Debut Performance
Rutgers University Orchestra with Andrea Quinn, Conductor

Mason Gross Presents offered its debut performance on Friday, March 1, 2002, featuring the Rutgers University Orchestra with guest conductor Andrea Quinn, music director of the New York City Ballet.

The event began at 8 p.m. in the Nicholas Music Center of the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick. The program included Joan Tower: Concerto for Orchestra; Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 1 Op. 1, featuring Mason Gross graduate student Emi Nakajima; and Igor Stravinsky: Firebird Ballet Suite for Orchestra 1945.

Born in 1964, Andrea Quinn studied conducting at the Royal Academy of Music with Colin Metters, George Hurst and John Carewe. In 1989, she left the Academy with the Ernest Read and Ricordi Conducting Prizes. Shortly after, the National Association of Youth Orchestras awarded her the Conductor's Bursary, which led her to Hungary for the Bartok International Seminar.

Over the last decade, Quinn has worked with Britain’s leading orchestras including the London Symphony, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic and the London Mozart Players. Before her recent appointment at the New York City Ballet, Quinn was music director for various orchestras including the London Philharmonic Youth Orchestra and Royal Ballet.

She also has appeared with the Adelaide and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the NRK Radio Orchestra in Oslo, the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Teatro Regio Turin, and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and the Commonwealth Youth Orchestra for the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, among others.

Quinn conducted a recording of Paul McCartney’s Tuesday with the London Symphony for EMI Records, for which the British Phonographic Industry nominated her as Female Artist of the Year.

A native Philadelphian, Emi Nakajima began her piano studies at the age of two. Since her solo debut at 11 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Ms. Nakajima has performed numerous solos, recitals and chamber music appearances throughout the United States and Europe. Currently, she is pursuing a doctor of musical arts degree at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she studies with acclaimed pianist Susan Starr. Her mentors have also included Eleanor Sokoloff of the Curtis Institute of Music and Claude Frank of the Yale School of Music.

Nakajima regularly participates in the Sarasota Music Festival, and was a Peggy Rockefeller Memorial Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Festival in the summer of 2000. Among her recent accomplishments, Ms. Nakajima won first place at the Pennsylvania Piano Competition (November 2000) and The Pinault 5th Biennial Audio/Video International Piano Competition (February 2001). She can be heard on WRTI radio, Philadelphia.