Scott Nickrenz, 1938–2025: A Tribute

by David Finckel  

On March 17, 2025, the classical music world lost one its most influential musicians. Scott Nickrenz was known to CMS audiences as a frequent guest violist, appearing virtually every season from 1972 until the end of Charles Wadsworth’s tenure as artistic director in 1989.  As an artist, his credentials were first-rate: co-founder of the Lenox and Vermeer String Quartets and the Orpheus Trio, as well as a Curtis Institute alum and a Tanglewood fellow, where he worked under such musicians as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Gunther Schuller and John Cage.  

However, although Scott was a stellar violist, it will be for his activities as a presenter that he will be chiefly remembered. He was the director of chamber music at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for 13 years, when the institution still had a robust classical music presence in New York, which had begun in 1861. In 1977, he became co-director (with his wife, flutist Paula Robison) of chamber music for the Spoleto Festivals in both Spoleto, Italy, and Charleston, South Carolina. More recently, he served as the director of chamber music for the New World Symphony, and taught at the New England Conservatory.  

I first met Scott in June of 1981 when my quartet, the Emerson, was engaged to play at both Spoleto Festivals. Coincidentally, in the fall of the same year, Wu Han met him when she came from Taiwan to study at the Hartt School of Music, where Scott was on the faculty. We both knew Scott before we knew each other.  

The musical connections my quartet made in the Spoleto Festivals remain with us to this day. Scott had an almost infallible instinct for detecting talent; I asked him once how he knew so well who would blossom into a successful career, and he said it was very simple: they have to have “chops” (instrumental technique in musicians’ language) and a good sense of humor. “That’s it?” I said. “Yes” he replied, in no uncertain terms.  

One could have not taken this seriously, except that in two summers at Spoleto, we met and played with Joshua Bell, Yefim Bronfman, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Joseph Swensen, Paula Robison, Kenneth Cooper, Laurence Lesser, Nathaniel Rosen, Jeffrey Kahane, Carter Brey—the list goes on and on. And not only they became our friends and colleagues: Charles Wadsworth had founded the Spoleto Festival chamber music component in Italy, and he was the concert host in both festivals. After hearing us perform the Debussy Quartet, he invited us to join the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as Artist Member, a position we held with great pride until the departure of Wadsworth in 1989. So, my story with CMS actually began in the Spoleto Festivals with Scott’s invitation.  

What Scott did for us, he did for many. His last presenter position was at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where he presided for 26 seasons. During that time, he oversaw the construction of the museum’s acclaimed Calderwood Hall, working with architect Renzo Piano and acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota. Music now thrives in the space that, in many ways, Scott built. And music is now part of many people’s lives, thanks to this indomitable force for good in the world.