Earlier this month, violinist Stefan Jackiw (jack-EEV) returned from a 10-concert tour in Korea as a member of Ensemble Ditto, an all-male chamber ensemble of Korean heritage.  Credited with broadening audiences for classical music and called "sensational" by the Korea Herald, Ditto sold out every concert in convention center-sized halls weeks in advance. Now Jackiw has been invited to do a solo recital in December at the Seoul Arts Center, Korea's equivalent of Carnegie Hall.  View this excerpt of his performance of  Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto from the Korean Orchestra Festival this past spring at the Seoul Arts Center.  

Last week the 24-year-old American violinist played three concerts at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, and this week he returns to the Seattle Chamber Music Society's Summer Festival to perform ten different works in as many concerts.  "Heartthrob violinist Stefan Jackiw will draw in the younger crowd for Mendelssohn's Piano Quartet," predicts the Seattle Times. Among his collaborators is pianist, blogger and tastemaker Jeremy Denk, who last fall singled out Jackiw in Time Out New York as his pick for the rising star he's watching.  Jackiw and Denk will play together again in August at the Bard Music Festival.  Jackiw's chamber music summer ends in recording sessions of the three Brahms sonatas with pianist Max Levinson.

The coming season brings a series of orchestral debuts for Jackiw, including the Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Toronto Symphony Orchestras, and the Russian National Orchestra with Mikhail Pletnev in a U.S. tour. "You'd have to go back several generations to find a violinist to compare to Stefan Jackiw," writes the Kansas City Star, "because there's almost no one today who is in his league."

For more information, visit Stefan Jackiw's page on the Opus 3 Artists web site. 

Cellist Joshua Roman earned a warm welcome back to Seattle when he recently performed the world premiere of David Stock's Cello Concerto.  Like the Beatles song, he got a little help from his friends - his former colleagues in the Seattle Symphony where he played for two seasons as principal cellist, a job he snared at the ripe old age of 22.  The Seattle Weekly called his performance "electrifying" and noted,  "Stock was lucky, too, to have popular cellist Joshua Roman on hand, who can not only play anything but sell anything."  The Gathering Note said the piece "could have been written for Roman.  The style suits him exactly.  While he can throw off fireworks like any whiz-bang young soloist, Roman is essentially a thoughtful, thought-provoking and lyrical player."

The 25-year-old musician is artistic director of Town Hall's TownMusic series in Seattle.  He returned from his home base in New York City in late June with a handpicked ensemble and an intriguing program of new works for clarinet, violin, cello and percussion.  The eclectic artist loves the standard rep as well.  Last week Roman performed the Dvorak Cello Concerto in Bellingham ("a masterful performance," according to Entertainment News NW) and gave a masterclass at Western Washington University.

The Seattle Times has claimed the Oklahoma native as "our own cello wunderkind".  Now that Roman has embarked on a solo career, Seattle has to share him as he prepares for a season of debuts with orchestras in Arkansas, California, Illinois, Kentucky, New York and Oklahoma. But first Roman heads to Peru in August to play with more friends in the International Festival of Chamber Music in Lima.   

For more information, visit JoshuaRoman.com or the Opus 3 Artists web site.