Violist Toby Appel and Pianist Drew Petersen

Toby Appel was born in Elmer, N.J. He was a winner of Young Concert Artists and has appeared throughout the U.S. and abroad as a recitalist, concerto soloist, and chamber musician. He is a former member of the Lenox, Audubon, and Tashi quartets and has appeared at the Angel Fire, Marlboro, Mostly Mozart, Chamber Music Northwest, Ravinia, Santa Fe, Seattle, and Great Mountains (Korea) festivals, among others.

Appel trained at the Curtis Institute of Music with Max Aronoff and Joseph DePasquale and was formerly on the faculty of the State University of New York-Binghamton, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque, and Carnegie Mellon University. He has been on the college faculty at Juilliard since 1990 and on the school’s Pre-College faculty since 1999. Appel is a frequent commentator for National Public Radio’s Performance Today program and has recorded on the Columbia, Musical Heritage, Delos, Desto, Opus 1, and Koch International labels.

Prodigious pianist Drew Petersen is the winner of the 2017 American Pianists Awards and the Christel DeHaan Fellowship of the American Pianists Association, and has been named Artist-in-Residence for two years by the University of Indianapolis. This is the latest accolade in a decorated young career that includes being prizewinner in the Leeds International Piano Competition, the Hilton Head International Piano Competition, Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Competition and the New York Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition.

Born in New Jersey in 1993, Drew Petersen’s career had an auspicious and early beginning—he was presented at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall at age 5 and by age 9 performed a solo recital at Steinway Hall in Manhattan for the company’s 150th anniversary. His prodigious intellect and insatiable curiosity led him to winning a Davidson Fellow Award for the profoundly gifted at age 12 and graduating cum laude from Harvard at 19 with a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Social Sciences. He completed both his undergraduate and graduate music studies at The Juilliard School, where he was recently accepted into the prestigious Artist Diploma program.

Drew’s unique gifts have been profiled in The New York Times, New York Magazine, the documentary just normal by award-winning director Kim A. Snyder, and Andrew Solomon’s book Far From the Tree.

Read more about Drew Petersen