August 5–9, 2015
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Tom Beghin
Praised for his eloquence and originality, Tom Beghin has been at the forefront of a new generation of interpreters of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century music. His release on Blu-ray of the complete solo Haydn for keyboard in nine “virtual rooms” was hailed as “one of the most audacious recording enterprises in recent memory” and won a 2011 Juno nomination for “Music DVD of the Year.” With classicist Sander Goldberg he co-edited Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, winner of the 2009 Ruth Solie Award from the American Musicological Society. Recent publications include a new CD-recording of Schubert’s Winterreise (with the tenor Jan Van Elsacker) on EPR-Classic and his monograph The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist (The University of Chicago Press, 2015). An alumnus of the doctoral performance program at Cornell University, he first taught at UCLA and since 2003 has been Associate Professor at McGill University. Currently on leave from McGill, he heads a research cluster at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium, entitled “Declassifying the Classics.”
Matthew Bengtson
Critically acclaimed as a “musician’s pianist,” Matthew Bengtson has a unique combination of musical talents ranging from pianist, harpsichordist, and fortepianist to analyst and composer. An advocate of both contemporary and rarely-heard music, he performs an unusually diverse repertoire, ranging from Byrd to Ligeti. He has recorded for the Roméo, Arabesque, Griffin Renaissance, Albany, Musica Omnia, and Navona labels. In the 100th anniversary of the death of Scriabin, he is presenting numerous all-Scriabin recitals including a multi-sensory celebration “Scriabin in the Himalayas” in Ladakh, India. On his recording of the complete Scriabin sonatas, the American Record Guide writes: “Only Horowitz and Richter can compare to what Bengtson achieves on this disc. Has Scriabin ever been played better?” He is also considered by Fanfare magazine “a Scriabinist for the twenty-first century . . . upon whom future generations can rely for definitive interpretations.” Bengtson is graduate of Harvard University in computer science and of Peabody Conservatory in piano performance. His teachers include Patricia Zander, Ann Schein, Webb Wiggins, Robert Levin, and Malcolm Bilson. For more information, please visit mattbengtson.com
Kristian Bezuidenhout
Kristian Bezuidenhout was born in South Africa in 1979. He began his studies in Australia, completed them at the Eastman School of Music, and now lives in London. After initial studies as a modern pianist with Rebecca Penneys, he explored early keyboards, studying harpsichord with Arthur Haas, fortepiano with Malcolm Bilson, and continuo playing and performance practice with Paul O’Dette. Bezuidenhout first gained international recognition at the age of 21 after winning the prestigious first prize as well as the audience prize in the Bruges Fortepiano Competition.
He is a frequent guest artist with the world’s leading ensembles including The Freiburger Barockorchester, Orchestre des Champs Elysées, English Concert, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Concerto Köln, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Sinfonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, and Collegium Vocale Gent, in many instances assuming the role of guest director. He has performed with celebrated artists including John Eliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe, Frans Brüggen, Trevor Pinnock, Ton Koopman, Christopher Hogwood, Pieter Wispelwey, Daniel Hope, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Isabelle Faust, Viktoria Mullova, Carolyn Sampson, and Mark Padmore. Bezuidenhout now divides his time between concerto, recital, and chamber music engagements, appearing in the early music festivals of Barcelona, Boston, Bruges, Innsbruck, St. Petersburg, Venice, and Utrecht; the festivals of Salzburg, Edinburgh, Schleswig Holstein, Tanglewood, Luzern, and Mostly Mozart (Lincoln Center); and at many of the world’s most important concert halls including the Berlin and Köln Philharmonie, Suntory Hall, Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Symphony Hall, Konzerthaus Vienna, Wigmore Hall and Carnegie Hall. Since 2009, Bezuidenhout has embarked on a long-term recording relationship with Harmonia Mundi. Recordings include the complete keyboard music of Mozart (Diapason d’Or, a Caecilia Prize, and Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik); Mendelssohn’s piano concertos with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, and Schumann’em>Dichterliebe with Mark Padmore (both won Edison Awards). His recording of Beethoven violin sonatas with Viktoria Mullova (ONYX label) won an Echo Award for the best chamber music album of 2011.
