Yoko and Nick

Yoko Rosenbaum, piano; Nicholas Mendez, piano

Yoko Rosenbaum, 17, is recognized as a "young artist beyond her age" (San Francisco Classical Voice). After making her solo debut with the Los Angeles Doctor’s Symphony at age ten, Yoko performed at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall at age eleven. Since then, Yoko has performed internationally in Poland, Russia, Israel, Germany, Austria, Estonia and Finland. Yoko is a prizewinner of numerous piano competitions, including the Alice Frazier Kitchen Competition, Robert Turner Piano Competition, Palisades Young Artist Competition, and Kathryn Gawartin Chopin Piano Competition. An avid chamber musician, Yoko's ensembles have garnered prizes in the Junior Chamber Music/USC Chamber Competition, MTAC State VOCE competition, and became a semifinalist in the acclaimed Fischoff National Chamber Competition. For the past six years, Yoko has been one of the select young performers in the Music@Menlo Summer Chamber Music Festival led by esteemed artistic directors Wu Han and David Finckel. Yoko studies with Jeffrey Lavner at the Colburn School of Performing Arts pursuant to the Richard D. Colburn Merit Scholarship.

Yoko is also a budding writer, with articles on music published in the San Francisco Classical Voice and a Gold Medal from the Scholastic National Art and Writing Contest. She is currently a junior at Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences where she serves on the board of the school’s literary magazine.

Nicholas Mendez is a 15 year old pianist from Pasadena, California. He attends the Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles, where he studies piano with Jeffrey Lavner and Advanced Music Theory with Dr. Robert Thies.

Nicholas is a recipient of the Richard D. Colburn Merit Scholarship since 2013, and has been selected to perform in the school’s Honors Recital series in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, both as a soloist as well as a chamber musician. Nicholas has been a winner of both the MTAC Contemporary and Bach Festivals every year since 2012 and won First Place in MTAC’s Concerto Competition in 2013. He is currently a semi-finalist in the 2015 Music Center’s Spotlight Awards.

For the past two summers, Nicholas has participated in the Yellow Barn Young Artist Program, and looks forward to joining fellow young musicians once again this summer in Vermont for the intensely rewarding chamber music program. Besides his Stravinsky duet with JCM, he plays in the Colburn School Honors Piano Trio. Last spring, his Colburn piano quartet was selected to perform at the LACMA music series. In his spare time, Nicholas likes to play competitive chess and is a Junior Member of the renowned Magic Castle Society.