Performances + Events
For faculty member and Borromeo String Quartet violist Melissa Reardon ’02 MM, ’03 GD, New England Conservatory has long been home.
As a teenager, Reardon studied with Hsin-Yun Huang, then the Borromeo Quartet’s violist, at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, in Natick. Reardon also attended NEC Prep, where she played in a quartet coached by Eugene Lehner, who, she said, “was a legendary faculty member at that time.” That group, the Amaryllis String Quartet, which also included violinist and current NEC faculty member Ayano Ninomiya, won First Prize in the Junior Division of the 1995 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.
After high school, Reardon completed undergraduate studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, before returning to NEC to study with Kim Kashkashian, who’d been teaching abroad for a few years before joining the NEC faculty in 2000.
“I was here for her very first class when she came from Germany,” Reardon, who earned her master’s degree and a graduate diploma from NEC said. “Studying with Kim was one of the most inspiring things for me, in my development.”
The Borromeo Quartet, in which Reardon is now the violist, was in residence during her graduate studies. “It’s kind of crazy,” she said. “The Borromeo Quartet figured large in my high school years. They were in residence at NEC when I was a master’s student, and I had the opportunity to play with them.” That opportunity came as a result of winning the ensemble’s inaugural Guest Artist Award, a competition prize that gives NEC students an opportunity to perform with the quartet. Borromeo Quartet violinist Nicholas Kitchen said Reardon had played alongside his group years earlier, as a member of the Amaryllis Quartet.
Twenty years passed before Reardon would become the Borromeo Quartet’s violist, years during which she honed her skills in another chamber group and developed as an artistic administrator. After leaving NEC, Reardon moved to New York City where she worked as a freelance musician and taught — in public-school settings in the city and at the Thurnauer School of Music in New Jersey. After a few years, she entered into a period of reflection.
“I was just about at the point where I was thinking, maybe music isn’t for me, maybe I’ll do something else,” Reardon said, explaining that in that moment “two important things happened: I won a job in a string quartet, which was the Ensō String Quartet, and then soon after that I got a job at the East Carolina University School of Music. So, I started playing in a quartet and I started commuting from New York City down to Greenville, North Carolina, and started teaching there. The timing of this was kind of serendipitous. My dream was to play in a string quartet. So, that immediately sort of set me on the path of doing that very seriously.”
Reardon at the time was also running the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, which she’d started with colleagues in 2001. “We had this idea, this very idealistic idea, of friends coming together, making chamber music, without a conductor. We wanted to be really, truly democratic.”
Collaboration drives Reardon. “I really love the idea of working with other people in a team,” she said. “That’s my favorite format.” And running ECCO with like-minded peers fed and informed her work in general, and her future. “That was really important and formative,” she said, learning how to do that and work with other people.”
It certainly informed her work as artistic director of the Portland Chamber Music Festival, a role she began serving in 2018, when the Ensō Quartet disbanded. “All that experience with programing, with ECCO and also with the Ensō Quartet, really helped,” she said.
It was in 2022 that Reardon joined violinists Kitchen and Kristopher Tong, and cellist Yeesun Kim, in the Borromeo Quartet, which had gone through a few iterations since its founding in 1989 and taking up residency at NEC in 1992. “When I got the call to audition for them,” she said, “I was kind of — shock is not really a strong enough a word.”
“What is wonderful in lots of treasured musicians is their ability to be imaginative and fresh,” Kitchen said. “Melissa does that in an extraordinary way. She has a way of interacting with the instrument which really creates a beautiful sound, for herself and for the group. It’s inspiring to feel like our paths have woven together over many years and that it all runs through NEC.”
Today, Reardon performs alongside musicians she began admiring as a student and teaches where she was once taught. The latter responsibility is one she approaches with thoughtful care.
“Part of my role is to help mentor them as they cross a threshold from being a student into the professional world,” she said of her students. “My job is to help them realize their goals to the best of my ability, and I try to model behavior for them, as well. I really encourage them to try to seek out the thing that really excites them, because that’s going to make the whole process of becoming a musician and artist better — if they’re really passionate about the direction that they’re going.
“You have to be able to get around your instrument and have the skill, and that takes a certain number of hours and practice and focus and talent and luck and all those things,” Reardon said. “But beyond that, what are you passionate about? What music makes you want to do more of that?
“There should be a burning desire to do this thing,” she said, “and you have to find out what that is for them.”
