Fitz Gary joined the Garth Newel Piano Quartet as Violist and Co-Artistic Director in summer of 2022. The Quartet programs and performs over 50 concerts a year and hosts numerous outreach and educational programs at the Garth Newel Music Center in Hot Springs, Virginia.
Fitz, a native of Charlottesville, Virginia, has toured across the United States, Europe, and Asia performing in such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, London’s Royal Albert Hall, and Japan’s Suntory Hall. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music with Jeffrey Irvine, and graduate studies at The Juilliard School with Heidi Castleman and Hsin-Yun Huang. Selected as a 2013-2014 Fulbright Scholar, he studied with Barbara Westphal at the Musikhochschule in Lübeck, Germany. The school subsequently awarded him the DAAD prize for an outstanding international student, as well as his second master’s degree. While in Germany, Fitz also performed with the Grammy-Award-winning NDR Sinfonieorchester (Elbphilharmonie) in Hamburg as a member of their Academy.
Fitz has served as a Clinician Ambassador for the string company D’Addario, as well as the President of the Feldman Chamber Music Society in Norfolk, Virginia. In 2012, Fitz started a project called Music Feeds Us, a chamber music series promoting hunger relief. The concerts, which have been featured on Performance Today, have raised over 220,000 meals for partner food banks in Virginia. As an avid orchestral musician, Fitz has performed with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, among others.