BONNIE THRON PRINCIPAL


The June and Tom Roberg Chair

Bonnie Thron joined the North Carolina Symphony as principal cellist in 2000. She is an active chamber musician and recitalist and locally has been a guest artist with the Mallarmé Chamber Players and the Ciompi Quartet, as well as occasionally joining the Jacobowitz-Larkin Duo to form a clarinet trio called Three For All. In the Washington, D.C. area, she has recently been a guest with the American Chamber Players and performs regularly on the Washington Musica Viva series. For the past several summers, she has been a guest artist and teacher at the East Carolina University Summer Chamber Music Institute. In the summers, she plays in the Sebago Long Lake Music Festival in Maine.

Previously Thron was a member of the Peabody Trio, in residence at the Peabody Institute, during which time the group won the Naumberg chamber music competition. Early in her career Thron was assistant principal cellist of the Denver Symphony for a season and she has played and recorded with the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble. She has had a long history with the Apple Hill Chamber Players, as a guest artist and chamber music coach, and was involved in the group’s first Playing for Peace tour to the Middle East in 1991. Thron has performed concertos with the North Carolina Symphony, the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble, the Juilliard Orchestra, the Panama National Orchestra, the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, and various other orchestras in North Carolina and her original home state of New Hampshire.

Thron received both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from The Juilliard School. Her teachers include Lynn Harrell, Norman Fischer, and Elsa Hilger. Thron also received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and worked as a nurse for several years at Johns Hopkins Hospital and as a case manager in home care nursing, during which time she was also a cello teacher at the Baltimore School for the Arts.