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Xak Bjerken
Pianist Xak Bjerken has appeared with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival Orchestra, and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Disney Hall. He has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Konzerthaus in Berlin as well as at Alice Tully Hall, Weill Hall, and the Kennedy Center. For many years, he has performed nationally as a member of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet and is the director of Ensemble X, a new music ensemble. He has held chamber music residencies at the Tanglewood Music Center, Spoleto Festival, and Olympic Music Festival and served on the faculty of the Eastern Music Festival, Kneisel Hall, and at the Chamber Music Conference at Bennington College. He released his first solo recording on CRI in 2001 and has since recorded for Koch International, Chandos, Albany Records, Artona, and Open G Records. Bjerken is Professor of Music at Cornell University where, with his wife, Miri Yampolsky, he co-directs Mayfest, an international chamber music festival. Bjerken studied with Aube Tzerko at the University of California at Los Angeles and received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the Peabody Institute as a student of and teaching assistant to Leon Fleisher.
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Malcolm Bilson
Malcolm Bilson has been in the forefront of the period-instrument movement for more than thirty years. A member of the Cornell University Music Department since 1968, where he is the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Music, he began his pioneering activity in the early 1970s as a performer of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pianos. Since then he has proven to be a key contributor to the restoration of the fortepiano to the concert stage and to fresh recordings of the "mainstream" repertory. In addition to an extensive career as a soloist and chamber player, Bilson has toured with the English Baroque Soloists with John Eliot Gardiner, the Academy of Ancient Music with Christopher Hogwood, the Philharmonia Baroque under Nicholas McGegan, Tafelmusik of Toronto, Concerto Köln, and other early and modern instrument orchestras around the world. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Bard College, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recently received the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, for his “extraordinary lifetime achievements” as “a pioneer in the performance of period instruments and chamber music in general.” For more information, please visit malcolmbilson.com.
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David Breitman
David Breitman is equally at home with the fortepiano and the modern piano, and enjoys both solo and ensemble playing. His collaboration with baritone Sanford Sylvan spanned more than thirty years, with several hundred recitals and four CDs, ranging from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin to the premiere recording of The Glass Hammer, a major song cycle by the Cuban-American composer Jorge Martin. He has recorded the Mozart piano-violin sonatas on historical instruments with Jean-François Rivest for Analekta, and, in a collaboration of a different sort, he is one of seven fortepianists on the 10-CD recording of the complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle on CLAVES. In 2003 he founded the Oberlin Fortepiano Trio with Elizabeth Wallfisch and Jaap ter Linden; alongside their activities as a trio, they have also recorded the complete Beethoven violin and cello sonata sets. Breitman is the director of the Historical Performance Program at Oberlin Conservatory where he teaches fortepiano and clavichord as well as courses in performance practice, and is currently working on a book titled “Time-Travel for Pianists: How Today’s Players Can Learn from Yesterday’s Instruments.”
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Blaise Bryski
Blaise Bryski’s checkered past reflects a broad range of musical interests. He was staff accompanist for the UCLA Department of Music for ten years and was a professional pianist in Los Angeles in many styles including rock and jazz. Bryski has performed with the New York Concert Singers, the Aldeburgh Connection/CBC Radio, Ensemble X, the Green Umbrella New Music series, Society for New Music, the Nakamichi Baroque Festival, the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, and the Cincinnati Symphony. He is also an eleven-year member of Mother Mallard, the world’s oldest synthesizer band. Bryski holds a doctorate in eighteenth-century performance practice from Cornell University. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts and is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Teachers include Aube Tzerko and Malcolm Bilson. Bryski currently holds positions as opera coach in the Ithaca College School of Music and as visiting lecturer in piano at Cornell University.Penelope Crawford
Internationally acclaimed as one of America’s master performers on historical keyboard instruments, Penelope Crawford has appeared as soloist with modern and period instrument orchestras, and as recitalist and chamber musician on major North American concert series. From 1975 to 1990 she was harpsichordist and fortepianist with the Ars Music Baroque Orchestra, one of the first period instrument ensembles in North America. As a member of the Atlantis Trio she has performed and recorded the major chamber works of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann for piano and strings. She has also recorded Schubert’s two major Lieder cycles, Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise with baritone Max van Egmond. Her solo and chamber music recordings have appeared on Timegate, Titanic, Wild Boar, Loft, and Musica Omnia labels. Her recording of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas won the Record of the Year Award from MusicWeb International. Crawford teaches a doctoral seminar in piano performance practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the University of Michigan. She also served for twenty-five years on the artist faculty of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute.
