USC Thornton Chamber Virtuosi

Hailed by The Guardian as “a cellist of power and grace” who possesses “mature artistry and willingness to go to the brink,” GRAMMY-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres. His projects delve deep into our cultural fabric, reimagining traditional works and commissioning new ones to propel classical music into the future, inspiring The New York Times to write, “Woods is an artist rooted in classical music, but whose cello is a vehicle that takes him, and his concertgoers, on wide-ranging journeys.” He is a recipient of the 2022 Chamber Music America Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.

In the 2022-2023 season, Woods premieres a new version of his evening-length, multimedia tour de force Difficult Grace at 92Y, UCLA, and Chicago’s Harris Theater; curates and performs a program honoring the centennial of composer George Walker at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.; premieres Freida Abtan’s My Heart is a River, commissioned by the Seattle Symphony; and performs a world premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir at Carnegie Hall as part of Claire Chase’s Density Series. The Great Northern Festival in Minneapolis will present Woods in his critically acclaimed performance installation, Iced Bodies, in which Woods, in a wetsuit, plays an obsidian ice cello. Woods is also a member of celebrated new music ensemble Wild Up, with whom he is nominated for a 2023 Grammy Award. 

Recital appearances this season include concerts with pianist Andrew Rosenblum at Dumbarton Oaks in D.C., Boston's Isabella Gardner Museum, and The Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills, and a return to his former home Brussels for a solo recital at Das Haus. He also tours to Washington Performing Arts, Krannert Center, Stanford Live, California Center for the Arts, Count Basie Center for the Arts, Auburn University, and Emory University with the Chad Lawson Trio. In addition, Woods will hold residencies at Montclair State University and Oberlin Conservatory. The season will also see the release of a new solo album on Cedille Records and the soundtrack of the PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust – a film by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein – to which Woods contributed.

In addition to solo performances, he has appeared with the ICTUS Ensemble (Brussels, BE), Ensemble L’Arsenale (IT), zone Experimental (CH), Basel Sinfonietta (CH), Ensemble LPR, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Atlanta and Seattle Symphonies, and in chamber music with violinist Hilary Hahn and pianist Andreas Haefliger. A fierce advocate for contemporary arts, Woods has collaborated and worked with a wide range of artists ranging from the likes of Louis Andriessen, Elliott Carter, Heinz Holliger, G. F. Haas, Helmut Lachenmann, Klaus Lang, and Peter Eötvos to Peter Gabriel, Sting, Lou Reed, Dame Shirley Bassey, and Rachael Yamagata to such visual artists as Ron Athey, Vanessa Beecroft, Jack Early, Adam Pendleton, and Aldo Tambellini. In the 2021-2022 season, he premiered concertos by Rebecca Saunders and Tyshawn Sorey.

In recent years, Woods has appeared in concert at the Royal Albert Hall – BBC Proms, Aspen Music Festival, Ojai Festival, Snape Maltings Festival, the Ghent Festival, Washington Performing Arts, Strathmore, Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Le Poisson Rougel, Cafe OTO, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Klang Festival-Durham, INTER/ actions Symposium, ICMC-SMS Conference (Athens, GR), NIME-London, Sound and Body Festival, Instalakcje Festival, Virginia Tech, La Salle College (Singapore), and FINDARS (Malaysia), amongst others. Recent awards include a DCASE artist grant, Earle Brown/ Morton Feldman Foundation Grant, McGill University-CIRMMT/IDMIL Visiting Researcher Residency, Centre Intermondes Artist Residency, Francis Chagrin Award, Concours [Re]connaissance-Premiere Prix, and the Paul Sacher Stiftung Research Scholarship.

His debut solo album, asinglewordisnotenough (Confront Recordings-London), has garnered great acclaim since its release in November 2016 and has been profiled in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, and The Guardian, among others. In April 2023, Woods releases the world premiere recording of Difficult Grace on Cedille Records. He was nominated for a 2023 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance as a soloist in Wild Up’s recording, Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy on New Amsterdam Records (2022).

Woods recently joined the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California as Assistant Professor of Practice - Cello and Chamber Music. He previously served on the faculties of the University at Buffalo, University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, and the Chicago Academy of the Arts and as Artist in Residence at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and Northwestern University - Center for New Music. Woods holds degrees from Brooklyn College, Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, and a PhD from the University of Huddersfield. In the 2020-21 season, he was an Artist in Residence with the Kaufman Music Center, and from 2018-2020 he served as Artist in Residence with Seattle Symphony and Creative Consultant for the interactive concert hall, Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center.

Seth Parker Woods is a Pirastro Artist and endorses Pirastro Perpetual Strings worldwide.

