Maritsa Brookes Concerto Awards

Voice - Susan Gouthro

Dr. Susan Gouthro is an Assistant Professor of Voice at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. For over a decade she was engaged as a soprano soloist on a full-time contract at the opera house in Kiel, Germany. Here she performed many of the most important roles in the lyric soprano repertoire including Mozart roles Pamina, Queen of the Night, Donna Anna, and Fiordiligi; French roles Micaela, Marguerite, Antonia, and Manon; and Italian roles Liu, both Mimi and Musetta, and Violetta. Her diversity extends to German operetta (Hanna Gawari in The Merry Widow and Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus) and the first forays into Wagner’s operas with Eva in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Czech roles that round out this singer’s repertoire are the title roles in The Cunning Little Vixen and Rusalka, as well as Marie in The Bartered Bride. Read full bio

Strings - Jeremy Bell

A native of Toronto, violinist Jeremy Bell earned a B. Mus degree from the University of Toronto, and from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he received his Masters and Doctor of Music.

Dr. Bell is a recipient of numerous grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and is a prize winner of the Eckhardt Grammatté National competition and the Conseil Québécois’ Prix Opus. He has studied with David Zafer, George Neikrug, Joyce Robbins, Metro Kozak and with members of the Orford, Juilliard, Tokyo, and Orion string quartets. Joining the Penderecki String Quartet in 1999, Dr. Bell is Artist in Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University where he teaches violin, chamber music, and lectures on the string quartets of Bartok and Beethoven. Read full bio

Keyboards - Jacob Ertl

Pianist Jacob Ertl has performed extensively in the United States and throughout Canada, China, France, Israel, Mexico, Panama, Serbia, and Spain. Performance highlights include solo recital debuts at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall and Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, and Chicago radio's "Live from WFMT" concert series. Other recent engagements include the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Symphony Space (NYC), Chihuahua International Music Festival (Mexico), Musicarte Festival (Panama) and the Oviedo and Gijon International Music Festivals (Spain). As a concerto soloist, he has been featured with the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra, New York State Ballet Orchestra, and Keystone Winds, among others. Recently, Ertl released the world premiere recording of Fisher Tull’s Piano Concerto on Klavier Records, distributed worldwide by Naxos. Read full bio

Winds, Brass & Percussion - Dan Piccolo

Percussionist Dan Piccolo has performed, taught, and studied internationally during his twenty-year professional career. He is currently Associate Professor of Percussion in Bowling Green State University’s College of Musical Arts.

Dan holds both a DMA and BM in Percussion Performance from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and during his master’s studies in U of M’s Jazz Department he focused on improvisation. He has studied concert percussion with Michael Udow, Salvatore Rabbio, Joseph Gramley and Jonathan Ovalle, among others, and his drum set and improvisation teachers have included Michael Gould, Steve Curry, and Ed Sarath. Dan is also skilled in several forms of non-Western percussion, having studied frame drumming with Jamey Haddad and tabla with Pandit Kuber Nath Mishra in multiple visits to Varanasi, India. A grant from the University of Michigan’s International Institute funded the first of these visits, and he returned to Varanasi in the winter of 2015 thanks to an award from the Presser Foundation. An additional award from U of M’s International Institute made it possible for Dan to begin formal studies of West African music in Ghana in the summer of 2014. Read full bio