Mikaela Schneider, a sixteen-year-old Suzuki student from the Milwaukee area, performed in four concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. with Marvin Hamlisch, December 9-12. She also performed with Hamlisch and the Dallas Symphony December 4th and 5th.

Mr. Hamlisch invited Mikaela to sing at the Kennedy Center Holiday Concert last year after hearing her sing Schubert’s Ave Maria in the Milwaukee Symphony’s Holiday Concert. This year he invited her to sing in Washington, D.C. and in Dallas as well.

After the Dallas Concert one reviewer said this:

“As a child prodigy himself (mimicking radio music on the piano at age five and accepted into what is now the Juilliard School Pre-College Division at age seven), Hamlisch knows aptitude when he sees it. For this weekend’s concert, he brought along a slew of young talent. Vocalist Mikaela Schneider, whom Marvin met a year ago in Wisconsin, sang a breathtaking “Ave Maria”, and had you not known otherwise, you would never guess by the sound of her beautifully graceful voice that she was only sixteen.”

Mikaela has studied voice with Mary Hofer of the Aber Suzuki Center since the age of 9. In the past three years she has performed with the Milwaukee Symphony Pops Orchestra, Present Music, the Milwaukee Children’s Choir, Music by the Lake, and was a National Anthem soloist for the Milwaukee Brewers. She also has been coached as UWSP by Professor Emeritus Marjorie Phelps Kampenga and studies flute with Jeani Foster of the Milwaukee Symphony.

The Aber Suzuki Center has two other alumni currently performing at the Kennedy Center: Eric Lee is associate concertmaster of the National Opera Orchestra and Joel Fuller is a violinist in the National Symphony Orchestra.