XAK BJERKEN has appeared with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival Orchestra, the Schoenberg Ensemble, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Glinka Hall in Saint Petersburg, the Konzerthaus in Berlin, and for many years performed throughout the US as a member of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet.

He has worked closely with composers György Kurtag, Sofia Gubaidulina, Steven Stucky, and George Benjamin, and has premiered piano concertos by Stephen Hartke, Elizabeth Ogonek, and Jesse Jones, a recording of which was released by Naxos in September 2021. He is also director of Ensemble X, a new music group, and has held chamber music residencies at the Tanglewood Music Center, Spoleto Festival, and Olympic Music Festival.

Mr. Bjerken is Professor of Music at Cornell University, where he co-directs Mayfest with his wife, pianist Miri Yampolsky. He has also served on the faculties of Kneisel Hall, Eastern Music Festival, and Chamber Music Conference at Bennington College. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the Peabody Conservatory as a student of and teaching assistant to Leon Fleisher. This performance marks his debut under San Francisco Symphony auspices.

Violinist Florin Parvulescu was born in 1971 in Bucharest, Romania. He started playing the violin at six at the Georges Enescu Music School. In 1978, he attended the Juilliard School Pre-College division, studying with Shirley Givens. By 1989, Florin Parvulescu had begun studying at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where his principal teachers were Sylvia Rosenberg and Herbert Greenberg. He also worked closely with pianist Leon Fleisher and violinist Berl Senofsky. In addition to earning Bachelor’s and Artist Diploma degrees at Peabody, Mr. Parvulescu was awarded numerous prizes, including the Marbury Award and Yale Gordon Award.

From 1996 to 1998, Florin Parvulescu was a member of the St. Louis Symphony. In 1998, he joined the San Francisco Symphony. He is currently serving as Artistic Director of the Tateuchi Institute of Music, an annual festival and workshop in Mountain View, California, in its fifth year.

As soloist and chamber musician Mr. Parvulescu has appeared in recital series at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Dame Myra Hess recital series in Chicago, Aspen Music Festival, Berkeley Chamber Music Series, Johanessen International School of the Arts in Victoria British Columbia, San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music Series, Chamber Music Series St. Louis, Heidelberg, Germany, and Fontainebleau, France, and as a soloist with the Xiamen Philharmonic in 2009 and 2010. He has performed in chamber music concerts with pianists Kiril Gerstein and Anton Nel and performed Thomas Ades’s Piano Quintet with the composer at the piano.

Mr. Parvulescu gave masterclasses at the Beijing Conservatory and taught at the Singapore International Violin Festival in 2018. He was featured on the McGraw-Hill Young Artist Showcase on WQXR radio in New York, on National Public Radio, on WFMT in Chicago, and on King FM in Seattle. The San Francisco Chronicle has praised him for his “gleaming tone and pyrotechnics.”