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Rebecca Cypess
Rebecca Cypess is Assistant Professor of Music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She holds a PhD in music history from Yale University, an MMus in harpsichord from the Royal College of Music (London), an MA in Jewish Studies from Yeshiva University, and a BA from Cornell in music. Her forthcoming work includes the book “Curious and Modern Inventions”: Music and Instrumentality in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press) and a recording of cantatas of Marc’Antonio Pasqualini with soprano Julianne Baird and harpist Christa Patton. Her research on Sara Levy has received grants from the American Bach Society and the Hadassah–Brandeis Institute. In September, 2014 she was co-convener and recitalist at the conference “Sara Levy’s World: Music, Gender, and Judaism in Enlightenment Berlin.”
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Adrian Daub
Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German Studies at Stanford University, where he works on the intersection between literature, music, and philosophy in the long nineteenth century. He received his PhD in May 2008 from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (The University of Chicago Press, 2012), Tristan’s Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner (The University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014). He has published articles on Richard Strauss, Franz Schreker, Richard Wagner, and the evolution of the piano repertoire in the nineteenth century.
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Ursula Dütschler
Swiss harpsichordist and fortepianist Ursula Dütschler is a renowned performer who has been heard throughout Europe and the United States. She is the first prizewinner of major competitions such as the International Harpsichord Competition in Paris and the Erwin Bodky prize in Boston, which she won as a fortepianist. Dütschler has a distinguished and lengthy discography on both instruments on the Claves label. She has won wide critical acclaim for her interpretation of J. S. Bach’s Toccatas. Geoffrey Crankshaw of Musical Opinion (UK) enthused, “Ms. Dütschler’s [performance of the Toccatas] at the Wigmore Hall was, quite simply, a revelation . . . [She] is an exceptional musician, commanding a superb technique, which she places wholly at the service of the music.” Goldberg Magazine praised her recording of the cycle as for its “beautiful, inspiring performances.” Dütschler was also a participant in the groundbreaking recordings of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas on period instruments by Malcolm Bilson and six of his former students, who also performed the works at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall. Dütschler studied at the Bern Conservatory, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and at Cornell University.
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Liv Glaser
Liv Glaser has since her debut in 1960 been recognized amongst the elite of Nordic pianists, with countless concerts, broadcasting and TV-performances, touring extensively in Norway, the Nordic countries, Europe, Middle-East and Asia, giving master-classes as well and serving on juries in competitions. Studies in Oslo with Robert Riefling, at Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique in Paris with legendary Vlado Perlemuter, with Lev Oborin in Moscow, and with Ilona Kabos and Wilhelm Kempff. Glaser has been teaching at the Norwegian Academy of Music since its foundation 1973 and became professor in 1994. A sabbatical, of invaluable significance to her future musical life, brought her in 1990 to Cornell University and Malcolm Bilson. In 1992, she started teaching fortepiano classes and performance-practice courses at the Academy, which today owns 4 fortepianos. Since 1992, Glaser has recorded exclusively on fortepianos with international acclaim. She has been awarded The King's Order of Merit and the Lindeman and Grieg prizes. Glaser still gives fortepiano classes at the Norwegian Academy of Music and remains active as a perfomer.
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Martha Guth
Soprano Martha Guth brings consummate musicianship, interpretive intelligence, and a distinctive tonal palette to a wide range of musical styles and periods. Her operatic performances include the Santa Fe Opera, the Canadian Opera Company, the Grazer Oper in Austria, Opera Lyra in Ottawa, Canada and Palma de Mallorca, Spain. In recital, she has performed at the Wigmore Hall and the Leeds Lieder Festival with pianist Graham Johnson, the Vancouver International Song Institute, and the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival with pianist Erika Switzer. She is proud to have worked under the batons of Seiji Ozawa, Robert Spano, Helmut Rilling, John Nelson, and Richard Bradshaw, among many others. Her discography includes a solo disc of Schubert songs with Penelope Crawford on fortepiano, Roberto Sierra’s Beyond the Silence of Slumber with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Puerto Rico for Naxos, and John Fitz-Roger’s Magna Mysteria for the Innova label. Guth curates the Casement Fund Song Series based in New York City, is a founding faculty member and co-director of the Contemporary Performance Studies program at the Vancouver International Song institute (VISI), and is the co-creator and co-editor of “Sparks and Wiry Cries,” a website dedicated to scholarship, exploration and performance in art song. For more information, please visit marthaguth.com.
