About the Ensemble
About the Artists
Yasmina Spiegelberg
Swiss-French clarinetist Yasmina Spiegelberg is the laureate of several international and national competitions including the Rotary International Competition Madrid Velazquez, the Frances Walton Seattle Competition, and the USC Concerto Competition. Additionally, she was awarded the Special Prize at the 2nd Vienna International Music Competition, and the Golden Medal at the 4th Manhattan International Music Competition. Her clarinet trio, The Tandru Trio, was the winner at the Beverly Hills National Auditions in 2019. She is also a member of the preeminent woodwind quintet, ConnectFive, which has been heard across the Northeast, invited at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute, and is an Ensemble Forward Grantee through Chamber Music America.
Based in NYC, she is currently a fellow at Ensemble Connect, the resident ensemble of Carnegie Hall, which features extraordinary young musicians from around the globe who are committed to community engagement, teaching, entrepreneurship, and leadership. She has appeared in many renowned concert halls including the Oslo Concert Hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and Carnegie Hall.
She holds a Bachelor’s from the Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne (Switzerland) and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (The Netherlands), as well as a Master in Performance from the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo with Björn Nyman. She also earned a Graduate Certificate and an Artist Diploma from the University of Southern California with world-famous Professor Yehuda Gilad.
Julia Yang
Praised for her sense of joyful virtuosity (South Florida Classical Review) as a concerto soloist, Julia Yang is a dynamic and versatile cellist, founding member of the Merz Trio and former member of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect and the New World Symphony.
As a soloist, Ms. Yang was featured in spring 2019 on Performance Today as a Young Artist in Residence and has garnered top prizes at numerous competitions such as the Lennox International Competition and the Union League of Chicago’s Young Artist Competition. She has performed as a concerto soloist with orchestras including the New World Symphony Orchestra, Central Florida Symphony Orchestra, and Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra.
An avid chamber musician, Julia has been noted for her ecstatic solos (Reading Eagle), deep tone, and precision, (South Florida Classical Review) and has performed throughout the United States and internationally in Europe, Australia and Canada. Festival appearances include Marlboro, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, Yellow Barn, Perlman Chamber Music Program, Britten-Pears’ Young Artist residencies, and Poland’s Krzyzowa-Music. Her and chamber performances have been broadcast throughout the United States as well as in Germany, and she can be heard on CD with the Aldeburgh Strings (Linn Records).
As an orchestral leader, Ms. Yang has toured as principal cellist of the New World Symphony, and has performed as principal under conductors such as Michael Tilson Thomas, Susanna Malkki, James Gaffigan, John Adams, and Leonard Slatkin and many others in halls ranging from New York’s Carnegie Hall and Boston’s Symphony Hall to D.C.’s Kennedy Center and Miami’s New World Center and Arsht Center.
Zhenni Li-Cohen
Hailed as …an artist of tremendous conviction, who fascinates even as she provokes… by Gramophone Magazine, …a thrillingly good pianist… by The New Yorker and for her …big, gorgeous tone and a mesmerizing touch by The Philadelphia Inquirer, pianist Zhenni Li-Cohen has performed in such notable venues as Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, WQXR’s Greene Space in New York, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., Kimmel Performing Arts Center, the Helsinki Music Centre in Finland, the Grieghallen in Norway and the Berliner Philharmonie. She has appeared as a soloist with the Bergen Philharmonic and the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. Her second album for the Steinway and Sons label was released in 2023.
Zhenni Li-Cohen has garnered worldwide recognition as the winner of the New York Concert Artists Worldwide Debut Audition, Astral Artist’s National Auditions and the Grieg International Competition in Norway. Ms. Li-Cohen is currently the Associate Professor of Piano at University of Alberta. She holds a Bachelor and Master of Music degree, both on a full scholarship, from The Juilliard School, under the tutelage of Seymour Lipkin and Joseph Kalichstein. After obtaining her Artist Diploma with Peter Frankl at Yale School of Music, she completed her doctorate studies at the McGill School of Music under Dr. Stéphane Lemelin.
Ms. Li-Cohen is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Opus 71 Concerts, a multimedia concert series near New York’s Lincoln Center. In her spare time, she enjoys learning jazz and new languages, looking forward to becoming pentalingual, traveling and meeting people of different cultures.
Zhenni Li-Cohen is a Steinway Artist.