Watch all 7 epsiodes of "Cinderella No More | The English Viola Legacy"

Internationally acclaimed for his generous musical spirit, violist Samuel Rosenthal delights in sharing music with audiences of all ages and collaborating with some of today’s preeminent artists. His performances are recognized for their “intimate, personal approach” (Journal of the American Viola Society) and communicative style “clearly conveying the range of human emotions” (ClevelandClassical.com).

First Prize winner at the 2025 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, Sam was also recipient of the silver medal at the 2021 Primrose International Viola Competition. Other awards and recognitions include major prizes at the Johansen International Competition and, as a member of the Razumovsky String Quartet, at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.

Sam began his musical studies in Cleveland, and continued his viola studies with Jeffrey Irvine as a member of the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. His passion for chamber music was ignited by formative work with the Cavani String Quartet and Cleveland Quartet violinist Peter Salaff. Since 2016, he has been a member of the Perlman Music Program community as a student at both the Summer Music School and the Chamber Music Workshop. His time at PMP involved transformative travel residencies to Sarasota, Palm Beach, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Chamber music plays a central part in Sam’s musical life. Since 2023, he has attended the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, where he had the opportunity to perform and collaborate with its legendary roster of extraordinary artists. Sam has been invited to perform at a variety of celebrated chamber music festivals across the United States and abroad including Chamberfest Cleveland, Musique de Chambre en Normandie, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, Music from Angel Fire, and Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute. In March 2024, he performed at the Schiermonnikoog Festival in the Netherlands, where he received the Audience Prize. He is grateful to have performed with some of the preeminent artists of our time including Itzhak Perlman, Miriam Fried, Joseph Lin, and Anthony McGill.

Sam is a graduate of the Juilliard School where he had the honor of studying with Heidi Castleman, Misha Amory, and Hsin-Yun Huang and was a proud recipient of a Kovner Fellowship. He is currently studying at the Kronberg Academy under the tutelage of Nobuko Imai. These studies are funded by the Annika and Wolfgang Fink Patronage. His studies of viola and chamber music have also included work with esteemed artists such as Tabea Zimmermann, Kim Kashkashian, Donald Weilerstein, Roger Tapping, Yura Lee, Merry Peckham, and Joel Krosnick.

Acclaimed by the Strad for "eloquent” and "vibrant" playing, Paul is the 1st Prize winner of both the 13th Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, and the 14th National Sphinx Competition, Gold Medalist with High Distinction at the 5th Manhattan International Music Competition and has been soloist with major orchestras such as the Pittsburgh Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Filharmonica de Bogata, New Jersey Symphony, Nashville Symphony, New Haven Symphony, San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Sphinx Virtuosi, in addition to being featured soloist at London's Wigmore Hall, the Shalin Lui Performance Center, the 40th International Viola Congress, the Kennedy Center in DC, and in various venues across NYC, Philadelphia, and Boston.

In 2023 Paul joined the faculty of the Boston Conservatory at the Berklee School of Music with the hope of passing on his belief in music’s power to heal and to connect people. Paul is also a recipient of the Sphinx Organization's 2019 MPower artist-grant for his innovative work in self produced/engineered recording projects and a 2024 MPower grant to fund his A Zarabanda Project. Paul’s music, as well as his musical writings have been featured in the NYtimes, Strad Magazine, on NPR, and WQXR multiple times.

Paul regularly performs internationally in venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Detroit's Symphony Hall, Seoul Arts Center, Suntory Hall, Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall, Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, Auditorio Leon de Greiff in Colombia, the Lincoln Center, and many others. Additionally, he has been an artist at festivals such as the Yellow Barn, Sarasota, Vail International, Festival Del Sole, incheon music hic et nunc!, Hong Kong Generation Next Arts, Macau International, Sitka, Banff, Grand Canyon, and Portland’s Chamber Music Northwest, where he was artist in residence for the 2022-2024 seasons. The 2022-2024 seasons also featured Paul’s Catalyst Quartet as artists in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where they curated a series of inspired collaborations and performances throughout the year.