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Tuija Hakkila
Tuija Hakkila studied at the Sibelius Academy with Liisa Pohjola and Eero Heinonen, and continued her studies at the Paris Conservatoire with Jacques Rouvier and Theodor Paraschivesco. She studied twentieth century music with Claude Helffer in Paris and historical performance practices with Malcolm Bilson in the United States. Her repertoire ranges from Bach to contemporary music. She has performed as soloist, in chamber groups, and as accompanist throughout Europe, in the United States, Japan, Indonesia, Africa, and South America. Hakkila's solo discography includes the complete cycle of Mozart keyboard sonatas for which she has won acclaim in the world press, a compilation of Jean Sibelius’s piano works, and a world premiere recording of the early nineteenth century Finnish Lithander brothers’ music. In addition, she has recorded Niccoló Castiglioni’s chamber music, Haydn flute trios, and Byström sonatas for piano and violin. In the repertoire for cello and piano her discography includes Gabriel Fauré’s music and all of Beethoven’s works. She has been the Artistic Director of the Early Music Festival in Hämeenlinna, the Sibelius Academy Concert Series, Kaiho Festival in Espoo, and Nurmes Summer Academy and Concerts. In 2014 she was appointed Professor of Piano Music at the Sibelius Academy. For more information, please visit tuijahakkila.info.
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Erin Helyard
Praised as a virtuosic and eloquent soloist as well as an inspired and versatile conductor, Erin Helyard is at the forefront of a new generation of young musicians who combine the latest musicological and historical inquiry with live performance in contemporary culture. Helyard graduated in harpsichord performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with first-class honors and the University Medal. He completed his Masters in 2005 in fortepiano performance with Tom Beghin at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal. Pursuing a passion for the music and culture of the eighteenth century and the ideals of the Enlightenment, he completed a PhD in musicology at the same institution in 2011. He was named the Westfield Concert Scholar on fortepiano for 2009–2010, an initiative of the John Ernest Foundation. From 2003 to 2011 Helyard was a central member of the award-winning Montreal-based Ensemble Caprice. In Sydney, Helyard is an artistic director and founder of Pinchgut Opera and Orchestra of the Antipodes. Together with Leo Schofield, Helyard is music director of Brisbane Baroque, an international early-music festival formerly based in Hobart. Helyard has been Lecturer in Historical Performance Practice at the New Zealand School of Music and is currently Lecturer in Music at the Australian National University.
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Shin Hwang
Shin Hwang, a prize-winner of the first International Westfield Fortepiano Competition, is a versatile keyboardist who has won recognition in both modern and historical performance. After completing his Masters degree at the University of Michigan with Penelope Crawford and Arthur Greene, he received the prestigious Fulbright Grant to study in the Netherlands at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. In 2011, he was invited to perform at the United States Library of Congress for the American Musicological Society Lecture Series: “What the Autograph Can Tell Us: Beethoven’s Sonata in E major, Opus 109.” Other significant performance engagements include solo and chamber performances in the Vredenburg Leeuwenbergh in Utrecht, and Het Bethanienklooste in Amsterdam and the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Schokland. As a recipient of the DAAD Scholarship, he currently studies harpsichord and fortepiano with Robert Hill at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.
