Cleveland Orchestra Violinist Joins Schoeffler for Ashland Recital

On Sunday, Feb. 12 at 5 p.m. in the Elizabeth Pastor Recital Hall, Susan Schoeffler, Adjunct Professor of Applied Piano at Ashland University, will perform a concert with The Cleveland Orchestra violinist Kim Nolen Gomez. The Northeast Ohio duo performs repertoire from Mozart to the 20th century masterworks. The concert is free and open to the public.

Schoeffler received her Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees in piano performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM), where she studied with Vitya Vronsky-Babin and Sergei Babayan and was the recipient of the Sadie Zellen Prize in Piano. She has performed in numerous masterclasses, including those at the 1993 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. For the last decade she has collaborated frequently with Nolen Gomez at performance venues including Severance Hall, CIM's Mixon Hall and broadcasts on WCLV Cleveland. Mrs. Schoeffler also serves as adjunct faculty and staff accompanist at Baldwin-Wallace University and teaches privately at her home in Cleveland Heights. Her previous appointments as teacher and accompanist include Westminster College, Indiana University Summer String Academy and the CIM.

A member of The Cleveland Orchestra since 1990, Nolen Gomez studied at the Peabody Conservatory, then earned a bachelor of music degree and an artist diploma from CIM, where she was a concerto competition winner. Her teachers have included David Cerone, Josef Gingold, Daniel Heifetz, Virginia Schneider, David Updegraff, Donald Weilerstein, and Mimi Zweig. Ms. Gomez has appeared on three occasions as a soloist with the Louisville Symphony Orchestra and solo appearances with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and the CIM Orchestra. 

AWARD-WINNING VIOLINIST AND PIANIST PERFORMING AT AU

Ashland University Department of Music presents a guest artist recital with award winning violinist Jinjoo Cho and pianist HyunSoo Kim on Monday, March 31 at 7:30 p.m. in the Elizabeth Pastor Recital Hall. The concert is free and open to the public. 

The program for the concert will begin with Claude Debussy's final composition, Sonata No. 3 in G minor, followed by Czech composer Leoš Janáček's Violin Sonata, and Grammy-winning contemporary American composer Joan Tower's String Force.  After intermission, the concert will conclude with Sergei Prokofiev's Sonata No. 1 in F minor. Inspired by one of Handel's violin sonatas, and the four-movement structure, slow-fast-slow-fast, the Sonata's first movement is a haunting prelude while the second movement is a vigorously contested debate. The third movement is a lullaby followed by a folk dance in shifting meters for the finale. Prokofiev described the violin scales at the end of the first and fourth movements as 'wind passing through a graveyard'. These movements were played at Prokofiev's funeral.  

Violinist Jinjoo Cho has won several international violin competitions including the Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld International String Competition, the Buenos Aires International Violin Competition, the Montréal International Musical Competition and the Stulberg International String Competition. She has appeared as a soloist with numerous orchestras such as The Cleveland Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, Aspen Concert Orchestra, and Ashland's own Symphony Orchestra. Jinjoo is a native of Seoul, South Korea, and a graduate of Yewon Art School and the Korean National University of Arts (Pre-College). She came to the U.S. in 2002 to study with Paul Kantor and participate in the Cleveland Institute of Music's Young Artist Program. Jinjoo attended the Curtis Institute of Music, but returned to CIM earning Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in violin performance. 

HyunSoo Kim is also a native of South Korea and began to play piano at the age of eight. He received a Bachelor of Music in piano performance from the University of Delaware and completed his Master’s degree in Collaborative Piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2011 where he received the Rosa Lobe Collaborative Piano award. HyunSoo recently completed his Artist Diploma with Anita Pontremoli at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and has served as a staff pianist at Kent State University since 2011. HyunSoo has served as a collaborative pianist at Interlochen Arts Academy and recently joined the CIM collaborative piano staff. He has performed as soloist with the University of Delaware Symphony Orchestra, the Newark Symphony Orchestra and numerous community orchestras in the Delaware region.