Our Artists in the 2025-26 Concert Season
Craig Combs
Pianist, Craig W. Combs, performs chamber music with like-minded artists who agree that great music is a reflection of the human condition. In his forty years as a performer, Dr. Combs has appeared in hundreds of performances in a wide array of venues and repertoire. His stage appearances include Merkin Hall, CAMI Hall, the Kennedy Center as well as Yale, Cornell, and Stanford Universities. From 2004-2017, Combs lived in London pursuing a chamber music career performing in Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, Lithuania and France. Reviews of his playing comment on “. . . the exceptional pianism of Craig Combs” and that “No praise is too high for his contribution.”
Combs trained at the Eastman School of Music where he earned his masters and doctorate in piano performance and literature. Early in his career, he taught at Shenandoah Conservatory of Music and George Mason University. In the mid 90’s, he was a visiting artist at several NYC community music schools - Turtle Bay, Third Street Settlement as well as the PS 7 Elementary School in the Bronx. Additionally, he worked in arts administration at the New York Foundation for the Arts and Chamber Music America.
In 2021, he co-founded and co-directs Red Door Chamber Music, a community ensemble dedicated to bringing chamber music to Provincetown and the communities of the Outer Cape. He is a member of the Provincetown Cultural Council and the Advisory Council of Great Music on Sundays at 5. In addition, Craig is the founder and Emeritus Director of The Paramount Chamber Players, an ensemble in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. In 2007, he released the CD, Forbidden Voices: Songs by Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis with soprano, Judith Sheridan.
Jeff Thurston
a graduate of Indiana University School of Music, has been an active free-lance violinist in the DC metro area since 1994. As an orchestral musician, he has performed most frequently with the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra and the National Gallery Orchestra. As a theater musician, he is most often heard (if not necessarily seen) at Signature Theatre, where he has had the good fortune to work with several leading composers of musical theater (including John Kander, Michael John La Chiusa, and Joseph Thalken), as well as many distinguished orchestrators (including Jonathan Tunick, Bruce Coughlin, and Josh Clayton). He has also played for productions at several other theaters in the area, including Arena Stage, Ford’s Theater, and The Shakespeare Theater.
By day he pushes numbers around in the Finance Department at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Tyler Michael James
Lauded as performing “like a gladiator” and with a “phenomenal color palette” (Radda), cellist Tyler Michael James stands out as an ebullient artist of his generation. He is a top prize winner at the Radda International String Competition and regularly performs as an international soloist and chamber musician. A champion of new music, Tyler just released the official recording of Jessie Montgomery’s “Loisaida, My Love” on the Monday Music Label. He is currently assistant Faculty of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Cello Workshop. For more details: https://www.tylermichaeljames.net/
Thomas Cooper
Hailed as a “intensely dramatic,” (Cleveland Classical) and praised for his “graceful approach [with] silvery power,” (The Arts Fuse), violinist Thomas Cooper has established himself as one of the most dynamic young musicians and leaders of his generation. A three-time winner of New England Conservatory’s Entrepreneurial Musicianship award, Cooper is the founder and Artistic Director of Fermata Chamber Soloists, an award-winning collective of young artists performing innovative concerts.
In the 2023-2024 season, Cooper appears regularly in concerts as a soloist and chamber musician, with engagements to include performances of Saint-Georges Violin Concerto in A Major with the New England Repertory Orchestra, and the Du Bois Orchestra, as well as Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with cellist Tyler James, and pianist Byron Zhou - in addition to a session at WGBH’s Fraser Performance Studio recording Chausson’s Poème.
As a chamber musician, Cooper has had the fortune of sharing the stage with such groups and individuals as the Oberlin Trio, the Jupiter String Quartet, David Bowlin, Amir Eldan, Evgeny Sinaiski, Vadim Gluzman, and Per Ennokson. An avid performer of new music, Cooper has appeared on the Boston Symphony Orchestra's "What I Hear" concert series, showcasing works of living composers commissioned by the BSO.
As an educator, Cooper is on faculty at Credo Music in Ohio, Project STEP in Boston, and was a guest faculty member at Music Adventure in Spannocchia, Italy. A native of the Boston area, Cooper received his formal training at New England Conservatory and Oberlin Conservatory.
Cooper performs on a 1751 Gennaro Gagliano, on generous loan from a private collection.
Constantine Finehouse
Constantine Finehouse has performed extensively in the US and abroad, including in Salzburg, Trieste, London, Ghent, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Odessa. His 2009 solo release, "Backwards Glance," interweaves works by Brahms and Richard Beaudoin. “The Bolcom Project”, made in collaboration with his American Double partner, violinist Philip Ficsor, included an Albany Records two-CD album and a national tour with concerts in Boston, New York, Denver, Santa Barbara, Spokane and at Yale University. Fanfare praised the recording as “indispensable to any serious collector with an interest in later 20th-century duo repertoire for violin and piano.” The American and European premieres of William Bolcom's Horn Trio, in collaboration with Ficsor and Steven Gross took place in the summer and fall of 2018. The work, commissioned by the group, was recorded at the Martinu Hall in Prague and released on Naxos Records in December 2021. Finehouse's recording of Bolcom’s piano solo works for Naxos saw its world-wide launch in December 2017. His latest album "The Brahms Age" on Hänssler Classic with violinist, Daniel Kurganov, follows their 2021 release "Rhythm and the Borrowed Past" on Orchid Classics and "Between the Notes" on Spice Classics in 2018. "Settling Old Scores" with cellist, Sebastian Bäverstam, duo's second release, features sonatas by Brahms and Shostakovich. During recent concert seasons Finehouse has performed at the Mozarteum (Salzburg), Miaskovsky Hall (Moscow Conservatory), Merkin Recital Hall, Weill Recital Hall (Carnegie Hall) and Jordan Hall (Boston), as well as at Harvard, Yale, and Emory universities, and St. Vincent's and Elmira colleges, among others. With degrees from Juilliard and Yale, Finehouse teaches at New England Conservatory, and serves as Visiting Artist/Faculty at Westmont College, CA.
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