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The American violinist, Amy Schwartz Moretti, was born in Wisconsin, raised in North Carolina and California, and is the third generation of professional musicians in her family. With degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM), and pre-college studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she i studied with Donald Weilerstein and Zaven Melikian. She was coached by Peter Salaff and the Cavani Quartet at CIM’s Intensive Quartet Seminars. Earlier studies were with Joanne Bath in North Carolina and Margaret Pardee of the Juilliard School during several summers at Meadowmount. She was mentored by Isaac Stern at his prestigious Chamber Music Workshop in Carnegie Hall and twice awarded fellowships from the Aspen Center for Advanced Quartet Studies where she was coached by some of the finest chamber musicians of our time. Along the way she won awards and prizes and made her New York solo concerto debut at Carnegie Hall a few months before graduating valedictorian from CIM. While studying for her master’s degree, she won the concertmaster audition of The Florida Orchestra marking the beginning of her professional career.
Amy Schwartz Moretti then served as concertmaster of the Oregon Symphony before joining the Mercer University Townsend School of Music in 2007, as director of the newly established Robert McDuffie Center for Strings. She has performed as guest concertmaster with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the New York Pops, and the Hawaii Pops as well as the festival orchestras of Brevard, Colorado and Grand Teton, and served as concertmaster of CityMusic Cleveland, a chamber orchestra bringing free concerts into the neighborhoods of northeastern Ohio. Her solo appearances with orchestras have included performances with the Asheville, Astoria, Brevard-Transylvania, Corvallis, Florida, Gulf Coast, Macon, Macon Pops, North Carolina, Omaha, Oregon, Portland Columbia, Raleigh, Richmond, Salem, Tar River, Valdosta, Wilmington and Winston-Salem symphony orchestras. With James Ehnes, Richard O’Neill and Robert deMaine, she is a member of the internationally acclaimed Ehnes Quartet.
Amy Schwartz Moretti, recognized as a deeply expressive artist with an affinity for chamber music, has a musical career of broad versatility that spans nearly two decades. She is former concertmaster of the Oregon Symphony and Florida Orchestra, and recipient of prizes from the D’Angelo International Young Artist Competition and the Irving M. Klein International String Competition. She was also an award winner at the Washington International Competition for Strings and made her New York concerto debut in Carnegie Hall. The St. Petersburg Times describes her playing as “breathtakingly rich in tone and color” and The American Record Guide has hailed her as a “brilliant soloist.” In addition to her performances as an orchestral soloist and concertmaster, she is an award-winning chamber music artist, appearing extensively in concert series and at music festivals across North America and Europe. She has appeared at such historic venues as Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Hall, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Palazzo Barberini in Rome, and Wigmore Hall in London.
In 2014, Amy premiered GRAMMY® winner Matt Catingub’s concerto: Three Shades of Blue for Violin, Jazz Trio and Orchestra written for her. She has premiered chamber works by Richard Drexler, Gary Kulesha, Libby Larsen, Dante Medina, Adam Neiman, Kevin Puts, Mark Sforzini and Tomas Svoboda, and most recently a work for violin and piano by Christopher Schmitz. In upcoming concert seasons, she performs the Catingub concerto in Japan and the USA, and returns to Europe for performances with the Ehnes Quartet after a highly successful debut tour in 2014. Her recent engagements include concerts at Memminger Auditorium in Charleston, Spivey Hall in Atlanta, Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Florida’s Palladium Theatre, the Supreme Court Grand Hall in Washington, D.C., ChamberFest Cleveland, and the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival on Long Island.
Recent recording projects include Prokofiev and Béla Bartók duos with James Ehnes. Their rendition of Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins, lauded as “electrifying” by The Telegraph (UK), was included in "Prokofiev: Complete Works for Violin" (Chandos) that won the 2014 Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year. Chandos released their rendition of B. Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins in the album "Bartók: Chamber Works for Violin, Vol. 3", that was awarded the 2015 Juno in the same category. Additional releases in 2014 were a newly commissioned String Trio (Harmonia Mundi) by John Harbison recorded with violist Richard Yongjae O’Neill and cellist Ani Aznavoorian; a live recording of Charles Ives’ Largo for Violin, Clarinet & Piano (Onyx Classics) with clarinetist Ricardo Morales and pianist Anna Polonsky; and Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11 plus Dmitri Shostakovich’s string quartets Nos. 7 & 8 (Onyx Classics) with the Ehnes Quartet. Her debut solo album "Kaleidoscope" (Sono Luminus) with pianist Elizabeth Pridgen was released in 2011, featuring works by Gershwin/Heifetz, Tchaikovsky and Massenet, and the Moszkowski Suite joined by violinist Robert McDuffie.
Amy Schwartz Moretti’s dedication to collaboration and performance inspires her teaching. She was instrumental in the development of intensive summer chamber music workshops for young musicians in both Florida and Oregon. At Mercer University, she teaches the McDuffie Center’s violin students and coaches chamber music. A frequent performer on campus, she developed and curates the Fabian Concert Series and is violinist of Cortona Trio with her colleagues cellist Julie Albers and pianist Elizabeth Pridgen. She has been director of the Center for Strings since its inception and formative years, working closely with Robert McDuffie and ten faculty Distinguished Artists. She holds the Caroline Paul King Chair.
Amy Schwartz Moretti and her husband reside in Georgia with their two young sons. The Cleveland Institute has recognized her with an Alumni Achievement Award, and she is the 2014 San Francisco Conservatory of Music Fanfare Honoree, the first pre-college graduate to be recognized. Through the generous efforts of the Stradivari Society of Chicago, she has been awarded extended use of an outstanding Italian instrument, the 1744, G.B. Guadagnini violin known as the “Canadian.” |
