About Summit
Two award-winning artists. Every seat in the house.
Summit Artistic Partners was founded by Joshua Gindele and Nicholas Tzavaras to provide high-level artistic leadership for classical music festivals, concert series and presenting organizations.
We are equal partners, longtime colleagues and friends, with more than thirty years of trust between us. Across our careers, we have performed on major stages around the world, led artistic planning for significant institutions, cultivated donors, served boards, guided education programs and helped shape the artistic experiences that bring audiences into the hall.
Summit brings that experience to organizations at defining moments: succession, growth, reinvention and long-term artistic planning.
An artistic organization is not merely a calendar of concerts. It is a voice.
That voice is shaped by taste, relationships, judgment, place, audience and the subtle architecture of a season. When those elements are aligned, a festival becomes more than excellent. It becomes unmistakably itself.
Our work is to help organizations find, protect and strengthen that voice.ity meets opportunity. Whatever you're building, we're here to help you take the first step with confidence. Driven by curiosity and built on purpose, this is where bold thinking meets thoughtful execution. Let’s create something meaningful together.
Our Perspective
JOSHUA GINDELE
Founding Cellist, Miró Quartet
Incoming Artistic Director, Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival
Professor of Cello, University of Texas
Joshua Gindele is a founding cellist of the two-time GRAMMY-nominated Miró Quartet, one of America’s leading string quartets, now in its fourth decade.
The Miró Quartet has won first prizes at the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the Naumburg Chamber Music Competition, and in 2005 became the first ensemble ever awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant. Josh performs internationally, records widely and serves as Professor of Cello at the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin.
Across his career, Josh has also done the institutional work that sustains the art form: fundraising alongside university leadership, board service, donor cultivation and artistic leadership. He is the incoming Artistic Director of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, where he is helping guide a multi-year succession from a beloved thirty-year founder.
NICHOLAS TZAVARAS
Cellist, Shanghai Quartet, 2000–2024
Senior Director of Artistic Planning and Educational Programs, Brevard Music Center
Nicholas Tzavaras spent nearly twenty-five years as cellist of the internationally renowned Shanghai Quartet, performing in more than thirty-five countries and on many of the world’s great stages, including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and Wigmore Hall.
He has appeared on more than two dozen recordings and served from 2009 to 2024 as guest principal cellist of the Shanghai Symphony. He now serves as Senior Director of Artistic Planning and Educational Programs at the Brevard Music Center, where he shapes a season of roughly one hundred concerts and leads its educational programs.
Nicholas also holds an MBA, bringing Summit a rare fluency in both artistic excellence and the business, governance and operational realities of the organizations we serve.
Between UsAs partners, we bring complementary experience and a shared belief: great artistic leadership should make an organization more itself, not more generic.
We have known and trusted each other for thirty years. That partnership is the foundation of Summit.
Why We Call It Summit
A summit is the height an organization is climbing toward: the fullest version of itself. It is also what an organization most wants in a guide — someone who has made the climb before, knows the route, reads the weather and helps you reach the top, then leaves you sure-footed enough to carry on.
Our ambition is not scale. It is to be the trusted name an organization reaches for at one of the most important moments in its life.