Described by Strad Magazine as being "vigorous, extrovert and emphatic players with a
vitality all their own," the young Nisaika Quartet, all barely 20 years old, had just received the
"Deuxième Prix" at the 8e Concours International de Quatuors à Cordes in Evian, France,
(later to become the Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition) from a jury presided
by the great Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, and comprising among others of cellist Claus
Adam (Juilliard String Quartet), Hatto Beyerle (Alban Berg Quartet), Paolo Borciani (Quartetto
Italiano), Milan Skampa ( Smetana Quartet) and the entire Borodin Quartet. This was in 1983.
This foursome of chamber-music-hungry friends and classmates at the Curtis Institute of Music
had decided to spend most of the previous year locking themselves into rehearsal studios for
marathon work sessions of Mozart, Beethoven and Bartok. With the support of their coaches
Karen Tuttle and Felix Galimir, they lived one of the great adventures of their musical lives.
Being young and in full development, the quartet disbanded to pursue graduate studies and
job opportunities, yet somehow remained connected for all these decades, collaborating and
performing during summer festivals, subbing for one another during sabbatical and maternity
leaves, founding other ensembles. But their association marked them deeply and started
defining their identity. Several of the choices they made then were an example of their idealism.
At a time where only the Emerson String Quartet traded violin seats, the Nisaika followed suit.
They chose a name that was all-inclusive, the word Nisaika meaning "we, us, our" in Chinook
pidgin, a trading language of the Pacific Northwest including elements of French, English,
Salishan and other indigenous languages.

Violinst David Salness threw a bottle in the ocean a year ago with the idea of a reunion tour in
2025-26, which was pretty rapidly and enthusiastically embraced by the whole group. Here is
who they are:

Violaine Melançon, violin

An artist deeply dedicated to the range of violin and chamber music repertoire, violinist Violaine Melançon is sought after both as a performer and pedagogue. She brings a sense of authenticity, curiosity, exploration and discovery to her interpretations, and enjoys presenting unusual gems of the duo repertoire. Violaine teaches at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University where she is Associate Professor of Violin. She regularly gives masterclasses and guest teaches at major peer institutions like the New England Conservatory in Boston, the Glenn Gould School in Toronto, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, UK.

She was a member of the violin and chamber music faculties of the Peabody Conservatory until 2019 and was during the ensemble’s entire life span the founding violinist of the Peabody Trio, ensemble-in-residence at the Peabody Conservatory until 2016. After winning the prestigious Naumburg Chamber Music Award, the Peabody Trio established itself as an important presence in the chamber music world and as dedicated teachers and mentors to a generation of young musicians. As a member of the Peabody Trio, Violaine gave a New York debut at Alice Tully Hall and performed on the most important chamber music series in North America and abroad. Their reputation as champions of new music garnered them an invitation to the first Biennale of Contemporary Music Tempus Fugit in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the opportunity to commission and perform the music of many of today’s most inspired musical voices. After thirty years of music-making, the trio played its final concert in San Francisco, the city where it was formed.

Violaine is from Québec, Canada. After receiving First Prize in violin at the "Conservatoire de Musique" at the age of seventeen, under the tutelage of Claude Létourneau, she continued her studies with Ivan Galamian at the Curtis Institute of Music, with Isadore Tinkleman at the San Francisco Conservatory and with Arthur Grumiaux in Belgium. While at Curtis, she was a member of the Nisaika Quartet, prize winner of the 8th International String Quartet competition in Evian, France. Violaine is also the recipient of many awards for solo performance including the Prix d’Europe, after which she performed with orchestras in Canada, the USA and Belgium and toured across Canada for Jeunesses Musicales. As a result of having been appointed USIA Artistic Ambassador with the Knopp-Melançon Duo, she toured extensively in Europe, Asia and Africa and made a Washington, DC debut at the Kennedy Center. Since then, her activities as a chamber musician, soloist with orchestras, and teacher have taken her to major music centers in Canada, the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Japan.

She has participated in many summer festivals as violinist, teacher and guest artist, including those of Tanglewood, Ravinia, Skaneateles, Rockport, Orford, the National Orchestral Institute and Festival, Music in the Vineyards and Yellow Barn. These days, Domaine Forget International Music and Dance Academy, Encore Chamber Music Institute, the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, and the Summer Violin Institute at Northwestern University Bienen School of Music in Chicago are where she teaches during the summer months. Since 2020, her musical curiosity has led her to perform as well on baroque violin and she enjoys collaborating in concert with many Canadian and American early music performers.

