LATROBE, PA – Saint Vincent College’s Music at Midday series will wrap up its spring 2021 slate with a performance by cellist Anne Martindale Williams and violinist Christopher Wu at noon on Tuesday, May 18.
The performance will be livestreamed on the Saint Vincent College Facebook page and will take place in the Verostko Center for the Arts in the College’s Dale P. Latimer Library.
Williams has enjoyed a successful career as principal cellist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra since 1979, while she has also frequently been featured as a soloist both in Pittsburgh and on tour in New York City at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall. She was soloist with the Pittsburgh Symphony in the premiere of “The Giving Tree,” conducted by its composer, Lorin Maazel, while she was also featured in the Pittsburgh Symphony premiere of Jake Haggie’s “The Work at Hand.”
In numerous chamber music performances, Williams has collaborated with notable guest artists such as Yehudi Menuhin, André Previn, the Emerson Quartet, Lynn Harrell, Joshua Bell and Pinchas Zuckerman, while she made her London debut performing Dvorak’s Cello Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic, conducted by Previn.
Williams divides her time between the orchestra, teaching at Carnegie Mellon University and solo and chamber music performances across the U.S. and Europe. She has appeared in several nationally televised productions on both the BBC and Pittsburgh’s WQED, while she has taught master classes at universities and festivals across the country, including The Curtis Institute of Music, Manhattan School of Music, the New World Symphony in Miami, Credo at Oberlin College and the Masterworks Festival. She has also performed at many of America’s top summer music festivals, including Aspen, Caramoor, Skanaeteles, Maui, Rockport Festivals in Maine and Massachusetts, Grand Teton, Strings Festival in Steamboat Springs and Mainly Mozart in San Diego.
The proud recipient of Carlow University’s Women of Spirit National Award, Williams is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studies under Orlando Cole. Her Tecchler cello was made in Rome in 1701.
Wu has enjoyed a diverse career as an orchestral and chamber musician, teacher and soloist. He joined the first violin section of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1988 and holds the Nancy and Jeffery Leininger First Violin Chair. Previously, he has served as concertmaster of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic and has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.
An active chamber musician, Wu has performed with pianist Emanuel Ax, violinists Joshua Bell, Gil Shaham, James Ehnes and the Muir String Quartet. He is a founding member of the innovative chamber music group Innuendo, hailed by the Boston Herald as “an ensemble notable for its unanimity of spirit and sonority” and for its “warmly intense interpretive powers.” He has appeared in numerous festivals across the world, including Aspen, Brevard, Heidelberg, Savannah, Masterworks, Stockbridge and St. Bart’s. As a soloist, he has appeared numerous times with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, most recently performing Piazzolla in 2019.
Along with his prolific performing career, Wu holds the title of artist lecturer in violin at Carnegie Mellon University. He has also taught classes at the University of Texas, Youngstown State University, Penn State University, West Virginia University, Ottawa University and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, while he has served as associate professor of violin at the University of Oklahoma. His students have won positions in major orchestras across the world including the New York Philharmonic, Amsterdam Concertgebouw and orchestras in Pittsburgh, Dallas, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Madrid.
A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Wu’s violin was made in 1727 by Nicolo Gagliano.
Saint Vincent College’s Music at Midday series is sponsored by the Saint Vincent College Concert Series and the Verostko Center for the Arts. For more information, contact Andrew Julo, curator of the Verostko Center for the Arts, at Andrew.julo@stvincent.edu, or Thomas Octave, director of the Saint Vincent College Concert Series, at Thomas.octave@stvincent.edu.
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PHOTO 1: Anne Martindale Williams
PHOTO 2: Christopher Wu
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PR2021-074