Summertrios co-founder and Music Director Emerita Lily Friedman was a founding member of The New York Piano Trio, winner of the Artists International Competition, and awarded a debut performance at Carnegie’s Weill Hall. She has been a participant in the Marlboro Festival, the Orono, Maine Festival, and has performed in a large variety of chamber ensembles throughout the New York metropolitan area and New England as well as in France and the former Soviet Union. Among her more notable performances are the entire Beethoven Sonatas for Piano and Violin with New York Philharmonic violinist Anna Rabinova as well as the entire Beethoven oeuvre for piano and cello with Juilliard professor Andre Emelianoff.

Friedman holds a Masters Degree from The Juilliard School where she was a student of Beveridge Webster and an ABD in the Doctoral Program at Teachers College of Columbia University. Independently, she studied piano with Irma Wolpe, and chamber music with Menahem Pressler, Arthur Balsam, Isidore Cohen, Rudolf Serkin, and Joseph Fuchs. She has been a performing participant in the Menahem Pressler Master Classes for the past 25 years.​