NICOLE OSWALD (violin) is currently a violin fellow in The Orchestra Now (TON) at Bard College in New York. She is often featured as concertmaster of TON, including a series of concerts and recordings alongside Gil Shaham at Carnegie Hall in 2021. In 2020, Oswald received a Master of Music degree under Andrés Cárdenes at the Carnegie Mellon School of Music (CMU). At CMU, Oswald was a graduate assistant, concertmaster of the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic Orchestra and in the honors string quartet. She was recipient of the Lucyane Guedes Memorial Award in 2020. In 2019, Oswald won a chair in the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra. She was a featured soloist with the Cincinnati Community Orchestra in December 2018, performing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. In 2018, Oswald received an Artist Diploma from the Frost School of Music in Miami, FL. There, she studied under Charles Castleman as a teaching assistant and Henry Mancini Institute fellow. Prior to her studies in Miami, Oswald attended the Utrechts Conservatory in The Netherlands and the Eastman School of Music. In Miami, Oswald was a chamber music teacher at Miami Youth for Chamber Music and was a guest artist at the Castleman Quartet Program 2018. Oswald is a founding member of Ensemble 1828, a piano trio based in San Francisco. Ensemble 1828 kicked off in summer of 2019 with a seven-concert tour in Northern California to packed houses before transitioning to livestreamed concerts after March of 2020. Oswald performs on a 1917 Carl Becker violin.