Aron Zelkowicz
Cellist Aron Zelkowicz currently serves as the Founder and Director of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival, which presents rare and diverse works from Jewish musical traditions to Pittsburgh audiences every spring. Currently in its fourth season, the Festival has featured renown ensembles and guest artists from the classical, early music, rock, and world music genres in innovative and thematic programs. Under his guidance the Festival has in only a short time doubled its budget, commissioned several works from major composers, received mainstream critical acclaim, and been featured on four full-length radio broadcasts for WQED-fm’s Pittsburgh Foundation Performance in Pittsburgh in addition to a complete video broadcast for Comcast In-Demand cable.
The Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival is a culmination of several years that Mr. Zelkowicz has spent studying and performing Jewish Music. While a student at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, he coordinated recitals for three years that featured exclusively Jewish performers and composers. He has performed repeat engagements of full cello recitals as part of the Piccolo Spoleto Festival’s Day of Jewish Culture in Charleston, South Carolina, cosponsored by the College of Charleston’s Jewish Studies Program, in addition to the the Hoyt Center for Fine Art in New Castle in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s travelling Oscar Schindler exhibit.
An avid chamber musician, Mr. Zelkowicz has performed at the Tanglewood, Banff, Aspen, Sarasota, Chautauqua, and Sunflower music festivals, and has served for several years on the faculties of Point Counterpoint Chamber Music Camp in Vermont and the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina as a teacher and coach to young string players. As a regular player with the Pittsburgh Symphony he has toured both America and Europe, and his performance of George Crumb’s cello sonata with the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project was included in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Top 10 Classical Music list for 2003. Mr. Zelkowicz enjoys relating directly to both adults and children with outreach programs and personal introductions to his concerts, as he has done with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra in South Carolina, the Proteus Ensemble, and Piccolo Spoleto’s Spotlight chamber music series.
Born in Ottawa, Canada, Mr. Zelkowicz grew up in Pittsburgh where he began his cello studies with Anne Martindale Williams, principal cellist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He went on to receive a Bachelor’s degree and Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music as a student of Paul Katz and Steven Doane and a Master’s degree from Indiana University as a student of Janos Starker. Most recently he has participated in master classes at the International Musicians’ Seminar in Prussia Cove, England with Steven Isserlis and Ralph Kirshbaum. He currently attends SUNY at Stony Brook as a Doctoral student of Colin Carr.