CLARA LYON Violin

Clara Lyon has performed in many of the world’s acclaimed concert halls, including Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tulley Hall, the Kennedy Center, Merkin Hall, Beijing’s National Center for the Arts, and the Shanghai Grand Theatre.  She graduated in 2008 from the Juilliard School with a Bachelor of Music degree, studying with Glenn Dicterow, and received her Master of Music from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2009.  She is currently a Staller Fellow at Stony Brook as a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree under the tutelage of Soovin Kim.  This past year, Ms. Lyon was a Teaching Assistant for the Violin Studio, and a winner of the Stony Brook Concerto Competition.  As a result, she will perform Bartok’s Violin Concerto No.2 with the graduate orchestra next year.

As a soloist, Ms. Lyon has played with many orchestras including the Pennsylvania Centre Orchestra, the Altoona Symphony Orchestra, the Susquehanna Symphony, the Williamsport Symphony, the Nittany Valley Symphony, the Hershey Symphony, the Festival de la Orquestra Sinfonica Juvenil de las Americas in Puerto Rico, and the Viva-Vivaldi Orchestra at the Kennedy Center.  As a student of Yumi Ninomiya Scott, she was a 2004 prizewinner of the NFAA ARTS Awards, and in the International Irving M. Klein Competition.  Equally at home in chamber music and orchestral roles, Ms. Lyon has worked with many of today’s leading musicians. Recent performances have found her with principal orchestral positions under such acclaimed directors as James Levine, Herbert Blomstedt, James Conlon, and Phillippe Entremont.  She has collaborated in performance with such artists as Soovin Kim, Eugene Drucker, Kathy Murdock, Colin Carr, Kurt Muroki, William Purvis, Alan Kay, and Frank Morelli.   Devoted to the programming of contemporary music as well as that of the past, Clara has played with Juilliard’s Axiom Ensemble since 2006.  She was the assistant concertmaster for the American stage premier at Tanglewood of Elliot Carter’s only opera, What Next, under Maestro James Levine.  She also performs in a duo with her sister, cellist Elizabeth Lyon; their performance of Ravel’s Duo Sonate garnered the sisters the Prix de Chambre at the 2007 Conservatoire Americain de Fontainebleau.   

During summers Ms. Lyon has participated in the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, the Conservatoire Americain de Fontainebleau, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Music Academy of the West, the Quartet Program, and Cultures in Harmony, a non-profit organization dedicated to global diplomacy through music.  She is on faculty at the Music Academy of Long Island, and maintains a private teaching studio.