Robert Crawford Lipsett Jr. (born October 23, 1947) is an American violin teacher in Los Angeles, California. He holds the Jascha Heifetz Distinguished Violin Chair at the Colburn School. He also serves on the faculty at the Aspen School of Music and previously taught at the USC Thornton School of Music. He has given master classes at major schools around the world.
Lipsett was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He has a younger brother named Stephen James Lipsett, a successful real estate investor/broker living on Lake Granbury, Texas. As a child, he moved with his family to Dallas, Texas, where he began violin study with Zelman Brounoff and Ruth Lasley. The family subsequently lived in Saint Louis, Missouri, where Lipsett's violin instructor was Melvin Ritter. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music and later studied with Ivan Galamian at The Juilliard School [1] and with Endre Granat. He also earned a B.A. in Music from California State University, Northridge. [2]
Lipsett's students have consistently won top prizes at important competitions including the International Tchaikovsky Competition, Queen Elisabeth Competition, International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition, International Joseph Joachim Violin Competition, Irving M. Klein International Competition, and several have received highest honors from the National Association for the Advancement of the Arts, and been recognized as Presidential Scholars. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Teachers Award from the White House Commission for Presidential Scholars. He is also a freelance commercial musician in motion pictures, television and the recording industry.
Robert Nathaniel Mann was a violinist, composer, conductor, and founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet, as well as a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. Mann, the first violinist at Juilliard, served on the school's string quartet for over fifty years until his retirement in 1997.
Robert Chen is a Taiwan-born violinist who is the Concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He received Bachelor's and Master's of Music degrees from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki.
Paul Kantor is an American violin teacher. Kantor is a professor at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. He continues the pedagogical lineage of Dorothy DeLay. He is often selected to participate as a jury member for international violin competitions.
The Clinton String Quartet is a string quartet based in the Syracuse, New York area. Active for over 15 years, their most prominent works have been the debuts of many 20th century classical recordings with the Syracuse Society for New Music. All four members are also members of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra.
Glenn Dicterow is an American violinist and former concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He is on the faculty of the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music where he holds the Jascha Heifetz Chair in violin as well as serving as a faculty artist at the Music Academy of the West.
Ralph Henry Kirshbaum is an American cellist. His award-winning career combines the worlds of solo performance, chamber music, recording and pedagogy.
Eleonore Schoenfeld was an American musician, considered one of the most influential cellists of the 20th century.
Frank Xin Huang is a Chinese-born American violinist and teacher. Since 2015 he has been the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Previous to his position in New York, Huang was the first violinist of the Ying Quartet and a professor of violin and chamber music at the Eastman School of Music, then served as the concertmaster of the Houston Symphony from 2010 to 2015. He has won several international music competitions, most notably the 2003 Naumburg Competition. Huang has concertized widely as a soloist, and his debut recording on Naxos was critically acclaimed.
Ronald Leonard is an American cellist. He has had a distinguished career as a soloist, chamber musician, principal cellist and teacher. He is currently on the faculties of the USC Thornton School of Music and the Colburn School. He was a winner of the Walter Naumburg Competition while a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Leonard Rose and Orlando Cole.
Sidney Harth was an American violinist and conductor.
Lynn Chang, born 1953, is a Chinese-American violinist known for his work as both a soloist and a chamber musician.
Andor John Toth was an American classical violinist, conductor and educator with a musical career spanning over six decades. Toth played his violin on the World War II battlefields of Aachen, Germany; performed with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini in 1943 at age 18; and formed several chamber music ensembles, including the Oberlin String Quartet, the New Hungarian Quartet, and the Stanford String Quartet. For 15 years he was the violinist in the Alma Trio. Toth conducted orchestras in Cleveland, Denver and Houston. In 1969, he was the founding concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Neville Marriner. Toth taught at five important colleges and universities, and recorded for Vox, Decca Records and Eclectra Records.
Sheila Browne is an American-Irish concert violist from Gladwyne, Pennsylvania with dual citizenship. She is a concert and recording artist and Associate Professor at the University of Delaware. For ten years she was on faculty and Associate Professor of Viola at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Named the William Primrose Recitalist of 2016 in conjunction with the Primrose International Viola Archive (PIVA), Ms. Browne has played solo, concerto and chamber music concerts and has played principal of orchestras on six continents, performing in major venues in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. She is in the Fire Pink Trio and principal of the New York Women's Philharmonic, making her Carnegie- Stern Hall concerto debut in 2011. Browne is the Director and faculty member of the January Karen Tuttle Viola Workshop, founder in 2015 and faculty member of the first European Karen Tuttle Viola Workshop at NYU- Prague 2016, and has served on the Executive Board of the American Viola Society Ms. Browne was the violist of the Gotham, Arianna, Pelligrini and Serafin string quartets. She has served on the faculties of Duke and New York universities, University of Missouri- St. Louis and of Tennessee- Knoxville, and Juilliard's Music Advancement Program.
Kevin R. McMahon is an American, orchestra/opera conductor, composer/orchestrator/arranger, clinician/adjudicator, and violinist.
Joseph Lin is a Taiwanese-American violinist. From 2011 to 2018, he was the first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet. Currently, he is on the violin and chamber music faculty of the Juilliard School in New York City.
John Harding Hon DMus is an internationally renowned violinist. He has travelled the world as a soloist, teacher, concertmaster, chamber musician, conductor and recording artist.
Dennis Kim is a Canadian violinist born in Seoul, South Korea. He currently serves as the Concertmaster of the Pacific Symphony in Orange County.
Noah Bendix-Balgley is an American classical violinist. He is currently First Concertmaster with the Berliner Philharmoniker. He served as concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra from 2011 to 2014.
Rafael Druian, was an American violinist, conductor and music educator. He is remembered for his tenures as concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony and Minneapolis Symphony under Antal Dorati, the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez.
William Preucil is an American violinist. During a musical career spanning several decades, he served as concertmaster for four major American orchestras, most notably the Cleveland Orchestra from 1995, until he was dismissed in 2018. He also played with the Cleveland Quartet, which won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance in 1997. He was a longtime member of the faculty at Cleveland Institute of Music until his resignation in 2018, following allegations of sexual misconduct.