Violinist Aaron Berofsky has toured extensively throughout the United States and abroad, gaining wide recognition as a soloist and chamber musician. As soloist, he has performed with orchestras in the United States, Germany, Italy, Spain and Canada. According to France’s Le Figaro, his playing is “beautiful, the kind of music-making that gives one true pleasure”.
Recent projects have included performances of the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas throughout the country, including at Merkin Hall in New York, and the complete Mozart violin sonatas at the International Festival Deia in Spain. He has appeared in such renowned venues as Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Corocoran Gallery, Het Doelen, L’Octogone, the Teatro San Jose and the Museo de Bellas Artes. Mr. Berofsky has been featured on NPR’s Performance Today and on the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and on radio throughout Europe as well. His acclaimed recordings can be found on the Sony, Naxos, New Albion, ECM, Audio Ideas, Blue Griffin and Chesky labels. Mr. Berofsky was the soloist for the 2009 NAXOS recording of Paul Fetler’s Violin Concerto No. 2. His 2011 recording of the complete Beethoven Sonatas with pianist Phillip Bush has been met with great acclaim.
Mr. Berofsky was the first violinist of the Chester String Quartet for fifteen years. The quartet has been acclaimed as “one of the country’s best young string quartets” by the Boston Globe. Tours have taken them throughout the Americas and Europe and the quartet members have collaborated with such artists as Robert Mann, Arnold Steinhardt, Franco Gulli, members of the Alban Berg quartet, Andres Diaz, Eugene Istomin and Ruth Laredo. Some notable projects over the years have included the complete cycles of the quartets by Beethoven and Dvorak, and numerous recordings by such composers as Mozart, Haydn, Barber, Porter, Piston, Kernis and Tenenbom. The Chester Quartet has served as resident quartet at the University of Michigan and at Indiana University South Bend.
An alumnus of the Juilliard School, Mr. Berofsky was a scholarship student of Dorothy DeLay. Other important teachers have included Robert Mann, Felix Galimir, Glenn Dicterow, Lorand Fenyves and Elaine Richey. Mr. Berofsky is known for his commitment to teaching and is Professor of Violin at the University of Michigan and was visiting Professor at the Hochschule fur Musik in Detmold, Germany as well. He taught at the Meadowmount School of Music for many summers, as well as the Chautauqua Institution. He has also taught at the Peter de Grote Festival in the Netherlands, Domaine Forget in Quebec, and Interlochen, and he has given classes at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin, Interlochen, the Adriatic Chamber Music Festival and the Conservatorio Palma Mallorca.
Mr. Berofsky’s interest in early music led him to perform with the acclaimed chamber orchestra Tafelmusik on period instruments, and he has recorded with them for the Sony label. Along with harpsichordist Edward Parmentier, he is co-director of the Baroque Chamber Orchestra at the University of Michigan. With a strong dedication to new music as well, he has worked extensively with many leading composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, performing, commissioning and recording music by John Cage, William Bolcom, Zhou Long, Michael Daugherty, Aaron Jay Kernis, Susan Botti, Morton Subotnick, Paul Fetler and Bright Sheng. Aaron Berofsky is the concertmaster of the Ann Arbor Symphony.