Ithaca College

School of Music faculty Richard Faria and Heidi Hoffman were invited by the Governor's School for the Arts, one of the most select arts magnet schools in Virginia, to give several masterclasses, a concert, and coaching to students of the school's Technology Orchestra on March 8, 9, and 10. 

The Governor’s School for the Arts is a center for innovation that develops excellence, nurtures creativity, inspires artistic vision and builds communities with a passion for the arts. The GSA Orchestra--performing internationally in Scotland, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Canada and England--presents three major concerts each year, modeling its programming after the traditions of the world's finest orchestras while staying ahead of the ever-evolving ways that orchestras can serve their loyal community of listeners.   

An accomplished cellist and professor of Performance Studies at IC, Hoffman has toured the United States, South America, Europe, and Japan, with such groups as the American Symphony, Jupiter Symphony, and Tchaikovsky Chamber Orchestra. She has also performed with such diverse ensembles as the Tanglewood Music Center Fellowship Orchestra, Northwest Sinfonietta, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Jimmy Paige and Robert Plant, and Heart. She has served as Lecturer in Chamber Music and cello performance at Wells College and Cornell University. Heidi has been a member of the Syracuse Symphony since 1995 and the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra in Chicago since 1998.

Faria, professor of Performance Studies whose specialty is clarinet, pursues an active career as soloist, chamber musician, and educator. He has been a participant in such festivals as the Bard Music Festival of the Hamptons, Garth Newel Music Festival and the Klasik Keyifler Music Festival in Cappadocia, Turkey, and has collaborated with the Zephyros and Sylvan Wind Quintets, Atlantic, Tektrakys, and Arianna String Quartets. He has performed in Weill, Zankel and Carnegie Hall, Spivey Hall, the Smithsonian Institution, as well as at the American Academies in Rome and Berlin, and Glinka Hall in St. Petersburg, Russia.

A fervent advocate of new music, Faria premiered the Clarinet Sonata by Roberto Sierra at the International ClarinetFest 2007 in Vancouver, BC, as well as the Pyrrhic Suite by Kevin Gray at the ClarinetFest 2010 in Austin, Texas. His first solo CD, Roberto Sierra: Clarinet Works, was described as “a superb recording that belongs on every clarinetist’s shelf” by the American Record Guide. His recording of Stephen Hartke's The Horse with the Lavender Eye was released on the Chandos label.A superb ensemble - The New Yorker) along with Pulitzer prize-winning composer Steven Stucky and colleagues from IC and Cornell University.