Praised by The Boston Musical Intelligencer for his “sonorous, sweet tone and masterful phrasing,” Armenian-American violinist Samuel Andonian hails originally from Massachusetts, and is a graduate of The Juilliard School and the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Catherine Cho and Donald Weilerstein.

His formative mentors also include Natasha Brofsky, Kim Kashkashian, Merry Peckham, and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein. Currently, Andonian is a doctoral fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center as a student of Catherine Cho and Mark Steinberg.

Andonian has been a soloist with orchestras such as the Boston Pops Orchestra, the New England Philharmonic, and the Boston Youth Symphony, and has performed on NPR’s From the Top, at Juilliard’s Starling-DeLay Symposium, in recital for Music for Food and Music for Peace concert series, and at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s season-opening gala.

As a chamber musician, Andonian has participated in NEC’s Honors Chamber Music program, has attended The Perlman Music Program’s Chamber Music Workshop, Kneisel Hall and Norfolk Chamber Music Festivals, and has performed with artists such as Kim Kashkashian, Donald Weilerstein, Roger Tapping, and as leader of the Brentano String Quartet.

Andonian has been a concertmaster for the New York Classical Players, the Moritzburg Orchestra (in recording for Sony Classical), the NEC orchestras, and the Boston Youth Symphony for three seasons.

Important to his musical purpose has been Andonian’s work interning and performing with Music for Food, a musician-led initiative founded by violist Kim Kashkashian, which collects donations from its performances for organizations fighting food insecurity in their local community.