A top medalist of the prestigious VII International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Ms. Chase has performed concerts in twenty-five countries throughout the world and is a recipient of the esteemed Avery Fisher Career Grant.

 

Equally at home in the virtuoso's repertoire, historically informed performance practice and contemporary music, Stephanie Chase offers an attractive repertoire of over 60 concertos and large works for violin and orchestra. As soloist she has collaborated with conductors that include Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Herbert Blomstedt, Marin Alsop, Enrique Diemecke, Christopher Hogwood, Hugh Wolff and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski; with conductor Kenneth Schermerhorn, she was a featured soloist with the Hong Kong Philharmonic on its first trip ever to the People's Republic of China.

 

In recent seasons her performances have been selected as a “Classical Act of the Decade” (Courier-Journal, Louisville), one of "20 Concerts to Hear this Fall" (WQXR) and “Critics' Choice” (Musical America).  Stephanie Chase’s world premiere recording on period instruments of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (featuring her own cadenzas) is “one of the twenty most outstanding performances in the work's recorded history” (Beethoven: Violin Concerto; Cambridge University Press) and honored with the highest possible ratings by BBC Music Magazine and Classic CD, including “Record of the Month.” Other recordings by Ms. Chase have been selected by Stereophile as a “Record to Die For” and Gramophone for its “Hot List,” and include several world premieres.

 

An advocate of contemporary music, Ms. Chase has premiered music by composers that include Earl Kim, Edward Applebaum, Joan Tower, Yehudi Wyner, Richard Pearson Thomas, and Taavo Virkhaus.

 

Stephanie Chase often performs in the dual roles of violin soloist and conductor, and she is recognized as a talented music arranger whose works are performed to rave reviews by the Perlman Music Program, Joshua Bell, The American String Project, the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, Boston Classical Orchestra, and the Music of the Spheres Society, among others.

 

Additionally renowned as a chamber musician whose festival appearances have included Bravo! Vail, Kuhmo, Bargemusic, and Caramoor, Ms. Chase is the Artistic Director of the Music of the Spheres Society, which presents chamber music concerts and lectures that are “dedicated to “exploring the links between music, philosophy and the sciences” (The New Yorker).

 

Born in Illinois, Stephanie Chase’s early violin teachers were her mother and Sally Thomas of The Juilliard School, and she was renowned as a child prodigy through concert performances starting at age two. She made her debut with the Chicago Symphony at eight and began extensive national concert touring while in her early teens. Following her Carnegie Hall debut at eighteen, she studied violin privately with Arthur Grumiaux and chamber music at the Marlboro Festival.

 

Ms. Chase has taught at New York University, Vassar College, MIT and the Boston Conservatory, and she is regularly invited to give master classes at prominent music conservatories that include The Juilliard School, Mannes at The New School, the University of Texas at Austin, The Frost School at the University of Miami, and the San Francisco Conservatory. She is a frequent judge for the violin concerto competitions at The Juilliard School, and recently judged for the Concorso Postacchini in Fermo, Italy, Concert Artists Guild String Competition, Hudson Valley String Competition, and Cooper International Violin Competition.  She has been a music advisor for Dover Publications, and articles she has written have been published by The Strad and Strings Magazine.   Since 2016 she is a regular guest columnist for Stay Thirsty, with a focus on the arts and the creative process.  Profiles of Ms. Chase have appeared in newspapers throughout the world and in such music journals as The Strad and Musical America, and her numerous television appearances include interviews for CBS "Morning News" and by Sir David Frost. More recently she has been profiled in Stay Thirsty, The Epoch Times, and Woman Around Town.

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Ms. Chase is a tenth generation lineal descendant of Aquila Chase, who arrived from England about 1639 and is the founder of one of New England's most important family lineages. Her current hobbies include studying the "music of the spheres" and the proportions of Stradivari violins, and researching her genealogy.  Stephanie Chase plays an acclaimed violin made in Venice in 1742 by Petrus Guarnerius, which she pairs with a bow made by Dominique Peccatte.