Exeter, NH (February 24, 2009)¾Phillips Exeter Academy music instructor and flutist Vanessa Holroyd will perform in concert with violist Amadi Azikiwe and pianist Joy Cline Phinney on Sunday, March 1, 2009, at 5 p.m. The concert will be in Phillips Church, located on the corner of Tan Lane and Front Street. The event is free and open to the public.

The trio will perform works by Telemann, Liebermann, Paganini, Francaix, and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, among others.

Holroyd earned a master’s degree in flute from McGill University under the tutelage of Robert Willoughby, Timothy Hutchins, Michael Parloff and Ransom Wilson. As an active performer and educator in the Boston area, she is a member of Arcadian Winds, a Boston-based woodwind quintet known for its promotion and performance of contemporary music and educational outreach. Holroyd is the principal flutist with the Festival Ballet Orchestra in Providence, RI, and performs with Emmanuel Music, the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra and the Key West Symphony in Florida. In addition to Exeter, she is a member of the chamber music faculty of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra. For the past two summers, Holroyd has performed and taught as a guest faculty artist at the Apple Hill Center for chamber music in Nelson, NH.

Phinney holds a master’s degree in piano from The Juilliard School, and has performed in solo and chamber music recitals across the United States and Europe. While in college, she studied with William Masselos, Adele Marcus and Samuel Sanders, and later earned a doctorial degree in music from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Phinney has collaborated in chamber music concerts, recording projects, radio and television programs with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, among others. Recent engagements include guest artist on the New York Philharmonic Chamber Music; a repeat engagement to “Arts Alive” in St. Thomas U.S. Virgin Islands with Holroyd; and the Cervantes Institute in New York City with violinists, Miguel Pérez-Espejo Cárdenas and Hsin-Lin Tsai, in Spanish Chamber Music II, among others. 

Azikiwe received his formal training at North Carolina School of the Arts as a student of Sally Peck, and later at the New England Conservatory with Marcus Thompson and conductor Pascal Verrot. As a professional performer, he has been heard in recitals in cities throughout the United States, and in Israel, Canada, Central and South America, India, Japan and China. Azikiwe has also performed at the U.S. Supreme Court. He has been a guest of the Chamber Music Society of New York’s Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. As a concerto soloist, Azikiwe has appeared with the Virginia Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony and the Fort Collins Symphony, and has performed at the Sarasota, Tanglewood, and Aspen Festivals, among others. As a chamber musician, he has performed with the Chicago Chamber Musicians and the Corigliano quartets, among others. Previously serving as the conductor of the Old Dominion University Chamber Orchestra and the Atlanta University Center Orchestra, Azikiwe currently serves on the faculties of James Madison University, and as music director of the Harlem Symphony Orchestra.  

For further information, please call Patrice Baker in the music department at (603) 777-3453.

To learn more about Exeter's concert series, please check the Musical Performances calendar page. To learn more about events at Exeter, please check the News & Events section of the website. Or, for a recorded voice line listing upcoming events, dial: (603) 777-4309.