The 2025-26 season will see the Nisaika Quartet reunited for concerts in Montreal, College Park MD, Philadelphia, PA and Indianapolis, IN. Violaine will also present the complete solo works of J.S. Bach in concert and will be touring the UK with pianist Meagan Milatz.

Violaine’s performances can be heard on the Naxos, Artek, CRI, and New World Records labels.

David Salness, violin

Violinist David Salness has attained international recognition as a performing artist and teacher. He has appeared in more than 25 countries and in 48 out of the 50 United States in such renowned venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Salle Pleyel and London’s Wigmore Hall. His performances are broadcast on National Public Radio, Radio France, Bavarian Radio and the British and Canadian Broadcast Corporations. His recordings are found on the RCA, Telarc and Centaur labels, amongst others.

A dedicated chamber musician, Salness was for twelve years a member of the Audubon Quartet and won the Deuxieme Grand Prix as a member of Nisaika in the 1984 Evian International String Quartet Competition. Formerly a performer with the historic Theater Chamber Players and currently founding artistic co-director of the Left Bank Concert Society, Salness is a member of the critically acclaimed Left Bank Quartet. He appears frequently in the greater Washington, D.C., area performing at the Kennedy Center, the Corcoran, National Gallery, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian and Hirschorn Museums, Strathmore Hall, Dumbarton Oaks, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and the Library of Congress.

Salness has collaborated with members of the Guarneri, Juilliard, Orford, Moscow and Cleveland Quartets amongst others. Pianists with whom he has collaborated include Yefim Bronfman, Lydia Artimyw, Christopher O’Reilley, Jean Yves Thibaudet, Ruth Laredo, Vladimir Sokoloff, Jorge Bolet and Semour Lipkin. Salness is fortunate to have performed most of Brahms chamber music with Leon Fleisher, known as an expert in this repertoire.

An alumnus of the Interlochen Arts Academy, earning the Dendrinos Scholarship Chair and the Curtis Institute (having also attended the Cleveland Institute of Music), Salness studied with David Cerone, Jascha Brodsky, Ivan Galamian, Joseph Gingold and Karen Tuttle. Salness’s understanding of the historical practice of chamber music has been informed by his work with members of the Kolisch, Griller, Hungarian and Budapest Quartets. He has actively pursued his study of the music and performance traditions of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Bartók, Kodály, Ravel, Ysaýe and Barber under the direction of Eugene Lehner, Felix Galimir, Lorand Fenyves, Brodsky and Gingold, all of whom worked personally with some of these composers and are considered their chief exponents. At the Banff Center, Salness was privileged to work intensively with Zoltán Székely on Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 (composed for and premiered by Székely) and several of the composer’s string quartets. Salness has performed Bartók’s string quartets many times over the past 30 years.

He has enjoyed a long association with New York’s Chautauqua Institute and Festival and was selected to participate in the Aspen Festival’s elite Center for Advanced Quartet Studies as a member of the Cézanne Quartet. Other notable festivals include Ravinia, Newport, Banff, La Jolla and Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. He has appeared with the Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Brandenburg Ensemble of New York.

At the age of twenty and as the youngest member in the group, Salness was appointed concertmaster of the St. Louis Opera Orchestra. Throughout his orchestral career, he has performed under some of the most respected conductors including Eugene Ormandy, Zubin Mehta, Leonard Bernstein, Rafael Fruhbeck du Burgos, Robert Shaw, Helmuth Rilling, Andre Previn, Robert Spano and Leonard Slatkin. Salness was honored to perform in Carnegie Hall under the direction of Sergiu Celebidache in his long-anticipated U.S. debut and to study with him the application of phenomenology in chamber music performance. Salness is currently concertmaster of Northern Virginia’s Fairfax Symphony Orchestra.

Salness began his teaching career as assistant to David Cerone at the Curtis Institute and also the Meadowmount School of Music in New York, where he returned to serve for five years as a member of the Meadowmount Artist Faculty. Having also been a guest faculty member at John Hopkins’ Peabody Conservatory and Distinguished Teacher of Violin at the Brevard Music Center, he is currently professor of violin at the University of Maryland. Salness has taught or coached students who have garnered top prizes from such major international compositions as Indianapolis, Evian/Bordeaux, Portsmouth, Naumburg, Menuhin, Schneider and Banff.