Paul has performed and collaborated with some of the greatest classical artists of our times such as Gil Shaham, Joshua Bell, Anthony Mcgill, Yo-Yo Ma, Jorg Widmann, Vadim Repin, Edgar Meyer, Donald Weilerstein, Khatia Buniatishvili, Kim Kashkashian, Anthony Marwood, Zlatomir Fung, Paul Huang, JP Jofre, and incredible artists of other genres such as Herman Cornejo, Cecile Mclorin Salvant, Aaron Diehl, Machine Dazzle, Caleb Teicher, and Calvin Royal. An avid new music proponent, Paul has worked directly with many of the leading voices in composition such as Jessie Montgomery (played together in Catalyst Quartet), David Ludwig Serkin, Gabriella Lena Frank, Richard Danielpour, Jimmy Lopez, Todd Machover, and maintains an especially close artistic partnership with Taiwanese composer Shiuan Chang. 

Paul comes from a Philadelphian viola lineage, beginning studies with Brynina Socolofsky (student of Leonard Mogill), and then continuing with Choon-jin Chang (Principal, Philadelphia Orchestra) and Che-hung Chen, through Temple University’s Center for Talented Youth and the Settlement Music School. In 2007, Paul entered the New England Conservatory of Music with full merit scholarship and began the most central stage of his training under Kim Kashkashian for 4 years. At NEC Paul made musical friends and colleagues that continue to influence him to this day and musical mentors including Dimitri Murath, Roger Tapping, Donald Weilerstein, Paul Katz, and after NEC, Steven Dann at the Glenn Gould School.  

Paul believes that it is crucial to expose the highest level of classical music to all people, and actively engages in community performances, gives masterclasses, composes and performs new music, and explores the boundaries of how classical music is traditionally presented. Paul has brought music to inner city schools, Native American Reservations, hospitals, nursing homes, and has presented concerts to areas and communities with limited access to live concert music.

Paul performs on a beautiful Hiroshi Iizuka viola in the ‘viola d’amore’ style, a prized Belgian bow by Pierre Guillaume awarded by the Bishops Strings shop in London, and is a proud supporter of Pirastro’s Eva Pirazzi Strings.

Recent seasons have seen Ridout tour across Europe, Asia, USA, Canada, South America and Australia, appearing with orchestras including the Bavarian Radio Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, hr-Sinfonieorchester, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Hamburger Symphoniker, Camerata Salzburg, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, the Hallé, Orchestre National Capitole Toulouse, WDR Sinfonieorchester, BBC Philharmonic, and Philharmonia Orchestra. Across his engagements, he has worked with conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo, Andrew Manze, Riccardo Minasi, Sir András Schiff, Lionel Bringuier, Sylvain Cambreling, Nicholas Collon, David Zinman, and Kazuki Yamada. 

 An iconic chamber musician, Ridout continues to present both solo and ensemble programmes across venues such as Wigmore Hall, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, and Alice Tully Hall New York. His partners include Janine Jansen, Isabelle Faust, Kian Soltani, Pablo Ferrández, Denis Kozhukhin, Benjamin Grosvenor, Federico Coli and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. 

In addition to these engagements, Ridout starts his tenure as one of Konzerthaus Dortmund’s Junge Wilde, which champions young, rising stars in the classical music world. He appears at festivals across Europe include his Verbier, Salzburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Rosendal and a residency at the Ryedale Festival in summer 2025. 

 Known for his wide ranging discography, Ridout regularly records for Harmonia Mundi, and has won a Gramophone Award for his recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, arranged for Viola by Lionel Tertis, in the concerto category in 2023. In 2024 Ridout released an album which pays tribute to the great violist Lionel Tertis. Previous recordings comprise of works by Prokofiev, Schumann, Britten, Vaughan-Williams and see Ridout collaborating BBC Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg as well as Pianists Frank Dupree and James Baillieu. In February 2025 he will release his first album for unaccompanied Viola with works by Britten, Shaw, Telemannn and Bach.

 A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and Kronberg Academy, he has earned accolades such as First Prize at both the Lionel Tertis and Cecil Aronowitz International Viola Competitions. Ridout is a former BBC New Generation Artist and also a recipient of the Borletti Buitoni Trust Fellowship. He was the inaugural recipient of Hamburger Symphoniker’s Sir Jeffrey Tate Prize, and also took part in Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program. 

