Sixteen-year-old Madeleine Baverstam, winner of the 2001 Henry and Gertrude Lasker Young Soloist Award, comes from a musical family and performs frequently with her three brothers and her mother as a member of the Baverstam Chamber Players. She is a junior at Newton South High School and is also a student at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School, where she studies composition with Larry Bell and piano with Margaret Bachelder, and is a member of the NEC Youth Philharmonic, conducted by Ben Zander. She began her violin studies with Esther Degrunigen and continued them with the late Zinaida Gilels. She is currently a student of Marylou Speaker Churchill. Her musical education has also included summers studying and performing chamber music at Greenwood Music Camp and at the Musicorda Young Artists Series, and she has toured Italy, Greece, Venezuela, and Cuba as a member of various orchestras. Madeleine is also a member of two NEC chamber ensembles -- as violinist in a piano trio with her brother, cellist Sebastian Baverstam, and pianist Ben Green, the NSO's 2000 Lasker Competition winner; and as pianist in a duo with her brother Sebastian. And in 1997 she won the All-Newton Music School concerto competition -- as a pianist.
As a member of the Baverstam Chamber Players, Madeleine has performed at Boston's French Library, the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., the Old Whaling Church on Martha's Vineyard, the gala for Presidents' Night at the Boston Pops, Uppsala Cathedral in Sweden, and at chamber music events and festivals in Newport, Minneapolis, Cape Cod, Florida, France, and Switzerland. The family has been featured on international broadcasts of Voice of America, on National Public Radio, and in numerous televised broadcasts. Composers Julia Scott Carey, Cythinia Wong, and Margaret McAllister, have written works for the group, including a concerto for violin, clarinet, and cello, which they have performed with the Wellesley Symphony Orchestra, the Salem Philharmonic and the Charlotte (Florida) Symphony.
Madeleine is also an accomplished composer. She won the 1999 New England Piano Teacher's Association Award for Original Composition for a piece for violin and piano, and her most recent work, a string quartet, was premiered at the New England Conservatory in June 2001 and was recently performed in the Contemporary Music Festival at the New England Conservatory and in a master class with Stephen Hartke. Her duo for violin and cello will be performed at a benefit for the Cape and Islands Chamber Music Festival in March, and at the WCRB classical cartoon festival in Symphony Hall.
