Judges

A violinist who plays with “enormous soul and a big, vibrant sound,” (The Reading Eagle, December 2015) Ari Isaacman-Beck is the first violinist of the Philadelphia-based Dalí Quartet, Quartet-in-Residence at West Chester University of Pennsylvania’s Wells School of Music. He connects with audiences through his infectious love for music stretching from JS Bach to Elliott Carter and its infinite capacity to express the entire range of human experience. A captivating and multi-faceted performer, Isaacman-Beck has given performances as a soloist and chamber musician across North America, Europe, and China.

An accomplished solo violinist, Isaacman-Beck has presented recitals and concerti across the United States and Switzerland. With the Dalí Quartet, he was the 2021 Silver Medal Winner of the Piazzolla International Competition as well as a recipient of the Guarneri Quartet Award from Chamber Music America. As a solo violinist, he is the 2016 winner of the Lili Boulanger International Competition, won second prize at the Sion-Valais International Violin Competition, and received the Josie and Elsie Scharff Prize from the Cleveland Institute; at the former, the Swiss newspaper Le Nouveliste praised his performance of Elgar’s Violin Concerto for its “impressive, masterful finesse” (August, 2006). A committed performer of new music, he won the prize for the best performance of Thomas McKinley’s newly-commissioned work, Dialogues (2016), at the 2017 Elmar Oliveira International Violin Competition. He carries in his repertoire works of many other recent composers including Elliott Carter, Donald Martino, Richard Wernick, and Alfred Felder. Highlights of recent seasons include a Carnegie Hall debut as well as performances in Boston and throughout California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, and abroad in Canada and Mexico; previous performances have been broadcast on Public Radio in Boston, New York, Cleveland, and Minneapolis.

Isaacman-Beck is a passionate collaborator as well; he has appeared as a guest violinist and violist with the Borromeo, Chiara, and Attacca String Quartets; larger groups including A Far Cry and the New York City Ballet Orchestra; and for eight years he was the violinist of Trio Cleonice, an award-winning group described as “abundantly sincere and absorbing” by the Boston Globe (May 2016) and “among the most accomplished piano trios now before the public” (Seen and Heard International, March 2015). With the trio, he gave performances across the US and in Europe at venues such as Jordan Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw; the group premiered and championed the 2nd Piano Trio of Richard Wernick (which was written for Trio Cleonice), as well as the music of other major American composers such as Donald Martino, Arthur Berger, and Elliott Carter. In addition to the group’s busy concert career, Isaacman-Beck won top prizes with the trio at the 2014 Schoenfeld International and Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competitions, and has enjoyed artist residencies at Yellow Barn, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, and Wellesley College. With the Trio, Ari Isaacman-Beck formed Trio Cleonice and Friends, a monthly concert series with a focus on community engagement and expanding the audience’s musical knowledge and boundaries. The series, which became a beloved staple in Brookline, Massachusetts, where it was based, was praised by Trill.me as “one of the most interesting and committed chamber series in Boston right now, exploring the repertoire from top to bottom, left to right, with an impressive roster of collaborators.” In more recent seasons, Isaacman-Beck has co-curated the Boston Beethoven Cycle, a multi-season concert series presenting all of Beethoven’s String Quartets alongside more recent solo and chamber works at the Pucker Gallery.

A devoted teacher committed to empowering and inspiring younger musicians, Isaacman-Beck was again the 2019-2020 Visiting Assistant Professor of Violin at the Sunderman Conservatory of Gettysburg College, where he was also the 2018-2019 Director of Orchestras and the 2017-2018 Visiting Assistant Professor of Violin. During the summers of 2018 and 2019, he was on faculty at the Kinhaven Music School in Weston, VT. He has also served on the faculties of Yellow Barn’s Young Artists Program, the New England Conservatory of Music’s Preparatory Division, The Rivers Conservatory, and Junior Greenwood Music Camp; has given masterclasses at the Eastman School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, Bucknell University, the University of Hawaii, and Husson College; and recently completed an extended teaching and performance residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Isaacman-Beck received degrees from the Cleveland Institute, Juilliard, Mannes, and New England Conservatory; his major violin teachers have included Donald Weilerstein, Ronald Copes, Laurie Smukler, Mark Steinberg, David Updegraff, and Mary West. 

In his time away from the violin, Isaacman-Beck is a serious cyclist and runner, as well as an avid yoga practitioner. He is fluent in Spanish and has studied Mandarin for years; his literary interests range from Charles Dickens to Haruki Murakami to modern non-fiction about medical care in the U.S. He is renowned among his friends and beyond as a spectacular home cook, mixologist, and bread baker.

