Music and Musicians

Musician Biography

Lisa Dempsey

Associate Concertmaster

Photograph by Brad Cansler

Lisa Dempsey is the Associate Concertmaster of the CSO, and moved here from Boston in 1998. Although she was born into a family of violinists, she did not begin playing until she was 15 years old. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree (summa cum laude) from the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, CT and a Master of Music (with honors) from Boston University, where she has also completed her Doctoral coursework. She was a member of the New World Symphony (Miami), under the direction of Michael Tilson-Thomas, and was a part of their PBS special “Beethoven Alive”.

She has also played with the Rhode Island Philharmonic, the Huntsville Symphony, the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, and the Vermont Symphony. She has been a substitute with the Alabama, Memphis, Charleston, and Richmond Symphonies, the Washington Opera at the Kennedy Center, and the Flemish Radio Orchestra in Belgium under the direction of Yoel Levi. She has held faculty positions with the Sewanee Summer Music Festival and the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras. Her teachers include Bayla Keyes, Mitchell Stern, Eduard Grach, Marylou Speaker-Churchill, Jonathan Sturm, and Machie Oguri-Kudo. She has participated in master classes with Dorothy DeLay, the Emerson String Quartet, the Muir String Quartet, Malcolm Lowe, Laura Park, Joel Smirnoff, Andres Diaz, and Fred Sherry. For the past three summers Lisa has performed as a part of Music on the Hill, a series of chamber concerts in Rhode Island, collaborating with musicians from major symphonies around the country.

In the summer of 2007, she served as the concertmaster of the Bard Conductors' Orchestra in New York, and during the summer of 2006, she won a job in an orchestra in Fontainebleau, France, just outside Paris. She also served as the Concertmaster of the Ohio Light Opera for two seasons, in 2004 and 2005. In August 2004 she spent a month in New York City as one of ten musicians chosen nationally for the John Cage Festival. In June 2003 she was one of twelve violinists selected to perform in a series of master classes with William Preucil, and was featured in both “Strings Magazine” and the “American String Teachers Association” Journal. Twice she has participated in the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, where she performed in concerts with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. Other festivals she has attended include Magic Mountain Music Farm, the Mark O'Connor Fiddle Camp (Nashville), Hot Springs Music Festival, Graz (Austria), Tanglewood, Aspen Music School, the Henry Mancini Institute in LA, Meadowmount School for Strings, Aix-en-Provence (France), the Istanbul Festival (Turkey), the Scotia Festival (Halifax, Nova Scotia), and the Moscow Conservatory International Summer School. She has recorded for the Chandos, Concord, and Albany labels.

In addition to playing, Lisa is a professional Orchestral Librarian, serving as Co-Librarian for the CSO, Head Librarian for the American Academy of Conducting at the Aspen Music Festival, and former Head Librarian for the Sewanee Summer Music Festival. Lisa feels honored to play on her grandfather’s violin, an 1875 Pasquale Ventapane, which he passed on to her when she was 17 years old.