Bios

Claudia Chen

 

Claudia Chen enjoys an active career as performer and teacher. Making her solo debut with the Denver Symphony Orchestra at age 14, Ms. Chen has performed as soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States, Canada, Eastern Europe and Chile. Ms. Chen often collaborates with her husband, cellist Arek Tesarczyk. Together the duo has given numerous recitals in the United States, Canada, Chile and Poland. In 2008, their performance was awarded a McKnight Fellowship for Performing Artists in Minnesota. Her performances have been aired nationally in Canada on CBC and in the USA on National Public Radio.

Equally at home in contemporary works as in standard repertoire, Claudia has given numerous premieres of solo and chamber works by several American and Canadian composers including Ned Rorem, Chris Gable, Randall Bauer, David Thomas, Michael Matthews, and Omar Daniel.

She has been a guest of the The Grand Teton Music Festival, Bowdoin Festival, Contrasts International Contemporary Music Festival in Ukraine, and in Canada, The Winnipeg Chamber Music Society, Agassiz Chamber Music Festival and Centara International New Music Festival. In the Twin Cities, she has been a frequent guest on the Chamber Music Series of both the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra at MacPhail, Sommerfest, and the Bakken Trio Series. She has collaborated with notable musicians as violinists Jorja Fleezanis, Peter McGuire, Adrian Anantawan, Oleg Pokhanovski, David Stewart, Karl Stobbe, Helen Chang; cellists Tony Ross, Paul Marleyn, Denise Djokic; clarinetists Osmo Vanska and Todd Palmer.

Teaching has always been as important to Claudia as performing. She has served on the faculties of the University of Manitoba in Canada, and Macalester College in St. Paul. Claudia has taught Piano at all levels, Chamber Music, Accompanying, and Piano Pedagogy. Several of her students were prizewinners in local, provincial and national competitions in Canada. She has presented performance and pedagogy classes in Canada and in Minnesota and has served on the jury of several competitions in Minnesota including GTCYS, YPSCA, WAMSO as well as The Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and the West Central Division of MTNA. Her dedication to teaching has been reflected in the number of students who have gone on to pursue music professionally. Students have been accepted to Performance Degree programs at The New England Conservatory, Boston; University of Southern California Thornton School of Music; University of Ottawa, and University of British Columbia, Canada; Arizona State University and University of Minnesota School of Music.

Ms. Chen received degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the University of Minnesota. Her principal teachers have been Julian Martin, Margo Garrett, Doris Pridonoff Lehnert and Patricia Parraguez. She has also worked with Leon Fleisher, Lydia Artymiw,  Richard Goode and John Perry.

 

Arek Tesarczyk

Cellist Arek Tesarczyk joined the Minnesota Orchestra in 2004 and made his solo debut with the Orchestra in 2006, performing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. He gave the world premiere performances of Rautavaara’s Cello Concerto No. 2, Towards the Horizon, under the baton of Osmo Vänskä in fall 2010. He has presented a full range of concerto repertoire, including works by Dvořák, Elgar, Saint-Saëns, Haydn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Goldschmidt, as soloist with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Silesian Chamber Orchestra, Orchesta Sinfonica de Chile and Concert Artists of Baltimore.

Tesarczyk, winner of a 2008 McKnight Fellowship for Performing Musicians, has participated in many Minnesota Orchestra chamber concerts, performing works by Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Messiaen, Dohnányi and Shostakovich, among others. In April 2011 he performed Grieg’s G-minor String Quartet on the Orchestra’s Chamber Music at MacPhail series. In fall 2010 he premiered Randall Bauer’sMetamorphosis, a work written for him and his pianist wife, Claudia Chen, and celebrated the bicentennial of Chopin’s birth with a performance of the composer’s Cello Sonata on the Bakken Trio series, also with Chen.

In 2006 Tesarczyk became a member of the American String Project, a Seattle-based, conductorless ensemble made up of 15 solo string players. In addition, he has performed at chamber music festivals in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, and has appeared at the Kennedy Center and Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Merkin Hall in New York. For two years he has performed as principal cello and taught at Indiana University’s Summer Music Festival. Other performances have taken him to Finland, Switzerland, Germany, England, Scotland and Russia. He has collaborated with such artists as Joseph Silverstein, Pamela Frank, Martin Beaver and Scott St. John, and he has recorded Brahms’ G-minor Piano Quartet with Jon Kimura Parker for the Bravo television network. He has also performed widely with Chen, giving recitals in the United States, Canada, Chile and Poland.

Born in Poland into a family of musicians, Tesarczyk won three consecutive first prizes in the annual Polish National Cello and Chamber Music competitions before graduating with honors from the Karol Szymanowski School of Music in Katowice. Continuing his studies in the U.S., he worked with the late Stephen Kates at the Peabody Conservatory, where he received the Gregor Piatigorsky Memorial Scholarship and earned two artist diplomas: one in cello performance, the other in chamber music as a member of the Peabody String Quartet. Before joining the Minnesota Orchestra he was principal cello of the Winnipeg Symphony for 11 years.

Tesarczyk plays a cello crafted in 1997 by an American maker, Christopher Dungey, and uses two French bows, one made by E.A. Ouchard and the other by Victor Fetique. He lives in St. Paul with his wife Claudia Chen and their children Katia and Viktor.