LAURA KOBAYASHI

Violinist, Laura Kobayashi leads a varied career as a performer and pedagogue.  She is a member of the Kobayashi/Gray Duo, the Main Street Chamber Players and Cirrus Ensemble and continues to actively perform as a chamber musician throughout the United States. Significant U.S. performances have included appearances at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina; the Embassy of Bulgaria and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; Merkin Concert Hall and Alice Tully Hall in NYC; Gindi Auditorium in Los Angeles; Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit and the Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago. Abroad as a chamber musician, she has performed in several countries in the European Union and South America as well as in Wales, Thailand, South Africa, and several Caribbean islands. She has recorded three CDs of music by women on the Parma Recordings label and has edited for publication a violin sonata by 19th Century French woman composer, Marie Grandval, for Hildegard Publishing Company. 

As an active teacher, Dr. Kobayashi is also the recipient of two teaching awards: the 2012 VASTA (Virginia State Chapter of ASTA) Outstanding String Teacher Award and the 2002 “Excellence in Teaching” Award by the School of Music and College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University.  She is a founding member of the Main Street Music Studios in Fairfax, Virginia, where she maintains a private studio of students. Her students have been accepted to The Juilliard School, The Jacobs School of Music (Indiana University), Shepherd School of Music (Rice University), Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Boston University, Ithaca College, The Hartt School (Hartford, CT), among others and throughout the U.S., many of her former students are college professors in violin or orchestral studies, public-school teachers or members of a professional orchestra.  Dr. Kobayashi’s past teaching positions include West Virginia University, the University of Georgia and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  She has also served on the summer faculties of the Brevard Music Center, Eastern Music Festival, Blue Mountain Chamber Music Festival, Lake Placid Summer Chamber Music Institute, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, Five Seasons Chamber Music Festival and the New England Music Camp. Prior to Dr. Kobayashi beginning her teaching career, she played as a member of the second violin section in the San Francisco Opera Orchestra.

Dr. Kobayashi studied violin with Dorothy DeLay, Paul Kantor, Andrew Jennings and Denes Zsigmondy and has performed in the master classes of Nathan Milstein, Arthur Grumiaux, Ruggiero Ricci and Gyorgy Pauk.  Chamber music studies have been with members of the Juilliard, Tokyo and American String Quartets as well as with collaborative pianists, Robert McDonald and Samuel Sanders. She earned her degrees from The Juilliard School, Yale University and The University of Michigan.