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Monica Jakuc Leverett
Monica Jakuc Leverett is Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor Emerita of Music at Smith College, where she taught from 1969 until 2008. A champion of both women composers and contemporary works, she has played solo and chamber music concerts on three continents. Inspired by Malcolm Bilson, Jakuc Leverett has been performing on early pianos since 1986. As guest artist in a series of Historical Piano concerts, she has played instruments from The Frederick Historic Piano Collection in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. A former board member of Arcadia Players, New England’s period instrument ensemble, she has frequently performed with them on her two fortepianos by Paul McNulty: a 5½-octave Walter design (c. 1803), and a 6½-octave copy of Graf’s op. 318 (c. 1819). With noted early music violinist Dana Maiben, she recorded Francesca LeBrun’s complete Sonatas for Fortepiano and Violin, Opus 1, on Dorian. She has also recorded fortepiano sonatas by Marianne von Martinez, Marianna von Auenbrugger, and Joseph Haydn on Titanic. Her newest CD features fantasies for fortepiano by Mozart, C. P. E. Bach, and Haydn, plus Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata. For more information, please visit www.monicajakucleverett.com.
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R. J. Kelley
R. J. Kelley began his work with historical horns in 1973, under the tutelage and mentorship of American master builder/player Lowell Greer. A founder and, later, president of the Detroit Waldhorn Society, Kelley has become a leading artist and teacher of early horns. Now in his fifth year as artist faculty at the Juilliard School, Kelley has concertized and lectured nationwide in furtherance of historical performance practice, most recently at the International Historic Brass Symposium held at NYU, as artistic director of the nineteenth-century horn quartet Universal Piston. Kelley also serves as solo/principal horn of the American Classical Orchestra (NYC), Trinity Baroque Orchestra (NYC), and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (San Francisco). Historical Performance credits throughout North America and Europe include the Royal Court Theater Orchestra at Drottningholm, Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Tafelmusik, Handel & Haydn Society, Boston Baroque, the Bach Ensemble, Santa Fe Pro Musica, and CBC Vancouver, to name just a few. Solo horn of Manhattan Brass and the Smithsonian Chamber Players, Kelley is also in the vanguard of modern players as a member of the Orchestra of St. Luke's, with appearances at the NY Philharmonic, MET, Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, American Ballet Theater, NYC Ballet, Orpheus, and many others. TV credits include Saturday Night Live, Late Night with David Letterman, the Tonight show with Jimmy Fallon, the Today Show, and the View.
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David Kim
Pianist David Hyun-su Kim has performed internationally, with past appearances in the United States, Canada, Austria, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Australia. Kim holds degrees from Cornell, Yale, and Harvard, and a doctorate from Boston’s New England Conservatory, and is professor of piano and theory at Whitman College in Washington. In June 2009, Kim made his historical performance debut at the Fringe Series of the acclaimed Boston Early Music Festival, with a program pairing works by Schubert and Schumann, and he returned to BEMF in 2011, playing Beethoven and Schumann to a sold-out audience. Since then, his performance schedule has included recitals at the Universities of Michigan, Washington, South Carolina, Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Maine-Farmington; Duke, Ohio, and Pennsylvania State Universities; Bowdoin, Colby, Denison, and Gettysburg Colleges; and a joint recital at Indiana University. He has participated in the Banff, Norfolk, ARIA, and Eastman’s Young Artists International Music Festivals, and the PianoFest Austria Summer Program, and was a finalist at the 2012 international Westfield Fortepiano Competition. In addition to his performance activities, Kim is also active as a scholar and, in summer 2012, he published “The Brahmsian Hairpin” in 19th-Century Music. For more information, please visit davidkimpiano.com.
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Tonia Ko
The music of Tonia Ko has been described by critics as “expansive, meditative,” and containing “an uncertain piquancy.” Her work strives to capture the poetics and emotions behind small visual details of everyday life. Ko’s music has been performed across the United States as well as in Asia and Europe, by ensembles such as the Flux Quartet, orkest de ereprijs, ensemble mise-en, Eastman Wind Ensemble, and New Morse Code. Festivals that have featured her music include Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, Thailand International Composition Festival, and the Wellesley Composers Conference. In 2013, she was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a residency from the Copland House. Tonia has also received recognition from the Lin Yao Ji Foundation, New Music USA, and International Alliance for Women in Music. Her own explorations in the visual arts have sparked a curiosity for interdisciplinary connections—recent projects include an installation for bubble wrap with electronics entitled Breath, Contained, a musical for the Perry Chiu Experimental Theatre, and a piece for Periapsis Music and Dance. Tonia is currently a doctoral student at Cornell University. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, she received previous degrees from Indiana University and the Eastman School of Music.
