Musicians

Born in St. Louis, Nancy Bracken studied under Ivan Galamian at the Curtis Institute of Music and later with Donald Weilerstein of the Cleveland Quartet at the University of Buffalo and the Eastman School of Music. She was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra for two years before joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1979. Ms. Bracken was concertmaster and a soloist with Colorado Philharmonic for two summers and played first violin at the Aspen and Grand Teton summer festivals. A member of the Cambridge String Quartet, she is the winner of several national awards. She has played recitals and chamber music concerts at the Gardner Museum, Harvard University, Clark Art Institute and the Berkshire Museum.

Rachel Goodwin has been the Artistic Director of AHCM since its founding in 1985. She is a performer, a teacher, and a resident of Ashmont Hill who is committed to the community’s cultural growth. She has appeared in solo recitals and as a chamber musician throughout the eastern United States and California, including at the Mannes College of Music, New England Conservatory, the Gardner and DeCordova Museums, Harvard University, Longy School of Music, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of California at Riverside, WGBH radio, Boston’s First Night Celebration, and as a concerto soloist with the Brookline Symphony Orchestra. She has participated in summer music festivals at Ernen Musikdorf (Switzerland), Aspen, the Banff Centre (Canada), and New College (Florida). Ms. Goodwin holds a Diploma in Piano Performance from the Mannes College of Music in New York and an M.M. (with honors) from the New England Conservatory. Her piano teachers include Edith Oppens, Barbara Shearer and Alexander Lieberman, and she has performed in master classes for Karl Ulrich Schnabel and Gyorgy Sebok. Active as a music theorist as well as a performer, Ms. Goodwin presented a lecture-recital on Bartok that was the featured event at a joint meeting of two music theory societies. In 2002, Rachel Goodwin was named by the Boston Cultural Council as an Artist/Humanist Fellow in the City of Boston. Artist/Humanist Fellows are chosen because of the quality of their creative work, their dedication over time, their community building efforts, and their outreach to the public at large. An experienced and dedicated teacher, Ms. Goodwin maintains a private studio on Ashmont Hill where she teaches a diverse group of students including middle and high school students, advanced amateur adults as well as both adult and children beginners. She coaches chamber music at New England Conservatory Preparatory School and this past year gave a lecture for Longy's Piano Pedagogy class on the integration of music theory into piano teaching. She became a member of the Board of the New England Piano Teacher's Association in 2007.

Michelle LaCourse, violist, has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States and Europe. Her playing has been described by critics in such terms as “a miraculous blend of intense passion and artistic elegance.” An enthusiastic advocate for new viola repertoire, she has also commissioned and premiered several new pieces for the instrument. She was formerly a member of the Lehigh Quartet, the Delphic String Trio and the Aeolian Trio, and has performed at numerous music festivals such as Aspen, Eastern, Interlochen, Skaneateles, Musicorda, and the Heifetz Institute. She has also performed at some of the world’s leading concert venues, such as Vienna’s Musikverein, Berlin’s Kammermusiksaal and Washington’s Kennedy Center. As an orchestral musician, she has performed with the Baltimore Symphony, and was formerly principal violist of the Chamber Orchestra of Grenoble France. LaCourse holds degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where she studied with, and was teaching assistant to renowned pedagogue Karen Tuttle. She also studied with David Holland at the Interlochen Arts Academy and Robert Swan at Northwestern University. She has given master classes at music schools across the country, and currently teaches viola at Boston University, where she is also Chair of the String Department. During the summer of 2007, she will teach and perform at the Karen Tuttle Viola Workshop, BU’s Tanglewood Institute, and the International Festival of Campos do Jordão, Brazil.

