Tom Rosenberg

Strings
Director of the Chamber Music Academy
Director of the Saint Paul Chamber Music Institute
 

Thomas Rosenberg is nationally known as a dynamic performer, chamber music coach, and teacher. A resident of Saint Paul, Minnesota, he is recipient of the 2025 National Arts Advocate of the Year from Chamber Music America. His activities include numerous solo and chamber music recitals, performances with The Isles Ensemble (www.islesensemble.org), and as an extra musician with the Minnesota Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Recipient of the 2025 National Arts Advocate of the Year from Chamber Music America, Mr. Rosenberg was also awarded the prestigious McKnight Performing Artist Fellowship Award in 2004. He also has received prizes at the Munich (Germany), Portsmouth (England) and Chicago Discovery String Quartet Competitions, and is a three-time Naumburg Chamber Music Award finalist. Since 1981, he has been Artistic Director of the prestigious Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition (www.fischoff.org) through which he is a recipient of the 2007 Indiana Governor’s Arts Award, the highest honor in the arts from that state. Mr. Rosenberg was a founding member of the highly acclaimed Chester String Quartet with whom he made numerous recordings and for twenty years appeared on concert stages and live radio coast to coast in the United States, Canada, Central America and Europe. He has been solo cello of the New York Chamber Ensemble performing in all of the major concert halls in NYC, performed with jazz greats Charlie Hayden and Al Foster in Carnegie Hall and appeared at many music festivals including Aspen, Newport, Banff, South Mountain, Cape May, the Grand Tetons, and the International Music Festival in San Jose, Costa Rica. Chester Quartet recordings can be found on Spotify, Apple Music and the Koch, Chesky, Pantheon, Stolat and CRI labels. As a soloist, he has been noted by the Boston Globe as displaying “beautifully inflected, noble playing with a gorgeous dark tone.” He performs on a rare cello by Lorenzo Storioni made in Cremona, Italy in 1794.

 He is currently on the faculties of Macalester College and Carleton College teaching cello and coaching chamber music, maintains The Opus 1911 Music Studio, a busy private studio of pre-college cellists and chamber ensembles featuring many of the region’s most outstanding young artists, and is Director of the Saint Paul Chamber Music Academy (pre-college). Previously, he served as String Chamber Music Coordinator and primary chamber music coach for the University of Minnesota School of Music. His students have won many awards, regularly gain acceptance into top music schools, and over twenty-five students from his studio have performed on NPR’s “From the Top”. They are in major symphonies, chamber music ensembles, Managing Artistic Director of the NY Philharmonic, Director of Education for Jazz at Lincoln Center and successful in countless other professions. Tom is recipient of the 2003-04 “Master Studio Teacher Award” from the Minnesota chapter of the American String Teachers Association, and has also been named “Arts Educator of the Year” by the Michigan-Indiana Arts and Sciences Council. masterclasses have been at music schools across the US. During summers, he has taught cello and coached chamber music at music centers such as the Tanglewood Institute, The Quartet Program where he has also been Associate Director, Icicle Creek, Bravo, and the Midwest Young Artists Summer Chamber Music Camp. He has also been Director of The Saint Paul Chamber Music Institute, and the Madeline Island and Green Lake Chamber Music Camps.

Tom is a graduate of Oberlin and the Eastman School of Music, where he was teaching assistant to both Paul Katz and Laurence Lesser. Other teachers include Richard Kapuscinski, Alan Harris, Alta Mayer, and for chamber music, members of the Budapest, Juilliard, Tokyo, Guarneri, and Cleveland Quartets. (www.tomrosenbergmusic.com)