Mary Brook Hartmann, age 16, is a cellist, composer, and junior at the Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Texas under the music direction of Dr. Brad Smith. She has been a member of Virtuosi since the age of 12 and Principal Cellist for the last two years. As a cellist she has won First Prize at the Bonn (Germany) Grand Prize Virtuoso International Music Competition, the Clear Lake Symphony Orchestra Youth Concerto Competition, and the Helen and Immanuel B. Olshan Concerto Competition, performing as a soloist with both Virtuosi of Houston and Clear Lake Symphony Orchestras. She has attended the Texas Strings Festival, the International Cello Institute, the Eastman Cello Institute, Vivace Cello Festival, Boulder Cello Festival, OSSI, Greenwood Music Camp, ENCORE, and Bowdoin International Music Festival. She was one of 10 high school composers in the U.S. selected for the 2022 Young Composers Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and recently won the High School Division of the 2022 Voices of Change Young Composer’s Competition. She studies composition in Rice’s Michael P Hammond Preparatory Program with Dr. Pierre Jalbert, Professor at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music. She studies cello with Richard Aaron, Professor of Cello at the Juilliard School and the University of Michigan, and in Houston with Latitude 49 cellist Max Geissler.
