This December, the New York String Orchestra Seminar, one of the nation’s first and most influential pre-professional training programs, celebrates its 54th year and the major impact its alumni have made on the music world in the US and abroad. The program is renowned for its unique musical philosophy, which emphasizes personal expression over a focus on technical mastery, and its approach to orchestral playing with a chamber-music perspective. The seminar was created in 1969 by arts manager Frank Salomon for the violinist, conductor, and founding member of the Budapest String Quartet, Alexander “Sasha” Schneider, who chose Jaime Laredo to succeed him as artistic director and conductor in 1993.

This year’s 61 New York String Orchestra members, selected through a highly competitive national audition process, come from conservatories, universities, and high schools across the country and around the world. (On December 28, the New York String Orchestra members are joined by outstanding, local students playing percussion, celesta, and harp in Nokuthula Ngwenyama’s Primal Message, and trombone in the Schumann Piano Concerto.) The students, who met for the first time on December 19, gave up their winter holidays to come to New York City for 10 10-hour days of intensive orchestral rehearsals with Mr. Laredo and chamber music sessions with master artists including current and former members of the Emerson, Juilliard, Orion, Dover, and Guarneri string quartets.

This year’s participants join an illustrious group of more than 2,400 program alumni that include some of today’s most acclaimed artists. Yo-Yo Ma (1977) called the seminar “one of the defining moments for me as a teenager,” as it was for violinists such as Cho-Liang Lin, Gil Shaham, Shlomo Mintz, and Pamela Frank; conductors who include Peter Oundjian, Douglas Boyd, Christian Măcelaru, Karina Canellakis, and Marin Alsop; past and current concertmasters of more than 40 orchestras (including the Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras, The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles and Czech philharmonics, and the Berliner Philharmoniker); members of ensembles that include the Emerson, Guarneri, Kronos, Dover, Calidore, and Takács string quartets and Brooklyn Rider; and faculty at leading music schools and conservatories. They describe the seminar as a “life-changing musical experience” that opened them to new musical worlds. Each new generation of New York String Orchestra Seminar alumni continues to make a vital contribution to music and illuminates lives around the country.

To ensure that all students chosen to participate in the seminar are judged solely on musical ability and not financial means, the seminar is tuition-free and provides free housing, meals, and local transportation for all students. Supporters of the program have made this possible since 1969. For more information on the seminar and its founders’ commitment to this policy, please visit newschool.edu/mannes/nysos.

The New York String Orchestra Seminar is a program of The New School’s Mannes School of Music (Richard Kessler, Dean), New School Concerts Department. New School Concerts thanks the conductor, coaches, soloists, audition panelists, advisors, and the College of Performing Arts’s production and operations team for their invaluable contributions to the project and acknowledges Choong-Jin Chang, Bart Feller, Alan Kay, Richard King, Diane Lesser, Mary Malin, Raymond Mase, Frank Morelli, Kurt Muroki, Todd Phillips, Linda Strommen, Steven Tenenbom, Raul Vergara, Peter Wiley, and the many others whose time, effort, and resources make the seminar possible. The program is grateful to the late Isaac Stern for bringing its performances to Carnegie Hall, and to the Hall’s current administration and staff for being such caring presenters of the annual concerts.

For more than six decades, Jaime Laredo has excelled as a solo violinist, conductor, recitalist, pedagogue, and chamber musician. Since his orchestral debut with the San Francisco Symphony at the age of 11, he has won the admiration and respect of audiences, critics, and fellow musicians with passionate and polished performances. At age 17, he won the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium, which launched his rise to international prominence. For 45 years, he toured as a member of the beloved Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. In the 2023–2024 season, Mr. Laredo tours the US as a conductor and soloist at venues including the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall, and as a chamber musician with Espressivo!, a new piano quartet in its first full season. This season is Mr. Laredo’s 30th year leading the New York String Orchestra Seminar.

Conducting and performing highlights include engagements with the Chicago, Boston, and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras; San Francisco Symphony; Los Angeles and New York philharmonics; The Cleveland Orchestra; and The Philadelphia Orchestra. Acclaimed premieres of double concertos written specifically for Mr. Laredo and his wife, cellist Sharon Robinson, are particularly memorable. He has appeared with the London and BBC symphony orchestras, Scottish Chamber Orchestra (with which he made numerous best-selling recordings), and orchestras around the globe.

Mr. Laredo has recorded nearly 100 albums, including a Grammy Award–winning disc of Brahms piano quartets with Emanuel Ax, Isaac Stern, and Yo-Yo Ma. His recordings range from collaborations with Glenn Gould, to double concertos with violinist Jennifer Koh and Ms. Robinson, plus award-winning recordings with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. A 23-CD box set on Sony Classical and five episodes of Exploring Music on WFMT celebrate his extraordinary legacy.

Mr. Laredo’s stewardships of the New York String Orchestra Seminar and the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis have become beloved educational pillars of the music community. This year is his 12th at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He is co–artistic director of Cincinnati’s Linton Chamber Music. He recently completed 20 years as music director of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and held the post of artistic director of the Chamber Music at the Y series in New York for 40 years.

Born in Bolivia, Mr. Laredo resides in Guilford, Vermont, and Cleveland, Ohio.

Pianist Anna Polonsky is widely in demand as a soloist and chamber musician. She has appeared with the Moscow Virtuosi, Buffalo Philharmonic, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Memphis Symphony, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, among others. She has collaborated with the Guarneri, Orion, Daedalus, and Shanghai quartets, and with such musicians as Mitsuko Uchida, Yo-Yo Ma, David Shifrin, Richard Goode, Emanuel Ax, Arnold Steinhardt, Peter Wiley, and Jaime Laredo. She has performed chamber music at festivals that include Marlboro, Chamber Music Northwest, Seattle, Music@Menlo, Cartagena, Bard, and Caramoor, as well as at Bargemusic. Ms. Polonsky has given concerts at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Vienna Konzerthaus, Alice Tully Hall, and Carnegie Hall, and has toured throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. A frequent guest at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, she was a member of Chamber Music Society Two in 2002–2004. In 2006, she took part in the European Broadcasting Union’s project to record and broadcast all of Mozart’s keyboard sonatas, and in 2007, she performed a solo recital at Carnegie Hall to inaugurate the Emerson Quartet’s Perspectives series. She is a recipient of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and the Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award.

Ms. Polonsky made her solo piano debut at age seven at the Special Central Music School in Moscow, Russia. She immigrated to the United States in 1990 and attended high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music under the tutelage of the renowned pianist Peter Serkin, and continued her studies with Jerome Lowenthal, earning her master’s degree from The Juilliard School. She serves on the piano faculties of Vassar College and the Marlboro and Kneisel Hall chamber music festivals.

Ms. Polonsky is a member of the Espressivo! piano quartet with violinist Jaime Laredo, violist Milena Pajaro–van de Stadt, and cellist Sharon Robinson. With clarinetist David Shifrin and cellist Peter Wiley, she performs with the Polonsky-Shifrin-Wiley Trio. She is a Steinway Artist.