Lina Bahn is a violinist who has a keen interest in collaborative and innovative repertoire, and has been called “brilliant” and “lyrical” by the Washington Post. Her most recent publication of Mean Fiddle Summer on the Naxos Label was hailed by the ClevelandClassical.com, “From start to finish, the violinist demonstrates her adroit technical facility, kaleidoscope of colors, and consummate musical taste.”

As a committed educator, she was on the faculty at the University of Colorado-Boulder from 2008-2015, and has taught masterclasses and lessons throughout the world, including those at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory in Singapore, the Sydney Conservatory, Hong Kong University, Renmin University in Beijing, The Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music, among others.  She was on the faculty of the Sierra Summer Academy of Music from 2001-2013, the Institute of the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, Italy, Green Mountain Chamber Music Summer Festival, the Borromeo Music Festival, the Mostly Modern Festival, and the Atlantic Music Festival. Currently, she teaches at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Intrigued by the relationship between art and social context, Bahn is one of four founding members of MoVE (Modern Violin Ensemble modernviolinensemble.org). 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 at the National Gallery of Art.

Lina Bahn was a member of the award-winning Corigliano Quartet, which held prestigious residency posts at The Juilliard School, Indiana University and Dickinson College, as well as on summer faculty at Madeline Island Chamber Music Festival, Marrowstone, Canandaigua Chamber Festival, and the Chicago Suzuki Institute. The quartet’s performances have brought them to such venues as The Library of Congress, Alice Tully Hall, Ravinia Festival, Corcoran Gallery, Phillips Collection, Carnegie Hall, and the Library of Congress, and earned them the ASCAP/CMA Award for Adventurous Programming. In 2007, their Naxos Records recording of quartets by John Corigliano and Jefferson Friedman was selected by The New Yorker magazine as one of the year’s “Best 10 Recordings.” The Corigliano Quartet was lauded by the Strad Magazine for their “abundant commitment and mastery”, and praised as “musicians who seem to say ‘listen to this!'” by the New York Times. They have been broadcast on NPR’s Performance Today, All Things Considered, and Backstage Pass, Chicago’s WFMT’s Live From Studio One, and can be heard on the Albany, CRI, Naxos, and Bayer Labels.

Chamber music performances have included recitals and concerts in festivals such as the Oregon Bach Festival, the Costa Rican International Chamber Festival, the Sierra Summer Festival, the Grand Canyon Music Festival, the Garth Newel Music Series, and the Festival de Música de Cámara de San Miguel de Allende, and Music on the Hill in Rhode Island.  In the spring of 2010, she was on tour with the Takacs Quartet, performing at Carnegie Hall, the Southbank Centre, Concertgebouw, and the Mariinsky Theater.  From 1992-1994 she toured extensively throughout Chile with the Bahn-Mahave-Browne piano trio as a recipient of national grants to teach and perform.  In 2005, their piano trio was selected to perform for the president of Chile and the King of Indonesia, in Kuala Lumpuur. 

In Washington, D.C., Lina Bahn was the Executive Director and violinist with the VERGE Ensemble for fourteen years, while it was the resident ensemble of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The VERGE Ensemble performed in Paris, New York, Cleveland, at the Livewire Festival (UMBC) and Third Practice Festival (Richmond), University of Virginia, and was the resident ensemble for the June in Buffalo Festival in 2009.  They have performed at Le Poisson Rouge, The Issue Project Room, and the National Museum of American Indians.  She is was a member of the National Gallery New Music Ensemble of the Smithsonian in 2010, which gave its inaugural performance in the East Wing, performing works of Xenakis, Antosca, and a premiere by Roger Reynolds. The National Gallery Ensemble participated in the 2012 Washington D.C. John Cage Centennial Festival, with performances at the East Wing, the NGA Auditorium, and at the Maison Française of the French Embassy.  These included premieres of composers Christian Wolff, Beat Furrer, Robert Ashley, and George Lewis.

As a soloist, she has made appearances with the Chicago Chamber Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, La Orquesta Sinfonica de la Serena (Chile), and the Malaysian National Symphony Orchestra, the Fort Collins Symphony, and Pro Musica Colorado Chamber Orchestra. Solo recitals include those at the Phillips Collection, The Stone, Issue Project Room, and at The Corcoran Gallery of Art.  She has commissioned numerous new and arranged works including those by Benjamin Broening, Ken Ueno, Dan Visconti, Jeffrey Mumford, Adam Silverman, Steve Antosca, Keith Fitch, Daniel Wohl, Pamela Z, Morton Subotnick, Daniel Kellogg, among others.  

Lina Bahn studied with Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School for her undergraduate degree. She completed her Masters degree as the recipient of the Jane Bryant Fellowship Award under the tutelage of Paul Kantor.  Her Doctorate in Music is from Indiana University, where she was an Associate Instructor and studied with Miriam Fried and Paul Biss. Her early training in Chicago started with Lillian Schaber and she finished her high school years under the guidance of Roland and Almita Vamos.