The Cleveland Orchestra announced the appointment of four new string players and a promotion within its violin and viola sections, effective this spring and summer. The changes shore up key leadership positions in the ensemble ahead of Music Director Franz Welser-Möst’s final season.

Elizabeth Fayette will join the orchestra as first associate concertmaster in May. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School, Fayette previously served as first violinist of the Vega String Quartet at Emory University and completed a fellowship with Ensemble Connect. Philip Marten will assume the role of associate concertmaster in August; he studied at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and the University of Southern California and held positions with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Kansas City Symphony.

Zhan Shu, who joined the orchestra’s first violin section in 2018, was promoted to assistant concertmaster. Two additional rank-and-file appointments fill out the section changes: violinist Dustin Wilkes-Kim, a Yale School of Music graduate most recently with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, and violist Gabriel Napoli, a Cleveland Institute of Music alumnus who served as associate principal violist of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

The appointments mean that Welser-Möst, who steps down after the 2026-27 season following 25 years as music director, has now personally appointed more than half of the orchestra’s current membership over the course of his tenure at Severance Music Center.

Source: The Strad