Aron Zelkowicz has been recognized by critics, audiences, and colleagues alike for his ability to communicate with audiences, students, and communities. With a career encompassing a broad range of activities as orchestral and solo cellist, performer, teacher, and administrator, he has cultivated a repertoire both classical and ethnic, familiar and obscure. Beginning this season (2011-2012) Mr. Zelkowicz is the principal cellist of the Miami Symphony Orchestra (MISO). He also serves as the Founder and Director of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival, which presents rare and diverse works from Jewish musical traditions to Pittsburgh audiences every spring. Currently in its eleventh annual season, the Festival has featured renowned ensembles and guest artists from the orchestral, chamber, early music, rock, and world music genres in innovative and thematic programs. Under his guidance the Festival has commissioned several works from major composers, received major grants and mainstream critical acclaim, and has been featured in full-length radio and cable television broadcasts.
As a chamber and orchestral musician, Mr. Zelkowicz has performed at the Tanglewood, Banff, Aspen, Sarasota, Chautauqua, Colorado, and Sunflower music festivals, the New York String Orchestra and Juilliard Quartet Seminars, with members of the Emerson and Cleveland Quartets, and on European and American tours with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Zelkowicz enjoys relating directly to both adults and children with outreach programs and personal introductions to his concerts, as he has done with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra in South Carolina, the Proteus Ensemble, Piccolo Spoleto’s Spotlight chamber music series, as well as his own Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival. He has served for several summers on the faculties of Point Counterpoint Chamber Music Camp in Vermont, the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina, and currently the North Carolina Governor's School as a teacher and coach to young string players. Recent professional highlights have included a solo tour of the midwest of the three unaccompanied suites by Benjamin Britten for the composer's centenary, a recital at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and his directorial debut of Ofer Ben-Amots' chamber opera "The Dybbuk".
Born in Ottawa, Canada, Aron Zelkowicz grew up in Pittsburgh and received degrees from the Eastman School of Music (BM), Indiana University (MM), and most recently SUNY Stony Brook (DMA), where his major teachers included Anne Martindale Williams, Paul Katz, Steven Doane, Janos Starker, and Colin Carr. He plays a cello made in 1705 by Giovanni Grancino and is currently based in Boston.
