Christopher O’Riley is one of the country’s leading pianists and a frequent guest artist with major symphony orchestras, such as the New York Philharmonic and the St. Louis Symphony. He brings his talent for musical presentation and a quick-witted charm to his role as host of “From the Top,” the series that showcases the musical performances and stories of the nation’s most exceptional, pre-college age classical musicians. 

A native of Chicago, O’Riley is an Artist Diploma graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. His work has been honored with top prizes at the Van Cliburn, Leeds, Busoni, and Montreal competitions. He has also received the Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Prize.

Media writing coach Kate Long is also an award-winning radio producer, songwriter, and freelance writer. She has presented programs for the National Writers Workshops, the Poynter Institute, The Freedom Forum, The Associated Press Managing Editors, the American Press Institute (API), and many other organizations. She has consulted with many major media organizations, including PRI’s “Marketplace,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Rocky Mountain News, and the New York Associated Press.

David Patrick Stearns is classical music critic at The Philadelphia Inquirer and for many years covered opera, classical music, and theater for USA Today. He is also a regular columnist for BBC Music Magazine, correspondent for The Independent in London, and contributes to Stereophile, Opera News, and amazon.com.

He earned a master of fine arts in musicology from New York University. He lives in New York City and writes impossibly wacky plays under a pseudonym he will never 
reveal.

Mark Mobley is music producer of "NPR's Performance Today," a Peabody Award-winning daily classical music program heard on more than 250 public radio stations from Maine to Guam. He is also the writer and producer of "Peter and the Wolf: A Special Report," an NPR Classics CD featuring NPR
personalities, the Virginia Symphony, and conductor JoAnn Falletta.

Before joining NPR, he was a "Performance Today" commentator and editor-in-chief of CD Review Music & The Arts, a monthly classical music and jazz magazine/CD package. During his ten years as music critic of theVirginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star in Norfolk, he won the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for distinguished music journalism, as well as awards from the Virginia Press Association and the Black Media Professionals of Hampton Roads. He is a graduate of Florida State University and the Peabody
Institute of Johns Hopkins University. He was also a fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts; his fellowship year at the University of Georgia included the development of an autobiographical one-man show, "Honor Guard."

From 1991 to 1996, he hosted, with Carol Taylor, the weekly alternative music/talk/humor show "Defenestration 895" on WHRV-FM. His recordings as producer include "American Mosaic," a collection of American music performed by flutist Debra Wendells Cross and harpist Barbara Chapman. "Performance Today" won the George Foster Peabody award in 1999.