A ‘most mature violinist’ whose playing has been described as ‘a dash of genius’(NJ Times), American violinist Christopher Kovalchick is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, where he studied with Ms. Shirley Givens. Other teachers include Christian Colberg, Ruotao Mao, and Joan Cordas. Upon graduation, Kovalchick was the recipient of the Josef Kaspar Memorial Award, given to a graduating string player of the highest caliber. He currently enjoys an active freelance career in the greater Los Angeles area.

Kovalchick currently holds the principal 2nd violin position in the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, as well as positions with the Riverside Philharmonic Orchestra, American Youth Symphony, and the Santa Monica Symphony. While at Peabody, Kovalchick was the principal violin of the Peabody Symphony Orchestra. Other orchestral positions at Peabody included concertmaster (2003-2004) and assistant concertmaster/principal (2002-2003) of the Peabody Concert Orchestra. He is also a member of the Greater Trenton Symphony Orchestra (NJ). He previously enjoyed a four year tenure with the Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra, where he served as concertmaster and guest soloist. He has been a featured soloist at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and has toured with Linda Ronstadt and the American Festival Orchestra. In 2006, he was the guest performing artist on the Johns Hopkins Knowledge for the World Tour in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Boston.

Kovalchick won Second Prize in the William Marbury Violin Competition at the Peabody Conservatory in March 2004. In June 2003, he took first place in the Glenn Miller National Competition, held in Clarinda, Iowa. Before matriculating to college he was a winner of the Princeton Youth Concerto Competition, the Anna B. Stokes Music Competition, and the Mercer County (NJ) Rotary Performing Arts Competition.

An avid chamber musician, Kovalchick has collaborated with such artists as Clinton Adams, Peter Landgren, Julian Yu, Gita Ladd, and with Edward Polochick as a featured soloist with the Concert Artists of Baltimore. He has studied chamber music with Michael Kannen, Maria Lambros, Amit Peled, Herbert Greenberg, and Julian Gray among others. He has performed in master classes with David Cerone, Aaron Rosand, Bertram Greenspan, Herold Klein, Thomas Lindsay, Oscar Ravina, Zvi Zeitlin, Oleh Krysa, Pamela Frank, the New Zealand String Quartet, Marc Johnson, Charles Schlueter, and the Ahn Trio.

In addition to his studies at Peabody, Kovalchick holds a M.S. in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology, as well as a B.S. in Engineering Mechanics and Mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University, where he achieved university and departmental honors. He is a recipient of the Robert George Gerstmeyer Award from the Johns Hopkins Department of Mechanical Engineering, and was named a Vredenburg Fellow by the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. He traveled to Hannover, Germany in Summer 2004 for a research assistantship at the Institute for Process Engineering, University of Hannover. In June 2005, he was awarded first prize in the International Student Paper Competition of the Society of Experimental Mechanics, for his research in the Experimental Mechanics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. Kovalchick was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for study in Germany in 2006, but declined the offer in order to pursue a PhD at the California Institute of Technology as a fellow of the United States Department of Defense. He is currently a third year graduate student of Professor G. Ravichandran.