The Lycoming College Piano Trio will host its inaugural performance on Saturday, Oct. 10 at 8 p.m. in the Mary Lindsay Welch Honor Hall located at the corner of Fourth and Basin streets in Williamsport. The concert is free and open to the public.
The Lycoming College Piano Trio will present Beethoven’s Trio in D major; Op. 70 No. 1, also known as “The Ghost;” and Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67. The Trio features Amanda Gunderson, assistant professor of music, on the piano; Emily Karosas, applied music instructor, on the violin; and Andrew Rammon, applied music instructor, on the cello.
The idea for the trio sprang from a shared interest in chamber music. “All three of us love chamber music and enjoy playing it at every opportunity,” said Gunderson. “The recent energy behind this group may have started with the success and excitement from the Williamsport Chamber Music Festival (WCMF), a summer chamber music camp hosted at Lycoming College for adolescent string players and pianists. Both Andrew and I served on the faculty at this camp for the last three years and enjoyed collaborating in faculty recitals. Then, this summer, Emily Karosas joined the music faculty at Lycoming. We wanted to find a way to collaborate with her, and to share her talents with the Williamsport community. This seemed like the perfect fit.”
Gunderson teaches courses in applied piano, music theory and music appreciation. As a soloist, she has performed throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, including an appearance at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. As a chamber musician, she serves as co-founder of Duo Mendota, with violinist Carol Carlson, and as pianist in the Lycoming College Piano Trio. She received her Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a University Fellowship, where she won the Irving Shain Duo Competition and earned an Emerging Interfaces Award for her research on injury prevention with small-handed pianists. She also has a Master of Music in piano performance and pedagogy, a Master of Arts in music theory, and a Bachelor of Music with honors in piano performance from Penn State University.
Karosas maintains a full studio at the State College Suzuki Program and severs as an adjunct faculty member at both Lycoming College and Juniata College. She is currently an active member of the Pennsylvania Centre Orchestra, frequently plays with the Williamsport Symphony Orchestra, and performs yearly with the Music at Penn’s Woods Summer Festival Orchestra. Karosas won the 2015 Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Young Artists Competition, and also recently performed the first movement of the Barber Violin Concerto with the Penn State Philharmonic Orchestra, as a winner of the 2015 Concerto Competition. She has performed in concert with Boyz II Men and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, and can be heard on recordings by Japanese instrumental rock band Mono and Christian folk group Aaron and Ashley. She received both her Master of Music, on a University Graduate Fellowship, and her Bachelor of Music degree from Penn State University.
Rammon teaches cello and string methods courses. He is currently cellist of the Grammy-nominated Eaken Piano Trio and has performed as soloist, and in chamber ensembles, across the U.S., Europe, Russia, China and Japan. Rammon also serves as an adjunct faculty member at Susquehanna University and is the principal cellist of the Williamsport Symphony Orchestra. Earlier this year, he participated in a chamber music performance with the Fitzwilliam String Quartet and his live performances have been broadcast on WVIA, WHYY (Philadelphia), and WQXR (NYC). He received his Master of Music from The Cleveland Institute of Music and his Bachelor of Arts from Pepperdine University.
As to the future of the trio, Gunderson says, “We hope the trio will become an asset to the College, helping to attract talented music students to the campus and enriching the arts community in Williamsport. We are so excited about this particular recital program that we hope to share it with a broader community throughout the concert season. The week before our concert, we'll be giving a short recital at Williamsport High School and speaking to the students in the string department.”