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Frédéric Lacroix
Frédéric Lacroix has performed in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia as a soloist, chamber musician, and collaborative pianist and harpsichordist. He has made regular radio appearances on the Canadian CBC and SRC or the American NPR. Following the University of Ottawa’s purchase of a fortepiano in 1997, Lacroix has devoted part of his time to the study and performance of music on period keyboard instruments, for which he was recognized as the Westfield Center Performing Scholar for 2008-2009. Lacroix is also active as a composer, having written for the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, the Society of American Music, the Canadian University Music Society, the Chœur Classique de l’Outaouais, and other noted Canadian musicians. He currently teaches piano and composition at the University of Ottawa.
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Mike Lee
Awarded Second Prize and Audience Prize at the 2011 Westfield International Fortepiano Competition, New Zealand pianist Mike Cheng-Yu Lee is one of an emerging generation of pianists that advocates performance on pianos spanning the eighteenth century to the present. Recent orchestral engagements include an invitation from Michael Tilson Thomas for a week-long residency to perform as soloist with the New World Symphony Orchestra and co-teach with Juilliard faculty Cynthia Roberts on eighteenth-century performance practice. As a chamber musician, Lee has forged partnerships with string players such as Joseph Lin, Clancy Newman, and Tatiana Samouil that integrate modern and period instruments, and has been invited to the Kneisel Hall, Sarasota, and Mayfest music festivals. Recent projects include a symposium on Schumann’s late chamber music and performances with the Formosa Quartet. He is currently Visiting Lecturer of Music at Cornell University. Lee is a graduate of Yale where he studied with Boris Berman and Michael Friedmann. He is currently completing a PhD at Cornell University where he is a student of Malcolm Bilson and the noted Haydn scholar James Webster.
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Gili Loftus
Gili Loftus was born in Toronto in 1989, and relocated to Israel in 1992. She served in the Israel Defense Forces under the status of “Outstanding Musician.” She completed her Master’s degree at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, where she double majored in piano and fortepiano—in the classes of Sara Laimon and Tom Beghin respectively—, and is now continuing her doctoral studies, triple majoring in harpsichord (Hank Knox and Alex Weimann), fortepiano, and modern piano. This three-fold perspective has opened new paths for interpretative and historical exploration, which earned Loftus a distinguished SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) research scholarship. Loftus proceeded to win the second prize as well as the audience prize at the 2013 Musica Antiqua Fortepiano Competition in Bruges, Belgium. Past engagements include a performance at the 2014 edition of the Festival Montréal Baroque as well as a solo recital given as part of the Jacques-Dansereau series at Salle Bourgie, Montreal. She has played in numerous live broadcast concerts on the “Kol Hamusica” national radio station in Israel, and in a concert celebrating the career of Clara Schumann this past March. Gili has spent the past six months in London, UK doing research towards the completion of her degree.
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Alexei Lubimov
Born in Moscow in 1944, Alexei Lubimov is one of the most strikingly original and outstanding pianists performing today. Following studies at the Moscow Conservatory with Heinrich Neuhaus, Lubimov early in life established a dual passion for Baroque music performed on traditional instruments and for twentieth century composers. He first attracted notice with compelling performances of modern scores and, in 1968, played the Moscow debuts of works by John Cage and Terry Riley. Soviet authorities heavily criticized his commitment to Western music and prevented him from leaving the Soviet Union for several years. So Lubimov concentrated on working with period (original) instruments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and founded the Moscow Baroque Quartet and the Moscow Chamber Academy. Lubimov's activity for developing the Early music movement in Russia has been inexhaustible: in the early 1980s, he began to perform music of Baroque, Classic and Romantic on period instruments; in 1997, he founded the Department for Historical and Contemporary Performance at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory; and he still organizes early music festivals and concert series. Political restrictions were lifted during the 1980s, and Lubimov soon emerged among the first rank of international pianists, performing on tour in Europe, North America, and Japan. In recent seasons, Lubimov has given numerous solo recitals and concerts with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the DSO Berlin, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment, the Munich Philharmonic, the SWR Stuttgart (Pärt), the Russian National Orchestra in Moscow, and the Tonkünstlerorchester in the Great Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein. He toured with the Haydn Sinfonietta playing Mozart concertos, played Mozart with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana under Robert King, Haydn with the Camerata Salzburg under Sir Roger Norrington in New York, and Pärt’s Lamentate with the RSO Vienna under Andrey Boreyko at the Musikverein. He held fortepiano master classes in Italy, Belgium, France, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Russia. Lubimov’s numerous recordings include piano duets with Andreas Staier on Teldec and a much-praised recording of the complete Mozart piano sonatas on Erato. For ECM, he has recorded CDs of particular note: Der Bote, with music of Liszt, Glinka and C. P. E. Bach alongside John Cage and Tigran Mansurian; Messe Noir with music of Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Scriabin; and the Debussy Préludes on a 1913 Steinway and 1925 Bechstein. Recent CD releases on period instruments include Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Satie on ZigZagTerritoires, Alpha, and Passacaille labels.
