Cellist Lydia Rhea has traveled across the world sharing the power of storytelling through music. A firm believer in increasing accessibility to concert halls and diversifying the classical canon, her work has taken her from Carnegie Hall to Cuba in performing and teaching capacities.

In 2023 & 2025, Lydia was a member of the quartet-in-residence at the European American Musical Alliance in Paris. She previously attended the Sitka International Cello Seminar studying with concert cellist Zuill Bailey. Other festival experiences include the Festival des écoles d’art américaines, Moritzburg Festival and Academy, Yellow Barn Young Artist Program, Meadowmount School of Music, and Heifetz International Music Institute.

An advocate for sharing music in spaces beyond the concert hall, Lydia traveled to Cuba in October 2024 with CAYO, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting, educating, and empowering students, teachers, and audiences in the US and Cuba. Lydia is an artist with Concerts for Compassion, a NYC-based nonprofit that brings music and education to displaced peoples and their local communities, and is a Teaching Artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. She regularly brings music into spaces such as immigration centers, hospitals, juvenile detention centers, and schools.

Lydia received her Master’s from The Juilliard School and completed her undergraduate work at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Upon graduating CIM she received the Speilman Memorial Award for an exceptional cellist and the Kaplow Prize for Uncommon Creativity. Her mentors include Natasha Brofsky, Dr. Melissa Kraut, and Andrea Casarrubios.

Lydia lives in New York City with her cello, Rosie, a Lawrence Wilke instrument made in 2008. You can follow along with her daily adventures on her socials @lydia_cello.

Amber Scherer is a pianist and educator based in NYC. Her work focuses on broadening accessibility to the arts and performing underrepresented voices in classical music.

In 2024, Scherer collaborated on the Webby-nominated Claiming Your Space, Juilliard’s celebration of Black musicians throughout history. She more recently performed in Juilliard’s Pride Songbook and Eros & Co. Eros featured Scherer and four singers at Merkin Hall as Caramoor Fellows, as part of the New York Festival of Song.

Scherer returned to Merkin Hall for Juilliard’s Vocal Arts Honors Recital with soprano Kerrigan Bigelow. Amber and Kerrigan have performed together extensively, as New Music Fellows at Songfest and Fellowship winners with the Federation of Art Song. Next season, they will perform recitals through City Lyric Opera, featuring a commissioned song cycle by composer Justine Chen.

Scherer also regularly performs with cellist Lydia Rhea. The pair enjoy exploring works by living and/or women composers in addition to the traditional repertoire, and their projects have included recording David Baker and Philip Lasser’s Cello Sonatas.

Her passion for education and community work was what first brought Scherer to NYC, as a 2021-22 Teaching Artist with AmeriCorps. She simultaneously joined the faculty at Brooklyn Music School and loves working with her students there.

For her own education, Scherer has attended various festivals on fellowship, including the Tanglewood Music Center, Music Academy of the West, and the Kent-Blossom Music Festival.

Scherer holds Bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance and Psychology from Oberlin, a Master’s in Collaborative Piano from The Juilliard School, and she will begin work on her DMA at Juilliard this fall. Her mentors include Jonathan Feldman and Lydia Brown.