Attacca Quartet

New York based violinist and pedagogue Amy Schroeder is a founding member of the Grammy award winning Attacca Quartet and has been hailed by the Washington Post as ‘an impressive artist whose playing combines imagination and virtuosity.’ She has soloed with orchestras including the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Amherst Symphony, the Clarence Symphony, the Hilton Head Symphony, and the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra.  As a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet, Ms. Schroeder has soloed with the Spanish National Orchestra with composer John Adams conducting, and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra with Marin Alsop conducting. Since its inception the Attacca Quartet has won an array of awards including the grand prize in the Osaka International String Quartet Competition, the National Federation of Music Clubs Centennial Chamber Music Award, the Arthur Foote Award from the Harvard Musical Association, and the Lotos Prize in the Arts from the Stecher and Horowitz Foundation. The quartet has also held prestigious residencies including one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and currently at Texas State University in San Marcos.  With the Attacca Quartet Ms. Schroeder can be heard on several critically acclaimed recordings produced by Azica Records: “Fellow Traveler” the complete works of John Adams, Haydn: “Seven Last Words,”  “Songlines,” works of Michael Ippolito, and most recently on Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records the Grammy award winning album, Shaw/Attacca Quartet ‘Orange.’ In 2016 the Quartet completed a six year project in which they performed all 68 of Haydn’s String Quartets.

Ms. Schroeder is proud to serve as music faculty member at Vassar College.  She also recently formed the Schroeder Umansky Duo with her husband Felix Umansky, internationally celebrated cellist and member of the Harlem Quartet. In 2002 she was the recipient of the Henrietta and Albert J. Ziegle Jr. Scholarship, which provided the tuition for her studies at Juilliard where she was a student of Sally Thomas and the Juilliard String Quartet. Growing up in Buffalo, NY Ms. Schroeder began her violin studies with Karen Campbell and Thomas Halpin. She currently plays on two different violins, a Fernando Gagliano made in 1771 on loan to her from the Five Partners Foundation, and a violin made by Nathan Slobodkin in 2012.  In New York Ms. Schroeder teaches violin and piano to students of all ages, and in her spare time she enjoys composing, traveling with her husband, and scuba diving.

Violinist Domenic Salerni is active as a chamber musician, composer and arranger, and freelance musician. As the newest member of the Grammy Award-winning Attacca Quartet, he looks forward to a full season of international concerts and tours ranging from Japan to Germany England to Brazil, including performances of the full cycle of Beethoven String Quartets at Trinity Church Wall Street in June. Domenic will be joining the Chiarina Chamber Players again this season for their Beethoven celebration, performing six of the major Piano Trios with pianist Efi Hackmey and cellist Carrie Bean Stute. Domenic is also pleased to join the PostClassical Ensemble for a number of concerts, as well as the Baltimore Symphony for their performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony.

From 2016-2020 Domenic was the first violinist of the Dalí Quartet, Quartet-in-Residence at West Chester University and recipient of the Atlanta Symphony’s Aspire Award. In 2016, as a member of Foundry, he was a laureate of the first inaugural M Prize at the University of Michigan. Prior to his tenure with Dalí, he was first violinist of the Vega Quartet, Quartet-in-Residence at Emory University, from 2010-2016, where he received ArtsATL’s “30 Under 30” award. In 2010, Domenic composed the film score to Giuseppe de Liguorno’s “Dante’s Inferno” (1911). It was premiered at the Yale Dante Symposium that year with Samuel Carl Adams on bass, and was given its second performance at Emory University through a collaboration between the Department of Italian and French, the Center for Creative Studies, and the Department of Film, with Adam Bernstein on bass.

In 2009, Domenic was a laureate of the Sion-Valais International Violin Competition, and in 2008, he joined violist Ayane Kozasa in Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante” at the prize-winning concert for the Cleveland Institute Concerto Competition  Summer festival appearances include Highlands-Cashiers, Brevard Institute, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and MIMIR. He holds degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he graduated with academic honors, and the Yale University School of Music, where he was the recipient of the Yale Chamber Music Society Award. Domenic started violin at the age of three in the Suzuki Method with Linda Fiore. Previous teachers include Linda Cerone, Naoko Tanaka, Diane Monroe, Lee Snyder, Geoffrey Michaels, and William Preucil. He can be found on the Delos, Naxos, Artek, Canary, Innova, and DoMilo labels.

Hailed by the New York Times as an “elegant soloist” with a sound “devotional with its liquid intensity,” Nathan is a composer, entrepreneur, and violist of the Attacca Quartet. Nathan has collaborated with many of the great artists of today including Björk, Itzhak Perlman, Sting, David Crosby, Becca Stevens, David Byrne, Trey Anastasio, Joshua Bell, Simon Rattle, and others. He has premiered music by Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, Timo Andres, Elliot Cole and Gabriel Kahane. Nathan is also a violist in the Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall, Decoda and an Honorary Ambassador to the city of Chuncheon, South Korea.

Apart from performing, Nathan is the Founder and Executive Director of Musicambia. Founded in 2013, Musicambia brings music learning and ensemble performance to prisons throughout the United States. Through working closely with incarcerated individuals on performance, music theory, ear training and composition, Musicambia’s professional musicians build artistic communities that nurture the humanity of all involved. Musicambia currently runs a music conservatory in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York with other programs in Indiana and South Carolina. In addition to their work in the U.S., Musicambia has collaborated with projects in Venezuela and Scotland.

Schram is a prizewinner of the 2007 Primrose International Viola competition, the 2006 Corpus Christi Concerto Competition and a First Prize winner of the 2008 ASTA National Solo Competition. He studied viola at Indiana University with Alan de Veritch and at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain with Diemut Poppen and Yuval Gotlibovich. Afterwards, as an Ensemble Connect Fellow, he was documented by radio journalist Jeff Lunden for a 2-year, four-part series for NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Cellist Andrew Yee has been praised by Michael Kennedy of the London Telegraph as “spellbindingly virtuosic”. Trained at the Juilliard School, they are a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet who have released several albums to Critical acclaim including Andrew’s arrangement of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” which Thewholenote.com praised as “ . . .easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” They were the quartet-in-residence at the Met Museum in 2014, and have won the Osaka and Coleman international string quartet competitions. Their newest recording of the string quartets of Caroline Shaw won a GRAMMY for best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance.

As a soloist last season Andrew performed John Taverner’s The Protecting Veil and Strauss Don Quixote. In 2019 they won the first prize at Oklahoma University’s National Arts Incubation Lab for their pitch of a wearable garment that translates sound into vibrations for the hard of hearing. They like making stop-motion videos of food, drawing apples, cook like an Italian Grandma and has developed coffee and cocktail programs for award-winning restaurants (Lilia, Risbobk, Atla) in New York City.

Their solo project “Halfie” draws on their experience as a bi-racial and non-binary person, having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them. The works commissioned and on the concerts will feature a wide range of composers all for solo cello.

They play on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan fro the Five Partners Foundation.