The Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York
Founder and Artistic Director
Joan Thomson Kretschmer, Artistic Director and founder of the Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York, graduated from Barnard College and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology from Columbia University. She has been a music critic for The New York Post and has written articles about music for the New York Times, Opera News, Stagebill, Keynote, and other publications. Her program notes have appeared at concerts at Mostly Mozart, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere.
In addition to writing scripts for radio and for national broadcasts of The Richard Tucker Gala, Dr. Kretschmer hosted Upbeat, her own classical music radio show. At The New School for Social Research, she created and hosted Musicians on Music, a series of interviews with artists Daniel Barenboim, Victor Borge, the Guarneri String Quartet, Marilyn Horne, Zubin Mehta, Birgit Nilsson, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Robert Merrill, Peter Schickele, André Watts, and others.
She has taught at The Juilliard School and lectured at the State University of New York at
Purchase and for the Metropolitan Opera Guild. At Yale University she directed an Oral
History of Electronics in Music, a collection of interviews with significant innovators in twentieth-century musical life.
A grateful student of Jascha Zayde, she has recently performed with wind and string players from the New York Philharmonic, including Joseph Robinson, Principal Oboe, and Sheryl Staples, Principal Associate Concert Master; the Moscow Quartet; violinists Eugenia Alikhanova, Alfred Hart, and Philip Quint; clarinetist Igor Begelman, hornist Karl Kramer; and bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann.
She is the author of Michelangela and Debuts, a book of short stories.
Dr. Kretschmer is the proud mother of Keith J. Thomson and Elliot R. Thomson.
Artist in Residence
Richard Bishop is a pianist whose versatility distinguishes him as a soloist, duo-recitalist, and chamber musician.
The winner of “The Best Accompanist” Award at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition in 1990, he has enjoyed an active career as a collaborative
and solo artist. In recent years, Mr. Bishop has performed concertos by Mozart and Charles Wesley with Jens Nygaard and The Jupiter Symphony
in New York. He was a soloist in the spring of 2001 in two series of concerts with the Jupiter in Vincent D'Indy's Triple Concerto for Flute,
Cello, and Piano, and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Rhapsodie d’Auvergne, Allegro Appassionata, “Africa” Fantasie, and “Wedding Cake,” all for solo piano
and orchestra.
A collaborative artist with the late violinist Isaac Stern, Mr. Bishop has performed as duo partner and chamber musician with Jeannine Altmeyer,
Carter Brey, Arturo Delmoni, Glenn Dicterow, Evan Drachman, Karen Dreyfus, Nicholas Eanet, André Emelianoff, Rafael Figueroa, Semyon Fridman,
Joseph Fuchs, Alan Gilbert, Mark Gould, Daniel Heifetz, Robert Langevin, Sung-Ju Lee, Roberto Minczuk, Charles Neidich, Cynthia Phelps,
Joseph Robinson, Sheryl Staples, Nathaniel Rosen, Bion Tsang, Wendy Warner, Reiko Watanabe, the Moscow String Quartet, and other young performers
such as Valerie Chermiset, Martin Kuuskmann, and Vadim Lando. He has performed in the major music centers of the United States and has made many
tours to the Far East: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China.
Mr. Bishop performs chamber music at such venues as Bargemusic, New York; The Phillips Collection, and the Terrace Theater, Kennedy Center, in
Washington, D.C.; Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, Maine; the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California; Music in Ouray, Colorado;
Adamant, Vermont Festival; and the Laurel Festival, Pennsylvania. He recently returned from concertizing in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and has also
performed and taught as a member of the faculty of the Festival de Inverno in Camposdo Jordao since 1999. He has also been performer and faculty
member at the Estherwood Summer Music Festival and at the Alfred University Summer Chamber Music Institute.
Mr. Bishop is a founding member and musical programming advisor of the Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York. He is also a regular member of the chamber music ensemble Amadeus Virtuosi of New York.
