Juliana Athayde

Appointed concertmaster of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005 at age twenty four, Juliana Athayde became the youngest person to hold the position since the orchestra’s inception in 1922. Prior to joining the RPO, Ms. Athayde was concertmaster of the Canton and Plymouth Symphonies. She has performed as guest concertmaster with the Houston Symphony and National Arts Center Orchestra, and has performed both nationally and internationally with the Cleveland Orchestra.  In 2002, she served as concertmaster of the New York String Seminar under the direction of Jaime Laredo for concerts at Carnegie Hall.  For many years Ms. Athayde was a fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and received the prestigious Dorothy DeLay fellowship in 2004.

Ms. Athayde’s numerous solo appearances with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra have covered a wide range of composers from Mozart and Brahms to Prokofiev as well as the world premiere of Alan Shawn’s violin concerto, commissioned by the RPO and written for Ms. Athayde.  She has also performed as a soloist with the Asheville, Canton, Diablo, Flint, Mid-Texas, New Bedford, Palo Alto, Plymouth and Wyoming Symphony Orchestras.  A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Ms. Athayde made her solo debut at the age of 16 performing with the San Francisco Symphony. She led the world-renowned San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra in performances at Paris’ Cite de la Musique, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw.

A passionate educator, Ms. Athayde is an Associate Professor of Violin at the Eastman School of Music and travels the country giving master classes.  She holds degrees from the University of Michigan School of Music (B.M.) as well as the Cleveland Institute of Music (M.M., A.D.) where her principal teachers were Paul Kantor and William Preucil.  At the Cleveland Institute of Music, Ms. Athayde became the first student to graduate from the renowned Concertmaster Academy under the direction of Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster William Preucil.  Ms. Athayde spends her summers performing along side her husband, RPO principal oboist Erik Behr, at the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego as well as the Sun Valley Summer Symphony in Idaho.  Ms. Athayde performs on a 1948 Celeste Farotte violin and a J.B. Vuillaume bow.