Hannah Ishizaki,18, a senior at the Mt Lebanon Senior High School studies violin with Hong-Guang Jia. She has played violin since she was six, and has been performing with the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra since 2013. She has been serving as the co-concertmaster since the 2016-17 season. As a chamber musician, Hannah was the first violin of the Imperial Quartet, which won the Montgomery Fellowship for 2016-2017. Previously, she was the first violin for the Penn Quartet, which won the Montgomery Fellowship for 2015-2016 and the Pittsburgh Concert Society Young Artists auditions.
Hannah is also a composer and aspiring conductor. Her orchestral work, City of Bridges, was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in February 2017. She was named an Emerging Composer by Tribeca New Music’s Young Composer Competition Division II for Chronicles in 2016, and The Hypothetical Machine in 2017. In December 2016, The Hypothetical Machine was premiered at the Mata Jr. Festival, Brooklyn, NY. Her orchestral work The Variance of a Trio won the 2015 Pittsburgh Philharmonic’s Young Composer Contest, and was premiered in March 2015. Hannah won the PYSO 2015-16 Conducting Competition judged by Maestro Leonard Slatkin.