Salness plays a beautiful example of the work of Pietro Giovanni Mantegazza built c.1785 in Milan. Born into a musical family, Salness began his study of the violin at the age of six, with his father as his first teacher.

Ed Gazouleas, viola

Violist Ed Gazouleas has emerged as one of the finest teachers of his generation and his students now populate the viola sections of many orchestras, including the Boston, St. Louis, and Indianapolis symphony orchestras; and many others in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.

Mr. Gazouleas was a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 24 years, where he held the Lois and Harlan Anderson Viola Chair and led the viola section on many occasions, notably with conductors such as Colin Davis, Kurt Masur, and André Previn. While in Boston, he was active in orchestra governance, chairing the orchestra’s artistic advisory committee and serving on the search committee that selected Andris Nelsons to be the orchestra’s music director. He has had a long association with the Tanglewood Music Center in leadership capacities.

As a chamber music performer, Mr. Gazouleas has appeared with members of the Fine Arts, Pacifica, Muir, Lydian, and Johannes string quartets, among others. A prize-winner at the Eighth International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France, he has also collaborated with such artists as Christian Tetzlaff, Stephanie Blythe, Roberto Díaz, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, and the principal string players of the Cleveland Orchestra.

Mr. Gazouleas works to expand and promote new works for the viola, and has collaborated with such composers as Sir Michael Tippett, John Harbison, and Osvaldo Golijov. In 2019 he performed the North American premiere of Letters from Warsaw by English composer Joseph Phibbs.

Mr. Gazouleas has also served on the faculties of Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music as a tenured professor, Boston University College of Fine Arts, Boston Conservatory, Wellesley College, and New England Conservatory. He is also in demand as an orchestral clinician around the country.

Mr. Gazouleas is a 1984 graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied viola with Michael Tree and Karen Tuttle. He joined the Curtis faculty in 2017 and was named the Gie and Lisa Liem Artistic Director in 2021 and Provost in 2022.

Peter Stumpf, cello

Peter Stumpf is professor of cello at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Prior to his appointment, he was principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Stumpf's tenure in Los Angeles followed 12 years as associate principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. His professional orchestral career began at the age of 16 when he joined the cello section of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He received a bachelor's degree from the Curtis Institute of Music and an Artist's Diploma from the New England Conservatory.

A dedicated chamber music musician, he is a member of the Johannes String Quartet and has appeared on the chamber music series at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, the Boston Celebrity Series, the Da Camera Society in Los Angeles, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Casals Hall in Tokyo, and at the concert halls of Cologne. He has performed with the chamber music societies of Boston and Philadelphia and at the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico as well as the Festivals of Marlboro, Santa Fe, Bridgehampton, Ottawa, Great Lakes, Ojai, Spoleto, and Aspen. He has toured with Music from Marlboro, the Casals Hall Ensemble in Japan, and with pianist Mitsuko Uchida in performances of the complete Mozart Piano Trios. He has collaborated with pianists Leif Ove Andsnes, Emmanuel Ax, Jorge Bolet, Yefim Bronfman, Radu Lupu, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Andras Schiff, Jean Yves Thibaudet, Mitsuko Uchida, and with the Emerson and Guarneri String Quartets. Most recently, the Johannes Quartet has collaborated with the Guarneri Quartet on tour in performances including commissions from composers William Bolcom and Esa Pekka Salonen.

Concerto appearances have been with the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Philharmonic, the Virginia Symphony, the Vermont Symphony, the Connecticut String Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of the South Bay, the American Youth Symphony, and at the Aspen Music Festival. As a recitalist, he has performed at the Universities of Hartford, Syracuse, and Delaware, at Jordan Hall in Boston, and at the Philips and Corcoran Galleries in Washington, D.C. Most recently, he performed the Six Suites for Solo Cello by J. S. Bach on the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society Series and on the Chamber Music in Historic Sites Series in Los Angeles. His awards include first prize in the Washington International Competition, the Graham-Stahl Competition, and the Aspen Concerto Competition and second prize in the Evian International String Quartet Competition.

As a former member of the Boston Musica Viva, he has explored extended techniques, including microtonal compositions and numerous premieres. As a teacher, he has served on the cello faculty of the University of Southern California, Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, the New England Conservatory, and guest artist faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music as well as at the Yellow Barn Music Festival and the Musicorda Summer String Program. He has conducted master classes at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, Manhattan and Mannes Schools of Music, Iowa and Pennsylvania State Universities, the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Seoul National University, Temple University, and at the Universities of Delaware and Michigan.