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Ryan MacEvoy McCullough
Pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough performs music ranging from standard repertoire to electroacoustic improvisation. He appeared as concerto soloist with such orchestras as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and performed alongside the Mark Morris Dance Group and contemporary ensemble eighth blackbird. He performed at the Tanglewood Music Center, Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, Sarasota Festival, Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival, and Nohant International Chopin Festival, and co-directed Environs Messiaen, a festival held at Cornell University in March 2015. McCullough has worked closely with composers George Benjamin, John Harbison, Helen Grime and Andrew McPherson. In 2008, Ryan released a CD of solo piano music by twentieth century Polish-French composer Milosz Magin on the Polish label Acte Prealable, and in 2013 was featured on an Innova Records release of Andrew McPherson’s Secrets of Antikythera for magnetic resonator piano. McCullough holds the BA from Humboldt State University, MMus. from the University of Southern California, and Artist Diplomas from the Colburn Conservatory and The Glenn Gould School. He studied with Deborah Clasquin, David Louie and John Perry and worked with Stephen Drury, Leon Fleisher, and Peter Serkin. At Cornell University, McCullough pursues a doctoral degree in Keyboard Studies with Xak Bjerken. For more information, please visit rmmpiano.com.
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Paul McNulty
Paul McNulty became interested in instrument building after studying music at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. He studied piano technology in Boston and earned guild qualification as a tuning examiner. After some years in Amsterdam, he came to the Czech Republic in 1995. He has built more than 200 fortepianos many of which feature in recordings and are owned by leading musicians and institutions. The growing maturity of the McNulty workshop has enabled swift assimilation and fine, timely execution of recent commissions, all world firsts as modern replicas of Pleyel 1830, Liszt’s personal Boisselot 1846, and Streicher 1868. This broadening experience has made more assured our typical production of earlier, Viennese models. The resources for undertaking large, complicated projects have enabled us to confidently meet sudden requests for the smaller pianos, including Graf, Fritz, Stein, and Walter. For more information, please visit fortepiano.eu.
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Zvi Meniker
Harpsichordist, organist and fortepianist Zvi Meniker was born in Moscow and raised in Israel. He began advanced musical studies at the age of 15. Meniker received diplomas with distinction from the Salzburg Mozarteum and the Zurich Academy of Music, where he studied with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Johann Sonnleitner, before moving to the USA to study with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University. Meniker commands a wide repertoire on his three instruments ranging from late medieval works to twentieth-century compositions. He has also won numerous awards at international competitions. Meniker taught harpsichord and performance practice at Duke University, and was a regular faculty member at the annual Early Music Workshop in Jerusalem. After teaching at the Mendelssohn Conservatory in Leipzig, Germany, he accepted a professorship at the Hannover Conservatory, where he currently teaches harpsichord, fortepiano and performance practice. He was also a visiting professor at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music in Tel-Aviv. His doctoral dissertation, is on the performance practice of Chopin’s piano works. He has perfromed with many renowned Early Music Ensembles, among which are Musica Antiqua Köln, Concerto Köln, Capella Savaria, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the Dresden Baroque Orchestra, the Orfeo Orchestra Budapest, the Tel Aviv Soloists, the Israel Camerata, and others.
