Participant
David Bernat
Violin
Accepted to the preliminary round of the 2026 Naumburg International Violin Competition.
Biography supplied for the 2026 competition.
Recognized for his deeply personal approach to music and ability to connect with a wide range of audiences, violinist David Bernat leads a multifaceted career as a performer, educator, and artistic director. A sought-after chamber musician, David is a violinist of the Formosa String Quartet, ensemble-in-residence at the University of Houston Moores School of Music and the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. Recent engagements include performances at Carnegie Hall, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the Kennedy Center, Seoul Arts Center, and the Marlboro Music Festival, as well as broadcasts on BBC Radio 3's In Tune and WQXR's The Greene Space. Deeply committed to community engagement, advocacy, and education, David was a 2023–2025 Ensemble Connect Fellow at Carnegie Hall. As part of the fellowship, he served as a partner teacher at I.S./P.S. 226 Alfred De B. Mason in Brooklyn and developed interactive performances and educational programs for schools and communities throughout New York City. As a curator, David is the founder and Artistic Director of the Grace Note Farm Music Festival. The festival builds community through music by bringing together musicians and audiences from across New England in the beautiful and historic northwest corner of Rhode Island. David is a graduate of the New England Conservatory and earned master's and doctoral degrees from the Juilliard School. His teachers include Joseph Lin, Soovin Kim, Yuan-Qing Yu, and Katie Wolfe. He performs on a 1984 Samuel Zygmuntowicz violin.
Pianists
2026 International Violin Competition
Elias Dagher
, piano
Elias Dagher is a pianist whose work spans instrumental chamber music and song. He completed a two-year collaborative-piano fellowship at Bard College, working with singers and instrumentalists under the guidance of Erika Switzer and Kayo Iwama. He was a Tanglewood Music Center fellow in 2022, and in January 2023 he joined bass-baritone Michael Alexander Aoun for recitals at Lebanon’s Nabu Museum and the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
His activities also connect music with literature and community. With pianist Pierre-Nicolas Colombat, he co-founded the Boston Text and Tone Festival in 2024, bringing together vocal music, poetry, and spoken-word performance. Earlier performances in Lebanon included a 2019 chamber program featuring a new work by Lebanese composer Nadim Tarabay.
Dagher holds degrees from Columbia University and New England Conservatory and participated in Columbia’s exchange program with Juilliard. His teachers have included Julian Martin, Jerome Lowenthal, Alexander Korsantia, Vivian Weilerstein, and Cameron Stowe. He also plays the mbira dzavadzimu, an instrument associated with Zimbabwe’s Shona musical tradition.
Jiarong Li
, piano
Chinese pianist Jiarong Li works across solo performance, collaborative piano, chamber music, and teaching. She completed a fellowship as Collaborative Piano Fellow and Coordinator at the Yale School of Music and has held fellowships at the Music Academy of the West and the Bowdoin International Music Festival. Her collaborative engagements include the 2023 Concours musical international de Montréal and performances with artists including Andrew Wan, Joseph Špaček, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, Joseph Lin, and Ani Kavafian.
Li’s solo work includes a complete performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Manhattan School of Music. She has also appeared in concert series at Queens College, with Metropolis Ensemble, and in Sacred Music at Columbia University. Her honors include the Oxford Philomusica Piano Festival and Summer Academy Competition and New England Conservatory’s Honors Competition, which led to a Jordan Hall performance of Milton Babbitt’s Lagniappe.
She earned her bachelor’s degree at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music and her master’s degree at New England Conservatory, where she studied with Bruce Brubaker. Her subsequent training includes doctoral studies in collaborative piano with John Forconi at Manhattan School of Music.