Cellist Gwen Krosnick has appeared across the world as recitalist, chamber musician, and joyous advocate for music. Her career spans devoted quartet and trio playing, solo cello recitals, teaching at major universities and chamber music festivals, writing on music, and countless premieres and performances of contemporary music. Krosnick is known for her ecstatic and luminous voice; for her deep, burnished palette of sounds at the cello; and for a fierce technique that etches her gestures, colors, and bass lines with arresting conviction.

Highlights of Krosnick’s upcoming seasons include solo cello recitals focused on works by Tania León, Ralph Shapey, Donald Martino, James Lee III, and Dorothy Rudd Moore; quartet tours in the U.S. and Europe; premieres of new works by Joan Tower, Victoria Bond, and Christian Wolff; and – with colleagues Laurie Smukler and Qing Jiang – performing and recording the piano trios of Weinberg and Shostakovich.

Since 2022, Gwen Krosnick has been the cellist of the Cassatt String Quartet, with which group she specializes both in joyful reimaginings of standard quartet repertoire and in a vast range of contemporary music – with particular emphasis on the music of women and other composers whose backgrounds have been underrepresented on classical music stages. Krosnick has spent recent seasons with the quartet sharing teaching residencies at Columbia, Bennington, Hartt, Bard, and SUNY Purchase; playing programs centering the music of American women; and working extensively with living composers – among them Tania León, Chen Yi, Adolphus Hailstork, Zhou Long, and James Lee III. As part of the Cassatt Quartet’s upcoming 40th-anniversary celebration, the CSQ will premiere and champion new works by major American women composers, including Victoria Bond – who is writing the group a new piano quintet – and Joan Tower, whose new string quartet the Cassatts will premiere in 2025.

In her early career, Krosnick was the founding cellist of Trio Cleonice, with which she performed across the United States, Europe, and Asia from 2008 to 2016. With violinist Ari Isaacman-Beck and pianist Emely Phelps, Krosnick played major trio debuts at Jordan Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Concertgebouw. The group was Graduate Piano Trio-in-Residence at the New England Conservatory from 2011 to 2014, and began an acclaimed community chamber music series, Trio Cleonice & Friends, presented monthly concerts – featuring music from baroque to world premieres – to an enthusiastic, regular audience. From 2016 to 2020, Krosnick presented the Boston Beethoven Cycle at Pucker Gallery; curated in partnership with Isaacman-Beck, the series spanned a chronological journey of the complete Beethoven string quartets, with contemporary solo and quartet works interspersed.

Krosnick has served on the faculties of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Vivace Cello Festival, New England Conservatory Preparatory Division, the New York Youth Symphony Chamber Music Program, and Junior Greenwood; she has given masterclasses at Eastman, Oberlin, the Cleveland Institute of Music, SUNY Potsdam, and Duke. In Fall 2024, she joins the faculty of Columbia University’s Music Performance Program; she will spend the Spring 2025 semester as Visiting Professor of Cello at Oberlin Conservatory. During the summers, Krosnick teaches at Kneisel Hall, of which she is a longtime alumna, and where she has served as Artist-Faculty since 2019.

B’Racz studied composition, electronic music, conducting at the Hartt School of Music, piano at the Yale School of Music, Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest Hungary (awarded a Fulbright Grant), composition and piano at the Oberlin Conservatory, Neighborhood Music School (NMS), and the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). 

He taught piano and composition as well as music technology at CCSU, SCSU, UNH, and ECA. Currently teaches piano and composition at NMS, and additionally improvisation, chamber coaching, electronic music, theory and ear-training privately in his studio in Hamden, CT.

A native of Puerto Rico, Jose Ramos Santana is one of the most acclaimed pianists of his generation and an acknowledged master of Spanish music.

He is the recipient of the 2020 Issac Albeniz Medal awarded by the Fundaćion Issac Albeniz in Camprodon Spain. Mr. Ramos Santana is also the founder and artistic director of the Puerto Rico International Piano Festival. Recent performance and masterclasses include the 2018 summer festival Maestros del Norte y Pianistas del Sur in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Jose Ramos Santana has appeared as a guest soloist with major orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London, Detroit Symphony, Saint Louis Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, San Antonio Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, 92nd Street Y Orchestra, The New York Virtuosi, Casals Festival Orchestra, Puerto Rico Symphony, and the orchestras of New Mexico, Sioux City, Utah, Syracuse and many others. Additional solo performances include the Moscow Philharmonic Latin-American tour, Orchestra of L'Hermitage of Saint Petersburg, the Orchestra of Guatemala, the Orchestra of San Salvador, and the Orquestra de los Reyes in Lima, Peru. He has collaborated with distinguished musicians and conductors such as Krzsztoff Penderecki, John Adams, Dennis Russell Davies, Jerzy Semkow, Dimitri Kitaenko, Joseph Silverstein, cellist Arto Noras, violinist Gregory Zhislin, and pianist Vladimir Viardo.

