Virginia Tech Honor String Orchestra Festival- October 25-26, 2025

The Virginia Tech Honor String Orchestra Festival takes place October 25 and 26, 2025 and accepts students by director's recommendation. Students will participate in masterclasses with Virginia Tech’s outstanding string faculty.

On Sunday evening, the festival will culminate in a combined concert in the Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre in the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. The concert will feature the Honor String Orchestra first, followed by the VT Philharmonic Orchestra, and close the evening with a side-by-side piece with Honor Strings and VT Philharmonic combined.

Conductors

Virginia Tech String Faculty

Richard Masters, pianist

Richard Masters is a soloist, opera coach, chamber musician and orchestral pianist based in Blacksburg, VA, where he is an associate professor of piano and collaborative piano on the music faculty at Virginia Tech's School of Performing Arts.

Significant collaborations include concerts with Grammy-winning baritone Donnie Ray Albert, flutist and composer Valerie Coleman, Colombian mezzo-soprano Marta Senn, and the late Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Barbara Conrad. He has also appeared with former Boston Symphony principal trombonist Norman Bolter, former Juilliard String Quartet violinist Earl Carlyss, saxophonist Harvey Pittel, and under the baton of the late Lorin Maazel. Masters has performed solo, chamber and vocal recitals throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Other recent appearances include performances at the English Music Festival in Oxfordshire, England, the American Cathedral in Paris, and the Richard M. Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California.

Masters is the music director of Druid City Opera in Tuscaloosa, where he recently conducted Il Barbiere di Siviglia in 2025. Past performances with Druid City include Rigoletto, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Tosca. He has also served as associate conductor and head coach for Opera Roanoke, where in the 2024 season, he conducted Amahl and the Night Visitors, played continuo for Le nozze di Figaro, and rehearsed and performed Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Of his recitatives for Figaro, Gordon Marsh wrote in Opera magazine, “…Masters's harpsichord continuo served brilliantly as a 'responding character' during the recitatives…” (June, 2024)

The Chicago Tribune critic Howard Reich selected Masters’s recording of American art songs on the Albany label with sopranos Ariana Wyatt and Emily Martin as one of “the best classical recordings of 2020,” writing “Richard Masters summon[s] practically orchestral color at the piano." Other recordings included song cycles, instrumental sonatas, and solo piano works on the Heritage and E-M Records labels. A disc of chamber music for trumpet and piano with trumpeter Jason Crafton was released on the Blue Griffin label in Fall of 2025.

Masters has published articles and reviews on a wide variety of topics in a number of periodicals including American Music Teacher, Piano Magazine, Opera Journal, Association of Recorded Sound Collectors (ARSC) Journal, and Leitmotive, the Journal of the Wagner Society of Northern California. The ARSC Journal awarded him its 2024 Best Review Award for his review “From Hollywood to the World: The Rediscovered Recordings by Pianist and Conductor José Iturbi.” In 2023, he published a book with Rowman & Littlefield, An Encyclopedia of American Pianists from the 1800s to the Present.

Masters is a Yamaha Artist. He holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (DMA), the Juilliard School (MM), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (BM).