Charles Sherba, Teaching Associate

Charles Sherba, violinist, holds the Heidi and Chester Kirk concertmaster chair of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, where he has served as concertmaster since 1987. With that orchestra, he has performed some of the most demanding concertmaster solos in the repertoire to critical acclaim, including Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss, Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov, Suite from L’Histoire du Soldat by Stravinsky, Appalachian Spring by Copland, Variaciones Concertantes by Ginastera, Symphony No. 4 by Mahler, and many others.

He is a founding member of Aurea, a performance ensemble started in 2002, dedicated to exploring the interface between music and the spoken word. With Aurea he has performed War Music by Christopher Logue with music by Paul Phillips, Dangerous Dan McGrew on a poem of Robert Service by Gerald Shapiro, Verklarte Nacht by Arnold Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 4 (“Amazing Grace”) by Ben Johnston, Iglesia abandonada for violin and voice on a poem of Lorca by Stephen Hartke, Oracion del Torero by Turina, Ferdinand the Bull by Alan Ridout, Seven Songs for Voice and Violin by Rebecca Clarke, the Sonata for violin and piano by Ravel, the Sonata for violin and cello by Ravel, the Sonata for violin and piano by Debussy, A/B by Paul Phillips, Quartet for oboe and strings by Vaughn Williams, Sonata St. John’s by Anthony Burgess, the radio play Hommage to A.B. by William Boyd featuring music by Anthony Burgess, Cavatina for solo violin by Barbara Kolb, Serenade for string trio by Dohnanyi, String Trio by Webern, Piano Quartet Op. 47 by Schumann, Piano Quartet No. 2 by Fauré, Providence String Quartet by Arnaud Petit, and other works.

Aurea has performed at the First Works Providence Festival, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the New York Univerisity Humanities Festival, and around New England. Its performances have been supported by the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities, the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University, the Brown University Creative Arts Council, the City of Pawtucket, the City of Chicago, the Poetry Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, New York University, the Friends of Aurea, and others. Aurea’s recording of String Quartet No. 4 (“Amazing Grace”) by Ben Johnston can be found in the Orwig Music Library.

Some of the other major repertoire Sherba has performed includes the Brahms Violin Concerto, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, the Mozart A Major Violin Concerto, the Kurt Weil Violin Concerto, Concerto for Violin and Chamber Ensemble by Lou Spratlin, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, the Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, the Bruch concerto for violin and viola, the Brahms Double Concerto, the Bach Double Concerto, the Ten Sonatas for Piano and Violin of Beethoven, the Three Sonatas for Violin and Piano of Brahms, Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky, the Mendelssohn Octet, the Schubert Octet, Souvenir of Florence by Tchaikovsky, the Quartet for the End of Time by Messiaen, Contrasts by Bartok, the Soldier’s Tale Trio by Stravinsky, Black Angels and Eleven Echoes of Autumn by George Crumb, the complete String Quartets of Beethoven, the String Quartets of Bartok, the String Quartets of Zemlinsky, and many others.

In addition to his appointment to the applied music faculty at Brown (where he has taught since 1986), he also teaches at the Rhode Island Philharmonic Music School. Past teaching appointments include: Connecticut College, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Greenwood Music Camp, Haverford College, Emory University, Eastern Music Festival, Southeastern Music Center, Shorter College, Columbus College, University of Charleston, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Agnes Scott College, and master classes at L'École Nationale de Musique in Chambery, France.

He was chosen as one of 16 participants at the first Starling-Delay Symposium on Violin Studies at the Juilliard School in 2001, where the topic explored was "How to teach the exceptionally gifted young violin student." Discussions at the Symposium were led by Dorothy Delay, Itzhak Perlman, Midori, Robert McDuffy, Cho-Liang Lin, and others

He has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The New Hampshire Symphony, the Vermont Symphony, and was concertmaster of the West Virginia Symphony, the Atlanta Ballet, and the Atlanta Chamber Orchestra. He began his professional career as the youngest member of the first violin section of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, where he served as a tenured first violinist for 9 years. Over the years, he has worked with some of the world's pre-eminent musicians, including James Levine, Kurt Mazur, Bernard Haitink, James Conlon, Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein, Henryk Szeryng, Igor Oistrakh, Ruggiero Ricci, and others. He was first violinist of the Charleston String Quartet from 1983-2000, and has performed at the Monadnock, Carvalho, Grand Teton, Aspen, and Colorado Music Festivals. About a dozen of his students have won the concerto competition at Brown. Some have gone on to study music at Yale, Harvard, New England Conservatory, and other institutions. Some have professional careers with orchestras and chamber music groups.

His violin studies were with Zinaida Gilels, Burton Kaplan, Samuel Magad, Sidney Harth, Leonard Sorkin, Abram Loft, Julian Olevsky, Phillip Naegele, Edward Mumm, Francois d’Albert, A.G. Sheasby, and Raymond Albright.

He has had chamber music coaching with the Juilliard Quartet, the Fine Arts Quartet, the Cleveland Quartet, the Chicago Symphony String Quartet, Eugene Lehner, and Earl Carlyss.

He attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he served as assistant to his principal professor, violinist Leonard Sorkin; the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he was a teaching associate and first violinist in the university’s first graduate string quartet; the Chicago Conservatory College, where he was a special student and performed the first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with members of the Chicago Symphony in Orchestra Hall, Chicago, as winner of the annual commencement competition at the age of 15; the Aspen Music School, where he was a Fellowship student and a first violinist in the Aspen Festival Orchestra; and the Aspen Institute for Advanced Quartet Studies, which he attended as first violinist of the Charleston String Quartet.

His wife is violist Consuelo Sherba, who serves as Artistic Director of Aurea, also teaches in the Applied Music Program at Brown, and was chosen as one of the Persons of the Year for 2007 by the Pawtucket Foundation for her work as an arts advocate. His younger brother is violinist John Sherba, the long-time second violinist of the internationally acclaimed Kronos Quartet.