Geneva Lewis/Evren Ozel

New Zealand-born violinist Geneva Lewis has forged a reputation as a musician of consummate artistry whose performances speak from and to the heart. Hailed by conductor Nic McGegan as “a name to watch,” Geneva is the recipient of a 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant and Grand Prize winner of the 2020 Concert Artists Guild Competition. Other recent accolades include Kronberg Academy’s Prince of Hesse Prize and being named a Finalist at the 2018 Naumburg Competition, a Performance Today Young Artist in Residence, and Musical America’s New Artist of the Month.

After her solo debut at age 11 with the Pasadena Symphony, Geneva has gone on to perform with orchestras around the world, including recent and forthcoming appearances with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Auckland Philharmonia, Sarasota Orchestra, Pensacola Symphony, Augusta Symphony, and Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra. She has worked with a number of notable conductors, including Nic McGegan, Edwin Outwater, and Michael Feinstein, and looks forward to collaborations with Giordano Bellincampi, Sameer Patel, Peter Rubardt, and Dirk Meyer. In recital, recent and upcoming highlights include performances at Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw, Tippet Rise, Emory University, Purdue Convocations, Kravis Center, and Myra Hess, among others.

While Geneva’s claim to chamber music fame came early on as a member of the renowned Lewis Family Trio with her siblings Nathan (piano) and Rochelle (cello), she has since established the Callisto Trio, Artist-in-Residence at the Da Camera Society in Los Angeles. Callisto received the Bronze Medal at the Fischoff Competition as the youngest group to ever compete in the senior division finals. They were recently invited on the Masters on Tour series of the International Holland Music Sessions and performed at the celebrated Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam.

​Deeply passionate about collaboration, Geneva has had the pleasure of performing with such prominent musicians as Atar Arad, Efe Baltacigil, Glenn Dicterow, Miriam Fried, Ilya Kaler, Michael Kannen, Kim Kashkashian, Ida Kavafian, Marcy Rosen, Mitsuko Uchida, and the Borromeo String Quartet, among others.

An advocate of community engagement and music education, Geneva was selected for the New England Conservatory’s Community Performances and Partnerships Program’s Ensemble Fellowship, through which her string quartet created interactive educational programs for audiences throughout Boston. Her quartet was also chosen for the Virginia Arts Festival Residency, during which they performed and presented masterclasses in elementary, middle, and high schools.

Geneva is currently in the Artist Diploma program as the recipient of the Charlotte F. Rabb Presidential Scholarship at the New England Conservatory studying with Miriam Fried. Past summers have taken her to the Marlboro Music Festival, Ravinia Steans Institute, Perlman Music Program’s Chamber Workshop, International Holland Music Sessions, Taos School of Music and the Heifetz International Music Institute.

Geneva is currently performing on the “Joachim-Ma” Stradivarius, c. 1714, on generous loan from the New England Conservatory.

Evren Ozel, piano  American pianist Evren Ozel began his musical studies at age 3 in his hometown of Minneapolis, MN.  He has won numerous honors and awards including scholarships from the U.S Chopin Foundation and Young Arts Foundation, first prize at the 2016 Boston Symphony Concerto Competition, second prize at the 2016 Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition, and second prize as well as Mozart and Chopin special prizes at the 2018 Dublin International Piano Competition.  Most recently, he received second prize and special prizes for Best Mazurka and Best Polonaise at the 2020 U.S. National Chopin Competition securing the honor of representing the U.S.A in the Inter-national Chopin Competition which will take place in Warsaw, Poland in October 2021.

Ozel has performed with orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, RTE National Symphony and Boston Pops among others.  In 2018, as a freshman at New England Conservatory, Evren won both the Honors Piano Competition and the NEC Chamber Concerto Competition which garnered him an opportunity to play on the Jordan Hall stage with the school’s con-ductor-less orchestra.

An avid chamber musician, Ozel was selected by Mitsuko Uchida to participate in the prestigious Marlboro Music Festival.  There he performed with Jonathan Biss, Alice Neary, Marcy Rosen, and Joseph Lin, among others. Three of his performances at the festival have already been featured in the archived Historic Recordings from Marlboro. In 2019, he participated in ChamberFest Cleveland, featured in their Rising Star program, performing alongside artists such as Franklin Cohen, Peter Wiley, and Hsin-Yun Huang.  Of his performance of Franck Sonata with Nathan Meltzer, Cleveland Classical wrote “Meltzer and Ozel attended to every contour of the music with care, crafting a long-form melodic idea that flowed effortlessly from phrase to phrase and movement to movement.  It was a privilege to witness.”

Other chamber experiences include invitations to play with Jupiter Symphony Cham-ber Players and Chamber Music Live! at Queen’s College.  He was also a member of Gruppetto Trio which was selected as a New England Conservatory Honors Ensemble in the 2018/2019 school year.

Other summer festival experiences include the International Mendelssohn Akademie Leipzig in 2018 as a Mendelssohn Fellow, taking masterclasses with Pavel Gililov and Matti Raekallio, and the Oxford Philomusica Piano Festival in 2015, where he had masterclasses with Ferenc Rados, Menahem Pressler, and Andras Schiff.  He has also been selected to perform in masterclasses for Richard Goode, Paul Lewis, Mitsuko Uchida, Garrick Ohlssohn, Robert Levin, Hugh Wolff, Lang Lang and others.

In the 2020/2021 season, Ozel appears again with the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players and performs with NEXUS Chamber Music for Hayden’s Ferry Chamber Music

Series in Tempe, AZ.  Other concerts this season include solo recitals for the Paderewski Festival in Raleigh, NC, the U.S. Chopin Foundation in Miami, FL, and the Gilmore’s Rising Stars Series in Kalamazoo, MI.