Elizabeth Oakes, violist, is an active chamber musician, teacher and performer.  For twenty-two years, Ms. Oakes served as the violist of the Maia Quartet and performed throughout the United States, Asia, Canada, and Europe, concertizing in major venues including Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Hall, the 92nd Street Y and the Kennedy Center. Her collaborations with other artists include Maia Quartet performances with Daniel Avshalomov, Joel Krosnick, Helen Callus, Andre Michel Schub and Robert Kapilow. Ms. Oakes has taught at numerous summer festivals including the Interlochen Advanced String Quartet Program, The Great Wall International Music Academy in Beijing, and the Rocky Mountain Summer Conservatory in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Ms. Oakes’s musical and interdisciplinary interests have led her to develop many large-scale projects. With two colleagues, Ms. Oakes founded and served as an artistic director for the Foothills Music Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for nine years. As member of the Maia Quartet, she coordinated several large events, including Scandinavian/NordicFest – a month-long U. of I. festival of chamber music tied to film, theater, dance and lectures.  In her current position as Director of the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program. Ms. Oakes brings in nationally and internationally-recognized quartets to campus for week-long residencies.  These residencies reach across disciplines and impact the broader U. of I. campus as well as the larger state of Iowa. She has been the recipient of numerous grants from major granting organizations such as Chamber Music America, the Iowa Arts Council, Humanities Iowa and the John and Anna Hanes Foundation.  Ms. Oakes is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of Iowa and her current areas of research are focused on racial equity in classical music specifically and higher education more broadly.

Violinist Lina Bahn has a keen interest in collaborative and innovative repertoire, and has been called “brilliant” and “lyrical” by The Washington Post. Her most recent recording, _Mean Fiddle Summer_ (Naxos), was hailed by ClevelandClassical.com. Intrigued by the relationship between art and social context, Bahn is one of four founding members of MoVE (Modern Violin Ensemble). MoVE is an innovative quartet of four violinists, committed to commissioning music and starting a canon of repertoire for this relatively unknown instrumentation. Along with MoVE, she has collaborated with cellist Matt Haimovitz to produce a program dedicated to ocean/water awareness: “Voices of the Ocean,” which premiered at the National Gallery of Art in 2017.  She was a member of the award-winning Corigliano Quartet, with performances at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Library of Congress, and Ravinia; the Quartet earned an ASCAP/CMA Award for Adventurous Programming. In 2007, their Naxos recording of quartets by John Corigliano and Jefferson Friedman was selected by The New Yorker as one of the year’s “Best 10 Recordings.” They have been broadcast on NPR’s Performance Today, All Things Considered, Backstage Pass, WFMT’s Live From Studio One, and can be heard on the Albany, CRI, Naxos, and Bayer Labels.  As a guest with the Takacs String Quartet, Bahn performed at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Strathmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Queen Elizabeth Hall, among others. From 2008-2014, she served on faculty at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and she currently teaches at the Thornton School of Music at USC in Los Angeles.

Thomas Meglioranza was born in New York City, grew up in northern New Jersey, and graduated from Grinnell College and the Eastman School of Music. He was a winner of the Walter W. Naumburg, Concert Artists Guild, Franz Schubert/Music of Modernity, and Joy in Singing Competitions. Highlights from recent seasons include an all-Hugo Wolf recital at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the role of Lord Henry in Lowell Liebermann’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with Odyssey Opera, and Bach’s solo bass cantatas with the Lyra Baroque Orchestra. In addition to Messiah, Carmina Burana, and Bach passions with many US orchestras, he has also sung Copland’s Old American Songs with the National Symphony, Eight Songs for a Mad King with the LA Philharmonic, Bach cantatas with Les Violons du Roy, and John Harbison’s Fifth Symphony with the Boston Symphony. His operatic roles include Mozart’s Count Almaviva and Don Giovanni, Pierrot in Die tote Stadt, Chou En-Lai in Nixon in China and Prior Walter in Peter Eötvös’ Angels in America. With pianist Reiko Uchida, he has given recitals around the world and recorded albums of Schubert lieder, Winterreise and Fauré’s La bonne chanson. His discography also includes orchestral songs of Virgil Thomson with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Bach cantatas with the Taverner Consort. His music festival appearances include the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, as well as Ravinia, Tanglewood, Aspen, and Marlboro. He is a Visiting Artist at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge.

Praised for his versatility, Gregory Sauer performs in many different musical arenas. He has appeared in recital at the Old First Concert Series in San Francisco, Vanderbilt University, Rice University, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, and the Brightmusic Concert Series in Oklahoma City, among many others throughout the U.S. Mr Sauer has performed concertos with orchestras such as the Houston Symphony, the Quad City Symphony, the Columbus (GA) Symphony, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, and the Missoula Symphony, among many others. As a member of Trio Solis, he performed in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall.

Greg has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, MSR Classics and Mark Records. Sauer holds the positions of principal cello of the Tallahassee Symphony and assistant principal of the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra. He served nine seasons as principal cellist of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic Orchestra.

A committed teacher and mentor, Greg was appointed to the music faculty at Florida State University in 2006. He taught eleven years at the University of Oklahoma, and was named Presidential Professor in 2005. Other teaching positions have been a visiting professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles, and at summer programs such as the Texas Music Festival, the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, the Duxbury Music Festival, and the Foulger International Music Festival.

Pianist Thomas Sauer is highly sought after as soloist and chamber musician in a wide range of repertoire. Recent appearances include Carnegie Hall, St. John’s College, Oxford, and the Chamber Music Societies of Lincoln Center, Boston, and Philadelphia. With his long-time duo partner Colin Carr, Mr. Sauer has appeared at the Wigmore Hall (London), the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), and Da Camera (Houston). He has performed with members of the Juilliard String Quartet at the Library of Congress and given numerous concerts with the Brentano String Quartet.

Mr. Sauer’s varied discography includes recordings of Beethoven and Haydn piano sonatas (MSR Classics); with Colin Carr, the complete cello and piano works of Mendelssohn (Cello Classics) and Beethoven (MSR Classics); music of Hindemith with violist Misha Amory (Musical Heritage Society); music of Britten and Schnittke with cellist Wilhelmina Smith (Arabesque); music of Ross Lee Finney with violinist Miranda Cuckson (Centaur Records); and music of James Matheson (Yarlung Records).

Mr. Sauer has performed at many of the leading festivals in the United States and abroad, including Marlboro, Caramoor, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Northwest, and Taos, as well as Lake District Summer Music (England), Agassiz (Canada), Festival des Consonances (France), and Esbjerg International Chamber Music Festival (Denmark). A faculty member of Mannes and Vassar Colleges, Mr. Sauer was the founder and director of the Mannes Beethoven Institute, a highly regarded summer program that ran for fifteen seasons.