BIOGRAPHY:  Prizewinner in the Tchaikowsky and Brussels competitions, Charles Castleman has been soloist with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, Moscow, Mexico City, New York, San Francisco, Seoul and Shanghai. A boxed CD set including the 17 best prizewinning violin performances of the Brussels Concours’ 50 year history has recently been released; Charles Castleman’s is one of those performances.

Mr. Castleman’s solo CDs include 10 Sarasate virtuoso cameos, 8 Hubay Csardases, and Ysaye’s Solo Sonatas (made at the time of his unique performance at Tully Hall in NYC) on MUSIC AND ARTS, Gershwin and Antheil on MUSICMASTERS, and 20^th century violin and harpsichord music for ALBANY. As a Ford Foundation Concert Artist he commissioned the David Amram Concerto, performing its premiere with Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony, and recording it for NEWPORT CLASSIC. He is dedicatee of "Lares Hercii" for Violin and Harpsichord by Pulitzer prizewinner Christopher Rouse.

He has participated in such U.S. festivals as Marlboro, Grant Park, Great Woods, Las Vegas, Newport, Round Top, Sarasota, and Saratoga as well as AFCM (Australia), Budapest, Fuefukigawa, Montreux, Shanghai, Sheffield, and Vienna Festwoche. His recitals have been broadcast on NPR, BBC, in Berlin and Paris.

Charles Castleman’s long-term chamber music associations have included THE NEW STRING TRIO OF N.Y. (with BASF recordings of Reger and Frank Martin) and THE RAPHAEL TRIO. In the RAPHAEL he recorded Dvorak for NONE- SUCH and SONY, Mendelssohn for DISCOVER, Beethoven for UNICORN, and Wolf-Ferrari for ASV, with premieres of Rainer Bischof’s "Trio 89" for Vienna Festival, and Frederic Rzewski’s "Trio" for the Kennedy Center.

Chair of Eastman’s String Department, Mr Castleman has conducted master-classes in Hong Kong, Kiev, London, Melbourne, Salzburg, Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo, Toronto, and Vienna. His students have been winners at Brussels, Munich, Naumburg and Szeryng, are in 30 professionally active chamber groups and are 1^st desk players in 12 major orchestras. He is founder/director of THE QUARTET PROGRAM, in its 36th season, now at Bucknell University, an intensive workshop in solo and chamber performance. The Tokyo and Cleveland Quartets, Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma have donated masterclasses there, Mr. Ma praising it as "the best program of its kind..a training ground in lifemanship."

Mr. Castleman earned degrees from Harvard, Curtis, and University of Pennsylvania. His teachers were Emanuel Ondricek (teaching assistant of Sevcik, Ysaye student) and Ivan Galamian, his most influential coaches David Oistrakh, Szeryng, and Gingold. He plays a Stradivarius from 1708, and chooses from 80 bows.