Adelphi Orchestra Announces Winners of Young Artist Competition

In the 20th Anniversary of the competition, Matthew Hakkarainen won the Grand Prize

The 2024 Adelphi Young Artist Competition recently came to a close at the National Opera Center in Scorca Recital Hall. The Grand prize winner was violinist Matthew Hakkarainen, who will perform with the Adelphi Orchestra during the 2024-25 Season.

The competition presented three different divisions: Juniors, Senior, and College. Each division had two prizewinners and were as follows:

Juniors:

1) Jayden King (Violin)

2) Elizabeth Song (Violin)

Senior:

1) Nathaniel Yue (Cello)

2) Johnathan Okseniuk (Violin)

College:

1) Kingsley Hsieh (Clarinet)

2) Yang Yu (Oboe)

Honorable Mention:

1) Simone Hagopian (Violin)

2) Hongbo Cai (Piano)

Based in New Jersey, the Adelphi Orchestra is a professional, non-profit orchestra known for its symphonic, chamber, operatic, choral, and dance concerts. Over the past 20 years, the orchestra has hosted the Young Artist Competition and Young Artist Concerts, supporting young talent throughout New Jersey and the New York metropolitan area.

Previous winners include Esther Youjeong Yang, Sophia Werner, Sooah Jeon, SoHyun Ko, Hikaru Yonezaki, Randall Goosby, Bryan Cheng, Xiaoxuan Shi, Nathan Meltzer, Ari Boutris, Ming Nga Cheung, Dylan Wu, Anton Rist, Brieuc Vourch, Jennifer Choi, Lindy Tsai, Ethan Siegel, Philo Lee, and Christina Hughes.

Grand Prize winner Matthew Hakkarainen was the first American violinist to win first prize at the Premio Rodolfo Lipizer International Violin Competition, in Gorizia, Italy. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Pamela Frank, and he currently attends the Juilliard School, studying with Sylvia Rosenberg and Ronald Copes. Previous teachers Matthew has studied with include Charles Castleman, Mauricio Fuks, Borislava Iltcheva, Huifang Chen, and Maree Sawhney.

Matthew was recently awarded third prize at the Stuttgart International Violin Competition in Germany. He also won the second prize, audience prize, and contemporary piece prize at the Mirecourt International Violin Competition in France. In 2018, he won first place in the New World Symphony’s Concerto Competition and performed Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Michael Tilson Thomas and the NWS. This past summer, he won first prize ex æquo in the Prix Ravel at the Conservatoire américain de Fontainebleau with his performance of Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane.

He has served as Concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, the latter for which he recorded the violin solos from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade for the orchestra’s first Curtis Studio Label album, now available on Apple Music, Spotify, and other streaming platforms.

He is currently Associate Concertmaster of Symphony in C, and has also appeared as a Substitute Violin with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Matthew has been featured on National Public Radio’s “From the Top,” and has performed as a guest artist at FestivalSouth.

Matthew has appeared as a soloist with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony, Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestra Sinfonica Bulgaria Classic di Plovdiv, Acadiana Symphony Orchestra, New River Orchestra, and others.

Matthew is also honored to be a Center for Musical Excellence Young Artist, and a faculty member at Musart Music. He plays a 1790 Giuseppe Guadagnini violin and an Étienne Pajeot bow graciously provided by CANIMEX INC., from Drummondville (Québec), Canada.