About

A native of Princeton, NJ, cellist Zachary Mowitz made his solo debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in July 2018 as winner of the Greenfield Competition. An artist who wears many hats, Zachary is Artistic Director of ensemble132 and Nodality Music, an associated artist at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, and co-founded Trio St. Bernard – the 2018 Gold Prize winner of the Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition. He has performed with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, and has played as Guest Principal Cello with the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra and Princeton Symphony Orchestra. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, he appeared at the Marlboro Music Festival, and he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic this Fall.

Experience

Zachary graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2018, where he studied with Carter Brey and Peter Wiley and served as principal cello of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra. He subsequently studied at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel with Gary Hoffman and Jeroen Reuling in Belgium, and at the Royal College of Music with Richard Lester.  In the summers of 2022-23, Zachary attended the Marlboro Music Festival.

Having played with artists such as Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Lin, Tara Helen O’Connor, Hsin-Yun Huang, Jonathan Biss, and Robert McDonald, Zachary has an intense passion for chamber music. In 2019 he co-founded ensemble132, a chamber music collective that presents innovative, genre-defying programs of their own original transcriptions of classical masterworks, paired with staples of the traditional chamber music repertoire.

Zachary has appeared throughout the United States, visiting halls such as the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall and Perelman Hall, Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium, Alice Tully Hall, Columbia University’s Miller Theater, and Johns Hopkins’ Shriver Hall. He has also toured extensively in Europe playing in venues such as the Salzburg Mozarteum, both halls of the Berlin Konzerthaus, Krzysztof Penderecki European Center for Music, Vienna Konzerthaus, Helsinki Music Centre, and London’s Cadogan Hall. Zachary has also performed for series and festivals such as Gstaad Menuhin Festival, IMS Prussia Cove, Perlman Music Program, Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, Chesapeake Music Festival, Santa Fe Pro Musica, Four Seasons Winter Workshop, Taos School of Music, and Music from Angel Fire.

As a young musician he performed as soloist with orchestras throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He also appeared on Heifetz on Tour and the radio show From the Top, and has had performances broadcast by PBS and Philadelphia’s WHYY. In 2017, he was the subject of a feature story in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Community Engagement

Personally invested in expanding the impact of classical music, Zachary has dedicated considerable time and energy to a community engagement programs. In 2018, he organized a benefit concert for immigrant families in partnership with ACLU and the Shut Down Berks Campaign, featuring musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra, Daedalus Quartet, and Curtis Institute. As a recipient of a 2017 Community Artist Project (CAP) grant from the Curtis Institute, Zachary piloted a program bringing joint presentations of interactive workshops on music arrangement with formal recitals to community venues throughout Philadelphia, including the Free Library of Philadelphia and Settlement Music School. He has also performed for Music For Food, Project Music Heals Us, public schools throughout New Mexico with Music From Angel Fire, and Philadelphia's Project HOME – where he also led song-writing and arrangement workshops.

More recently, Zachary has brought programs to the Community Center Arnaud Fraiteur for handicapped children and IRSA (Royal Institute for the Deaf and Blind) in Brussels. He helped produce ensemble132’s Benefit Concert for the Boston Resiliency Fund, supporting those most vulnerable to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Boston area. In 2022-23, he was a Community Artist Fellow at the Curtis Institute, where he led a weekly workshop in partnership with Penn Memory serving people living with dementia and a climate justice education program in the Philadelphia school district, which included a special performance at the Kimmel Center. In 2023-24 he co-taught a class at the Curtis Institute on social entrepreneurship and climate justice and participated in a climate residency at Western University highlighting the Northern Tornadoes Project. That same year, he performed and spoke about the power of the arts to explore the human mind at the Franklin Institute as part of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society’s Arts on the Mind Festival.

Looking Forward

A fervent advocate for new music and innovative programming, Zachary has premiered an array of new works by prominent and young composers alike, including the world premiere of Richard Danielpour’s string quintet Shattered Vessel at Music from Angel Fire in 2019. He has presented two newly commissioned works for solo cello by Nick DiBerardino and Zachary’s own father, Ira Mowitz, in a series of interactive lecture-recitals named Suite Talk. Nick and Zach have since captured the best of this program in a video series with Guarneri Hall and launched the nonprofit Nodality Music, a nonprofit that cultivates direct links between artists, audiences, and broader culture with narrative-driven musical experiences. Nodality’s current featured project is its Climate Commissioning Initiative, which brings together composers, performers, and scientists in creating spaces for communities to process and address the realities of climate change.

Zachary was awarded First Prize in the 2020 World Bach Competition and is the cellist of Philadelphia’s Gamut Bach Ensemble. In his spare time, Zachary enjoys exploring the endless world of podcasts and tossing a frisbee.