Jose Ramos Santana's much lauded guest appearance with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall during the Sonidos de las Americas Festival was his third Carnegie Hall performance in one year. Mr. Ramos Santana has also performed at Zankel Hall and the Weill Recital Hall under the auspices of La Gesse Foundation.

A top prize winner of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition and a participant in the Xerox Piano Artist’s Program, he has appeared in music festivals such as Spoleto, Caramoor, Casals Festival, Grant Park Festival in Chicago, International Keyboard and Institute Festival at Mannes College, Washington International Piano Festival, Inter-American Music Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Amalfi Coast Music Festival in Italy.

His recital work has taken him to major venues throughout the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Central America, and the Far East.

He has been featured in documentaries on the PBS network, A&E channel and CBS Sunday Morning.

Jose Ramos Santana is also an established recording artist. His world premiere of "Glosas" by Roberto Sierra on the Fleur de Son Label received critical acclaim. His collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra also includes recordings of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G and Saint- Saens Piano Concerto in G minor op. 22 He has also recorded the complete works for piano and violin by the Spanish Catalonian composer Xavier Montsalvage with violinist Eva Leon on the Naxos Label.

As an active member of Musica de Camara, Inc., Jose Ramos Santana has served as jury member of the Gershwin International Music Competition, Rosalyn Tureck International Bach Competition for Young Pianists, Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Piano Competition, Liszt-Garrison International Piano Competition, Louisiana International Piano Competition and William Kapell International Piano Competition selecting jury.

Jose Ramos Santana is a graduate of the Juilliard School where he studied with Adele Marcus, William Masselos and Sylvia Rabinof. He has also coached with Leon Fleisher and Alicia de Larrocha.

He is a member of the piano faculty at New York University Steinhardt School and teaches at the Levine School of Music in Washington, D.C.

Jose Ramos Santana is a Steinway Artist.

Jose Ramos Santana is the founder and artistic director of the Puerto Rico International Piano Festival. 

Dr. Liz Seidel enjoys a successful career as Pianist, Teacher & Chamber Musician.

Founder of Pianoforte, Inc. (now Carmel Klavier, Inc.), she was instrumental in providing

educational opportunities for young musicians and hosted the annual Young Artists’

Achievement Festival for Piano and Chamber Music in Muncie, IN. Additionally, Carmel

Klavier, Inc. now hosts the Carmel Clavier International Piano Competition (Carmel, IN),

of which Dr. Seidel is a co-founder.

Dr. Seidel holds degrees from Ithaca College and Temple University. Her teaching

experience includes adjunct faculty positions at Miami University (Ohio), University of

Wisconsin (Superior), University of Minnesota (Duluth) and Ball State University (IN). She

was a member of the summer piano faculty at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp (MI) for thirteen

years, served on the board of the Indiana Music Teachers Association and was the recipient

of a Teacher Enrichment Grant awarded by the MTNA Foundation.

    Solo and chamber music concerts include appearances in the U.S. and Canada, most

notably the Pacific Rim Summer Chamber Music Festival (British Columbia) and the St.

Petersburg College Piano Concert Series (Florida). She was Collaborative Pianist in

Residence for the Jascha Heifetz Symposium (Connecticut College) for ten years.

Regional / state festivals are among invitations received for adjudication, including

Musicfest Northwest, an annual festival for young artists in Spokane, WA. 

Dr. Seidel has lectured on various aspects of piano technique (It’s All About the

Wrist!) and has also explored neurodiversity in The Impact of the Arts on a Disabled Brain

(presented at the National Conference for Disorders of the Corpus Callosum).

Currently residing in Chicago, Dr. Seidel was a member of the piano faculty in The

Hartt School Community Division for eight years.

Sophia Cornicello is a pianist, organist, and harpsichordist with a particular interest in early music and historically informed performance. She graduated from Bard College Conservatory in 2026 with degrees in piano performance and mathematics, studying piano with Rieko Aizawa and organ and harpsichord with Renée Anne Louprette. At Bard, she was a member of the Bard Baroque Ensemble and performed as both a soloist and chamber musician.

A finalist in the 2025 Rosalyn Tureck International Bach Competition, Cornicello has also received an Early Music America Workshop Scholarship and was a 2026 fellow of the Emmanuel Music Bach Institute in Boston. Her musical interests extend from Renaissance music to contemporary works, and she has performed on piano, organ, and harpsichord in a wide variety of settings.

She most recently performed on Duke Chapel's Bach Cantata Series, where she played obbligato and continuo parts on both harpsichord and organ. Cornicello is the 2026–27 Organ Scholar at Duke University Chapel, where she accompanies worship and choral services, rehearses and performs with the Chapel choirs, and continues her development as a church musician and continuo player.