SPA Trio

If you designed a 21st-century salon like those of the Enlightenment age, soprano Susanna Phillips, violist Paul Neubauer, and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott would be among the first musicians to invite. Phillips received the Metropolitan Opera's 2010 Beverly Sills Artist Award and has enjoyed a fabulous career singing opera's leading ladies. Neubauer, called "a master musician" by The New York Times, was appointed principal violist of the New York Philharmonic at age 21. Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott is a prolific solo and collaborative pianist whose career has seemingly spanned the whole world - and composers as diverse as Bach and Scriabin. Together, these three are an unstoppable force. Cleveland Classical has called the trio “collaborative music-making at its best.”

Of the trio's last Modlin performance, the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote, "Although they’re all highly acclaimed solo performers…they’ve also performed this repertoire of salon-style songs together on numerous occasions — and it showed in their refined sense of ensemble and unity of artistic vision. Phillips exhibited a strong yet flexible and warm lyric soprano, Neubauer showed expressive and effortless obbligato playing, and McDermott demonstrated the ultimate accompanist’s sensibility in controlling her dynamics, never overpowering the others even with the lid of the Steinway grand fully open."