On Wednesday, Sept. 4 from 12:10 p.m. to 12:40 p.m. the Free Admission Glendale Noon Concerts will feature violinists Alexander Knecht and Jacqueline Suzuki, violist Adriana Zoppo, cellist Jonathan Flaksman and pianist Brendan White performing the Cesar Franck Piano Quintet at the Sanctuary of Glendale City Church.

The free concerts are every first and third Wednesday.

Alexander Knecht, violinist and violist, was born in 1991 and is a Juilliard graduate. He has a passion for virtuosic arrangements of music across genres both old and new. He received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Southern California under full scholarship, where he studied with Bing Wang and Brian Chen. He holds a master’s degree from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Masao Kawasaki. He was awarded a Career Grant upon graduation from Juilliard for his work with original viola transcriptions including Franz Waxman’s “Carmen Fantasy.” He is a proud alumnus of La Sierra University, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and violin in 2013, studying with Jason Uyeyama.

Outside of music, he recently worked as a mathematics instructor at La Sierra University. He maintains a busy private music teaching schedule and is also active as a private academic tutor.

Jacqueline Suzuki, violin, is a longtime member of the Long Beach and Santa Barbara Symphonies. A native of San Francisco, she began her earliest chamber music studies on scholarship at the San Francisco Conservatory. She has performance degrees from the Mannes College of Music (BM), where she studied with William Kroll, and the California Institute of the Arts (MFA).

As a Los Angeles freelancer, she has performed with many ensembles and in many genres, from rock, jazz, Latin and Arabic to playing in the pit for the Bolshoi Ballet and onstage with the Three Tenors. She has recorded with diverse artists including Snoop Dogg, Neil Sedaka, Leonard Cohen and Whitney Houston and appears on recordings by the Long Beach, Santa Barbara and Pacific Symphonies. She has spent summers at the Peter Britt, Oregon Coast, Carmel Bach and Cabrillo Festivals and has performed in a string quartet “in residence” on a raft trip down the Green River in Utah.

Adriana Zoppo performs on the violin, viola, baroque violin, baroque viola, and the rarely heard viola d’amore. She has played regularly with the Santa Barbara, Pacific, and Long Beach Symphonies, Pasadena Pops, Long Beach Opera, St. Matthew Chamber Orchestra and other ensembles in the area. Director/curator of the Glendale Noon Concerts’ early music sub-series Adriana, with “Ergo Musica,” is heard there frequently. Previously a member of the Carmel Bach Festival and LA Baroque Orchestra, she plays with the original instrument ensembles Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra, L.A. Baroque Players, Bach Collegium San Diego and the Corona del Mar Baroque Festival, where she has appeared as viola d’amore soloist. 

Zoppo has played for motion pictures, TV shows, video games, solo artist recordings, Broadway musicals, and live shows of all musical styles from classical to jazz, and was part of the band for the musical “Hamilton” during its recent run in Los Angeles. Adriana holds a bachelors degree from USC and masters from the University of Michigan, both in violin performance.

Jonathan Flaksman, born in 1981 in Akron, Ohio, started playing the cello at 5 years of age. His first regular teacher was Madalena Burle-Marx. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music with Richard Aaron and the Juilliard School with Fred Sherry. In 2002 he moved to Germany and graduated in 2007 from Mannheim University in the class of his father Michael Flaksman (former professor at Cal State Northridge), completed an artist diploma in orchestral studies in 2010, and was a member of Live Music Now.

In 2013 he was a fellow at the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. He has played in the Orchestra of the Nationaltheater Mannheim, as principal cellist of Mannheimer Philharmoniker and Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern, as continuo cellist of the La Folia Baroque Orchestra, and has toured as a member of the Philharmonie Der Nationen. His activities as soloist and chamber musician have brought him all over the United States and Europe as well as to Asia. He performs annually at the Chamber Music Festival of Ascoli Piceno in Italy.  As a teacher he has given master classes in Cividale del Friuli in Italy and at University of California Santa Barbara. He has served on the jury of various string competitions.

He currently lives in LA and plays with the Symphonies of Pasadena, New West, Modesto, and Hawaii. He is also an active recording artist covering all genres.

He is tenured since 2015 as Assistant Principal Cellist of the Santa Barbara Symphony.

Pianist Brendan White has appeared as soloist with the Jackson Symphony Orchestra, Musica Nova (Eastman School of Music), Delta Symphony Orchestra, Crown City Symphony, and the Vicente Chamber Orchestra. White’s collaborations in Southern California have included the Mühlfeld Trio, which won the prestigious Beverly Hills Auditions, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, the Speakeasy Society, and Eighteen Squared. He is also a founding member of the Sunset ChamberFest in Los Angeles; www.sunsetchamberfest.com

Local recital appearances include Glendale Noon Concerts, Pasadena Presbyterian Music at Noon, Music@Mimoda, Mason Concerts, Emerging Artist Series Recital at Boston Court.

White was born and raised in Tennessee before attending Eastman to study with Thomas Schumacher, and then, the University of Southern California, with Kevin Fitz-Gerald, where he was awarded Outstanding Master’s Graduate of the Thornton School of Music. As a devoted performer of new music, he has worked with notable composers and conductors including Thomas Adès, Donald Crockett, Alan Pierson, Steven Stucky and Jeffrey Milarsky.

Glendale City Church is located at 610 E. California Ave. (at Isabel Street) in Glendale.

For more information, email glendalesda@gmail.com or call (818) 244-7241.