while at the Eastman School of Music, where she earned both her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees. Her primary teachers were Michael Avsharian in Ann Arbor, and Sylvia Rosenberg and Zvi Zeitlin at Eastman.

BRIAN GANZ, PIANIST

Brian Ganz is widely regarded as one of the leading pianists of his generation. A laureate of the Marguerite Long Jacques Thibaud and the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium International Piano Competitions, Mr. Ganz has appeared as a soloist with such orchestras as the St. Louis Symphony, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Baltimore Symphony, the National Philharmonic, the National Symphony, and the City of London Sinfonia, and has performed with such conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop, Mstislav Rostropovich, Piotr Gajewski, and Yoel Levi.

The Washington Post has written: “One comes away from a recital by pianist Brian Ganz not only exhilarated by the power of the performance but also moved by his search for artistic truth.” For many years Mr. Ganz has made it his mission to join vivid music making with warmth and intimacy onstage to produce a new kind of listening experience, in which great works come to life with authentic emotional power. As one of Belgium's leading newspapers, La Libre Belgique, put it, "We don't have the words to speak of this fabulous musician who lives music with a generous urgency and brings his public into a state of intense joy."

In January of 2011, Mr. Ganz began a multi-year project in partnership with the National Philharmonic in which he will perform the complete works of Frédéric Chopin at the Music Center at Strathmore. After the inaugural recital, The Washington Post wrote: "Brian Ganz was masterly in his first installment of the complete works [of Chopin]." The next recital in the series will take place on February 26, 2022.

Mr. Ganz is on the piano faculty of St. Mary's College of Maryland, where he is an artist-in-residence and is also a member of the piano faculty of the Peabody Conservatory. He is the artist-editor of the Schirmer Performance Edition of Chopin’s Preludes (2005). Recent performance highlights include Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto with the Waco Symphony Orchestra and Chopin's 2nd Piano Concerto at the Alba Music Festival in Italy and with the National Philharmonic at Strathmore.

Fotina Naumenko

Fotina Naumenko, soprano, has been praised for her “radiant voice” (Boston Globe), described as both “angelic” (MusicWeb International) and “capable of spectacular virtuosic hi-jinks” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). Fotina’s singing encompasses a wide variety of vocal genres including art song, oratorio, opera, choral and new music, both as a soloist and ensemble singer.

Festival appearances have included the Ravinia Festival (Considering Matthew Shepard), the Constella Festival (From Russia with Love), the St. Olav Festival in Trondheim, Norway (Kim Arnesen’s Wound in the Water) and the Tanglewood Music Festival (Soprano Fellow). Her performances of David Lang’s just and Castiglioni’s Cantus Planus at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music were hailed as “a beautiful performance” by the New York Times and “a stunner” by the Boston Globe. Recent oratorio solos have included the world premiere of Arvo Pärt’s O Holy Saint Nicholas (Artefact), Rachmaninoff’s Liturgy (Cathedral Choral Society), J.S. Bach’s Ascension Oratorio and B Minor Mass (Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and Vocal Arts Ensemble), Chesnokov’s My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord (Cappella Romana), Orff’s Carmina Burana (American University Chorus), Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor and Handel’s Messiah (Winchester Arts Chorale). Fotina was a featured soloist with the Boston Pops for the symphonic premiere of Sondheim on Sondheim, a Sondheim musical revue curated by James Lapine.

Ensemble credits include Grammy® award-winning Conspirare, Grammy® award-winning Experiential Chorus, Grammy® nominated groups Skylark, Clarion, the Saint Tikhon Choir, and PaTRAM, as well as Cappella Romana, Coro Volante, Alium Spiritum, The Thirteen, and the Cincinnati Vocal Arts Ensemble, among others. Fotina has recorded with these groups on the Reference Recordings, Chandos, Delos, Ablaze Records, Naxos and Cincinnati Fanfare labels.

Fotina is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music (BM), the Cincinnati College-Conservatory (MM, DMA), and is a Fulbright scholar, having completed a post-graduate diploma specializing in Russian vocal music at the Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory in St. Petersburg, Russia. The culmination of this work was the creation of www.RussianAriaResource.com, a lyric diction resource for Russian operatic arias. She is passionate about training and mentoring the next generation of singers and serves as Associate Professor of Voice at Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, VA.