Stephanie Chase

Stephanie Chase (b. October 1957, Evanston, Illinois) is an American violinist and music educator, married to musicologist Stewart Pollens (b. 1949) and currently residing in New York. She was a member of the Boston Chamber Music Society (1982 to 1997) and an assistant professor at New York University's Steinhardt School between 2002 and 2019. Chase plays the 1742 Pietro Guarneri violin with Dominique Peccatte bow. Stephanie was born in the musical family, daughter of composer and arranger Robert "Bruce" Chase (1912—2001) and violinist Fannie Bernice Caine, neé Paschell (1919—2000). As a child prodigy, Chase gave her first public performance at only two and won the Chicago Symphony's Youth Competition at nine. Stephanie studied with Sally Thomas (5), an assistant to Ivan Galamian at the Juilliard School in New York, before taking private lessons with Arthur Grumiaux in Belgium. In the early 1980s, Stephanie Chase returned to the United States, further coached by Rudolf Serkin, Felix Galimir, Rudolf Firkušný, Samuel Rhodes, and David Soyer at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. In 1982, Stephanie gained worldwide recognition after sharing the bronze medal with Cuban-born Andrés Cárdenes at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. (The prestigious contest was explicitly politically biased until the crash of the Soviet Union, with a mere eight "solo" gold medals given to non-USSR participants in the first 35 years; thus, the international press widely celebrated even silver and bronze prizes awarded to Western musicians. In 1982, Tomoko Kato from Japan took silver, while the top prize was predictably split between Viktoria Mullova and Sergei Stadler, two students of the violin jury's chairman, Leonid Kogan.) As a soloist, Stephanie Chase has performed internationally with over 170 orchestras and ensembles, including The New York Philharmonic Orchestra, The London Symphony Orchestra, The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She played under the baton of renowned maestros, such as Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Herbert Blomstedt, Frans Brüggen, Marin Alsop, Roy Goodman, Hugh Wolff and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Before joining the NYU Reinhardt faculty in 2002, she taught at Berklee's Boston Conservatory, Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, and Vassar College.