Susannah Foster, Violinist

Introduction: Please see my website for student testimonials, full bio, and media. Susannah completed her string pedagogy training at Northwestern University, where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in Violin Performance. She performs and teaches internationally on modern and baroque instruments, and has over a decade of experience teaching violin, viola, chamber music, and music theory to students of all levels, ages three through seventy. She has served on the faculty of Northwestern University's Music Academy, the People's School of Music in Chicago, the Performing Arts Center of Metrowest in Framingham, and has worked extensively with the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras. Her teaching draws from the Suzuki, Rolland, and traditional methods, with particular emphasis on body awareness, balance, and ease of movement, informed by her study of the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has won top prizes at competitions including Northwestern’s Thaviu String Competition, the Williams Chorale Performing Arts Scholarship Competition, and the International Chamber Music Foundation of New England Ensemble Competition, and was a recipient of the Tanglewood Jules C. Reiner Violin Prize. She has served as concertmaster of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Tanglewood Music Center, Music Academy of the West, and Northwestern University Symphony Orchestras, and has performed frequently as a substitute musician with the New World Symphony. She studied historical performance at the Oregon Bach Festival's Berwick Academy and the Tafelmusik Winter Institute. Susannah has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Africa under the baton of artists such as Riccardo Muti, Kurt Masur, Jaap Van Sweden, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, John Williams, Christoph Eschenbach, Herbert Blomstedt, and Oliver Knussen, and at the Oregon Bach Festival alongside Rachel Podger and Robert Levin. She has played for Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, Julia Fischer, Arnold Steinhardt, Joseph Silverstein, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Menahem Pressler, and studied chamber music with Pamela and Claude Frank, as well as members of the Guarneri, Takacs, Juilliard, Vermeer, and Cleveland String Quartets. Her principal teachers include Blair Milton, Almita Vamos, and Gerardo Ribeiro, and she has studied baroque violin with Marc Destrubé and members of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. I am passionate about helping students achieve their goals, whether they want careers in music or just want to have fun learning a new instrument.