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Director for Rising Stars
Violinist Pamela Frank was born in New York City in 1967. As the daughter of pianists Lilian Kallir and Claude Frank, she partook of a musically vibrant home life, including violin lessons from the age of five. Although she enrolled in the pre-college division of the Juilliard School of Music, she otherwise enjoyed a typical adolescence. She attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1989. Her violin teachers included Shirley Givens for eleven years, followed by Szymon Goldberg and Jaime Laredo. She officially launched her career in 1985, when she accompanied Alexander Schneider and the New York String Orchestra in four performances at Carnegie Hall. Not until ten years later, in 1995, did she make her Carnegie Hall solo recital debut. In 1999, she won the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize.
Accustomed to being surrounded by musicians at home, Frank continued the trend when away by spending many of her summers at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. In the course of practicing and performing chamber music with the musicians there, as well as touring with them on occasion, she formed significant and lasting professional associations with many of the world-class performers with whom she would later concertize in cities around the globe. Her father, pianist Claude Frank, and pianist Peter Serkin were two such performers.
Ms. Frank's passion for chamber music, and the finely tuned synergy of the groups in which she plays today, have produced many memorable performances, both live and recorded. Among Ms. Frank's noteworthy chamber music recordings are the Brahms Violin Sonatas with Peter Serkin on the London/Decca label, the Piano Trio of Frédéric Chopin with Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma on Sony Classical, and the "Trout" Quintet of Franz Schubert, also on Sony Classical.
Aside from her chamber music activities, Pamela Frank carries on an active career as a soloist with major American orchestras, and as a recitalist. Although devoted to the standard repertoire, she frequently includes contemporary works by composers such as Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Toru Takemitsu, and Aaron Jay Kernis in her live and recorded performances.
Frank is a member of the faculties of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and Stony Brook University in New York. She and her husband, violinist Alexander Simionescu, live in the New York City area.
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