Sharan Leventhal (violin), has toured four continents as a soloist, chamber musician and teacher. Since winning the Kranischsteiner Musikpreis at the 1984 International Contemporary Music Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, she has built an international reputation as a champion of contemporary music. She has premiered over 130 works, including compositions by Gunther Schuller, Ben Johnston, Pauline Oliveros, Tania León, Simon Bainbridge, Scott Wheeler, and Fred Hersch. Equally active in traditional venues, Leventhal has appeared as a soloist with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, and the Toledo, Milwaukee, Gulf Coast, Topeka, Dayton and Albany symphonies, among others. She is a founding member of the Kepler Quartet, Marimolin and the Gramercy Trio. Leventhal has received awards from Chamber Music America, the Fromm Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music Recording, the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Recordings include the string quartets of Ben Johnston with the Kepler Quartet (New World), the violin and piano works of Virgil Thomson (Northeastern Recordings), Gramercy Trio (Parma Recordings, Naxos, Newport Classic, Ltd.), and discs by Marimolin (GM Recordings, Catalyst/BMG).
Leventhal is a professor at Boston Conservatory at Berklee and at Berklee College of Music.