The Scripps College Department of Music and The Joint Music Program of Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, and Scripps colleges will host the Bessie Bartlett Frankel Chamber Music Festival, featuring the Gold Coast Trio on Sunday, October 1, at 3 p.m. at Garrison Theater, Scripps College Performing Arts Center. The program includes works by Brahms, Haydn, Schoenfield, and Schubert. The performance is free and open to the public. For more information, please call (909) 621-8280.
The Gold Coast Trio is comprised of musicians Hao Huang on piano, Rachel Vetter Huang on violin, and Susan Lamb Cook on cello. The members of the trio have been featured in major performance halls around the world. In recent years, performance highlights have included concerts in Eisenstadt, Austria, Washington, D.C.; New York; Budapest, Hungary; Timisoara, Romania; Barcelona, Spain; Cairo, Egypt; Beijing, China.
Winner of various prestigious international music awards including the Van Cliburn Piano Award at Interlochen, Professor Hao Huang has gained acclaim in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. He performed as a featured soloist at the George Enescu International Music Festival and the Barcelona Cultural Olympiad. He has also appeared with the Timisoara “Banatul” Philharmonic, the Brevard Music Center Orchestra, the Music in the Mountains Festival Orchestra, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, and more. A graduate of Harvard University, the Juilliard School, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he is the chair of music and artist-in-residence at Scripps College and head of piano faculty at Claremont Graduate University.
Professor Rachel Vetter Huang holds the rare distinction of being honored by both the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has received NEA grants towards production of chamber music festivals in New York and Colorado, and has enjoyed the privilege of being chosen to participate in an NEH Summer Seminar, the 1989 “JAZZ: A Comparative View” at Yale University, directed by John Szwed. Vetter Huang has been invited to make presentations on the topic of violin-piano duo repertoire as chamber music at state and national conventions of the Music Teachers National Association and the College Music Society. She has performed extensively on both coasts and in Asia, from Washington D.C.’s Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress to Beijing Central Conservatory Hall. Professor Vetter Huang holds degrees from Harvard University and the State University of New York, Stony Brook.
Susan Lamb Cook, artist affiliate in cello and chamber music at the University of California, Davis, has performed as soloist as well as chamber musician in Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East. She earned her bachelor’s degree in music and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, as well as performance degree from the Hochschule fur Musik in Vienna. Lamb Cook has performed as soloist with orchestras throughout Northern California, and her solo and chamber music recitals have been broadcast on Capital Public Radio. She is program director and coach for the Sacramento Youth Symphony’s Chamber Music Workshop, and has recorded works for cello and piano by Rachmaninoff, and American composer Daniel Kingman for Innova Recordings.