Matthias Naegele has performed extensively as soloist and chamber musician in Europe, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Asia. He has participated in music festivals at Marlboro, Apple Hill, Dubrovnik, Jerusalem, Curacaos, Aspen, Prussia Cove, and Edinburgh. Many of his performances are regularly broadcast over National Public Radio and Public Television, and he has also appeared on Dutch, French, Austrian, and British radio and television. Mr. Naegele performs regularly with numerous chamber music ensembles, including the Kaleidos Ensemble, the Prometheus piano quartet, The Music Project, The Chamber Music Society of N.Y., Anthony Newman’s Brandenburg Collegium, The Chamber Music Society of New Jersey, Sergio Luca’s Context, the twentieth century music ensemble Möbius in residence at Columbia University, An Die Musik, and the microtonal group New Band. Mr. Naegele has recorded with the New Jersey Chamber Music Society for Koch International. In 1995, he recorded with Dawn Upshaw for Nonesuch. With his father, violinist Philipp Naegele, he has recorded for Musical Heritage and Beyer Records. Matthias plays on a Mateo Gofriller made in Venice in 1735. This cello was previously owned by Hermann Busch of the Busch Quartet.

Henry Shapiro has participated in both the Marlboro and Aspen Music Festivals and appears regularly as a soloist and chamber musician in the U.S. and Europe. In recent seasons, he has performed at the Mendocino (CA) Music Festival. He has taught chamber music at The State University of New York. Mr. Shapiro holds a PhD from Columbia University. His piano teachers include Claude Frank, Edith Oppens, and Leonie Gombrich, with whom he studied as a Fulbright Scholar. For the past six summers he has served as coach for the Quartet Program at Bucknell University. Mr. Shapiro writes fiction and has published a short study of the choreography of Balanchine. He teaches in the department of Writing, Literature and the Arts at Eugene Lang College of theNew School University in New York City.

Cellist Brian Snow is active as a chamber musician, recitalist, soloist, and orchestral musician. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with such artists as Ricardo Morales, Christina Dahl, David Jolley, and the Emerson String Quartet, and has appeared on concert series including Bay Chamber Concerts (Rockport, me), Plymouth Music Festival, and Longy’s “Sundays at Seven” series. Formerly a member of the Diabelli String Quartet, Brian appeared on broadcasts of wgbh Boston and cbc/Radio Canada, and was a finalist in the Banff String Quartet Competition. He holds a Master’s degree from Yale School of Music, where he studied with Aldo Parisot, and is featured on The Yale Cellos’ recent cd release “Cello-Celli” on Naxos. Mr. Snow is pursuing a Doctoral degree at suny Stony Brook, where he studies with British cellist Colin Carr. He studied at Hartt with David Finckel, and at Longy with Terry King. As a soloist, he has performed with the Crescent City Symphony of New Orleans, the Hartt Symphony, and the Longy Chamber Orchestra. He won first prize in the Paranov competition and in the Longy Concerto Soloists competition, and was also a winner of the Emerson String Quartet competition. He has studied chamber music with members of the Emerson, Guarneri, Juilliard, and Tokyo Quartets, as well as with pianists Peter Frankl, Claude Frank, Boris Berman, and Gilbert Kalish. A passionate advocate of new music, Brian has appeared regularly with many contemporary ensembles and has premiered numerous pieces by composers such as Shinuh Lee, Richard Wernick, and Marcus Pous. He is a member of the New Haven Symphony and Orchestra New England, and was principal cellist of the Waterbury Symphony from 2000-2005. He was a fellow the Aspen Music Festival and participated in the Taos, Round Top, and Orford festivals, as well as the American-Russian Youth Orchestra Tour. Brian is a native of Dallas, Texas, and plays on a cello by David Caron of Taos, NM.

Masako Yanagita began her violin studies in Tokyo at the age of six with Eijin Tanaka, continuing with Louis Graeler of the Kroll Quartet. In 1966, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and a J.D. Rockefeller III grant, enabling her to study in the United States with William Kroll at the Mannes College of Music. During her first summer in the U.S., she was presented with the Silverstein Prize as leading violinist at Tanglewood, while studying on a scholarship given by Jascha Heifetz. She subsequently won top honors in several international competitions including the Paganini, Carl Flesch and Munich International. Ms. Yanagita has had an extensive solo career and has performed at numerous music festivals including Mostly Mozart, Mohawk Trail Concerts, Caramoor, Madeira and Newport. She is a member of the faculties of Mannes College of Music, Greenwood Chamber Music Camp, and the Chamber Music Conference at Bennington College (VT). She has recorded for Musical Heritage Society, Vox/Turnabout, Town Hall, and Music Minus One.