Direction

Nancy Chumachenco, Founder and Director

Nancy Chumachenco was born in 1943 in Boston, Massachusetts USA and began her cello studies with Bettina Roulier at the Hartford School of Music in Connecticut. She moved some years later to Washington, D.C., where she studied with John Martin, solo cellist of the National Symphony Orchestra.

After graduation from high school, she attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, studying with Orlando Cole and Leonard Rose. In the summer of 1961 she spent 7 weeks as a student at the Tanglewood Festival, and during the summer of 1962, she studied with Leonard Rose for 8 weeks at the Meadowmount School of Music. The experience of Meadowmount was to be essential to her later projects.

Moving to Switzerland in 1967, Nancy Chumachenco was a member of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, where her former husband was concertmaster. In order to raise her children, however, she left the orchestra as a permanent member, but continued to free lance in the chamber orchestra and later for 17 years in the Tonhalle Orchestra, Zurich. She also continued her cello studies with Alexandre Stein, solo cellist of the Tonhalle Orchestra. With, among others, her former husband Nicolas, her son Eric, her sister-in-law Ana Chumachenco, Oscar Lysy, Eke Mendez she was privileged to perform a large repertoire of chamber music.

Nancy Chumachenco taught cello at the Zurich School of Musik for 23 years. It was here that she realised the great challenges and rewards of teaching and working with highly-gifted young musicians, and this became her passion. Her former student Christian Poltéra, who began his studies with her in Zurich, is today one of the most prominent young cellists on the international scene. Her young trio with Linus Roth, Violin, Christian Poltéra, Cello and Philippe Jordan, Piano won the top prize for chamber music at the Swiss National Competition in 1992. Other students and ensembles which she taught and coached were equally successful at home and abroad.

All this culminated in the founding of Astona International.