 Timothy Ridout performs on a 1565-75  viola by Peregrino di Zanetto, generously on loan from a patron of the Beare’s International Violin Society. 

 With his remarkable range and commitment to expanding the viola repertoire, Ridout’s performances this season are poised to captivate audiences worldwide.

The Chinese violist Ziyu Shen was born in 1997 and first started playing the violin at the age of four. She switched to the viola at the age of twelve and started to study with Li Sheng at the Music Middle School affiliated to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She has taken part in masterclasses with Yuri Bashmet, Lars Anders Tomter, Antoine Tamestit, Roberto Diaz, Pinchas Zukerman and Gabor Takacs-Nagy.

Ziyu Shen has won first prize in a number of international major competitions. 2018 Ziyu Shen won the secon prize in the Tokyo International Viola Competition. In 2013 fifteen-year-old Ziyu Shen won first prize in the 11th Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition and was the youngest winner ever. In 2012 she also won first prizes in the Johansen International Competition in Washington DC and the Morningside Music Bridge Chamber Music Competition in Canada. Another first-prize was awarded her in the 2014 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. 2017 she won second prize in the Johannes Brahms Competition.

Ziyu Shen has given successful viola recitals in venues such as London’s Wigmore Hall and Royal Festival Hall and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in China. She has also taken part in the Verbier Festival Academy, where she was awarded the Academy Prize for viola. As a soloist, she has worked with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Soloists Chamber Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra in Canada, the Shenzhen and Qingdao Symphony Orchestras in China and the hr-symphony orchestra with Christoph Eschenbach.

From 2015 until summer of 2021 Ziyu Shen has been studying at Kronberg Academy with Nobuko Imai. These studies were funded by the Annika und Wolfgang Fink Scholarship.

Praised by Strad magazine as having "lyricism that stood out...a silky tone and beautiful, supple lines," Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt has established herself as one of the most sought-after violists of her generation.  In addition to appearances as soloist with the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, theTokyo Philharmonic, the Jacksonville Symphony, the Sphinx Chamber Orchestra, and Symphony in C, she has performed in recitals and chamber-music concerts throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia, including an acclaimed 2011 debut recital at London’s Wigmore Hall, which was described in Strad as being "fleet and energetic...powerful and focused."  

Ms. Pajaro-van de Stadt was the founding violist of the twice-Grammy-nominated Dover Quartet, and played in the group from 2008-2022. During her time in the group, the Dover Quartet was the First Prize-winner and recipient of every special award at the Banff International String Quartet Competition 2013, and winner of the Gold Medal and Grand Prize in the 2010 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. Also during her tenure, the Dover Quartet received  the Cleveland Quartet Award and an Avery Fisher Career Grant.  Her numerous awards also include First Prize at the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition and top prizes at the the Sphinx Competition and the Tokyo International Viola Competition. While in the Dover Quartet, Ms. Pajaro-van de Stadt was on the faculty at The Curtis Institute of Music and Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, and a part of the Quartet in Residence of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  She is now a member of the newly formed piano quartet “Espressivo!” along with acclaimed artists Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, and Anna Polonsky.

A violin student of Sergiu Schwartz and Melissa Pierson-Barrett for several years, she began studying viola with Michael Klotz at the Bowdoin International Music Festival in 2005. Ms. Pajaro-van de Stadt graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Roberto Diaz, Michael Tree, Misha Amory, and Joseph de Pasquale. She then received her Master's Degree in String Quartet with the Dover Quartet at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, as a student of James Dunham.

Yuval Gotlibovich is a performer, composer and teacher. As a violist, he won first prize at the Lionel Tertis (UK), Fischoff (USA) and ‘Aviv’ (Israel) competitions. He performs regularly as a soloist, recitalist and is a regular guest at some of Europe’s main music festivals and venues. His arrangements of thirteen of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in different musical styles are featured on a Sony album with the Trio Garnati. A passion for combining performance, composition and improvisation, has led to the creation of original live music to accompany films of the silent era. Gotlibovich was the youngest professor on the faculty of Indiana University and currently teaches at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano and the Escola Superior de Música, Catalunya (ESMUC).