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Roger Moseley
As scholar, teacher, and pianist, Roger Moseley focuses on intersections between the musical disciplines of history, theory, and performance. His interests range from the music of Brahms, on which he wrote his PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, to music-based video games and from eighteenth-century keyboard improvisation to technologies of musical (re)production. In his current book project, Between Work and Play: Technologies of Musical Recreation from Mozart to Nintendo, Moseley examines how a diverse array of musical phenomena can be understood as (pre)texts and practices that manifest and enable musical playfulness. His research aims to help establish an agenda for ludomusicology—the study of music as play—that complements and challenges the work-based approach characteristic of much scholarly treatment of Western art music. Prior to his arrival at Cornell in 2010, Moseley lectured in music history and theory at the University of Chicago. From 2004–2007 he was a Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford, and in 2007 he was awarded an MMus in Collaborative Piano from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. At Cornell, he teaches undergraduate courses in music history and theory, and recently held a graduate seminar on virtuosity in nineteenth-century music. For more information, please visit rogermoseley.com.
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Stefania Neonato
Stefania Neonato, born in Trento, Italy, studied piano with Alexander Lonquich, Riccardo Zadra, and Leonid Margarius. She earned her fortepiano master’s degree at the Imola International Academy under Stefano Fiuzzi and a DMA. in Historical Performance Practice under Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University. In April 2013, she was appointed Professor of Fortepiano at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart, Germany. Her repertoire ranges from the classical era to the twentieth century. In 2007 she got both first prize and audience prize at the International Fortepiano Competition “Musica Antiqua” in Bruges. She plays at some of the most important Early Music Festivals (Bruges – Van Vlaanderen, Graz – Styriarte, Rovereto – Mozart Festival, Bruxelles – Klarafestival, Festival Alte Musik Knechtsteden, Boston – Early Music Festival, Kölner Fest für alte Musik, Regensburg &ndashl Tage der Alten Musik), and concert seasons (Münster – Erbdrostenhof, Bologna – Accademia Filarmonica, Brescia – Teatro Grande, Firenze – Accademia B. Cristofori, Padova – Amici della Musica, Madrid – Juan March Foundation, Rome – Oratorio del Gonfalone, Vienna – Musikverein). She is also active as pedagogue around the world with masterclasses on performance practice. In 2012 she served as juror at the first International Fortepiano Competition “G. G. Ferrari” (Rovereto-Italy). For more information, please visit stefanianeonato.com.
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Olga Pashchenko
Olga Pashchenko is a young artist who has established a reputation as a versatile performer on harpsichord, fortepiano, modern piano, and organ. In 2005, Pashchenko graduated with honors from the Gnessin School and entered the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. She studied with Alexei Lubimov (modern piano), Olga Martynova (harpsichord, fortepiano), and Alexei Schmitov (organ) and concluded her studies with honors in 2010. Subsequently, she was a postgraduate at the same Conservatory with Alexei Lubimov (historical keyboards). From 2011 onwards, she studied fortepiano and harpsichord with Richard Egarr at the Conservatory in Amsterdam, and received her master’s degree cum laude in 2014. Pashchenko was awarded prizes on all her instruments at many international competitions (such as Musica Antiqua Brugge, Hans von Bulow International Piano Competition, Bach Wettbewerb Leipzig, and others) and performs internationally as a soloist, chamber musician, and with orchestras. She is also a regular guest at early and contemporary music festivals across Europe. She has made various radio and CD recordings. In 2012, Outhere/Fuga Libera issued her first CD, Transitions, with works by Dussek, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, and she will record an all Beethoven solo disc for the same label in the Spring of 2014.
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Michael Pecak
Chicago-born pianist Michael Pecak has performed to great acclaim throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe on both modern and historical instruments. He has been recognized by such organizations as The Chicago Chopin Society, The Kosciuszko Foundation, Early Music America, Early Music Vancouver, and The Historical Keyboard Society of North America. He earned special awards at the Kosciuszko Foundation International Chopin Piano Competition for his performances of works by Szymanowski and Chopin. Pecak earned his BM from Northwestern University where he studied piano performance with Alan Chow and orchestral conducting with Victor Yampolsky. As a Fulbright scholar at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, Poland, Pecak completed an intensive research and performance project on the piano music of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Polish composers. Pecak was subsequently named Artist-in-Residence at the Polish Studies Center of Indiana University where he earned his MM in piano performance, studying with Andre Watts. A consuming interest in historical performance practices then brought Pecak to Cornell University where he studied with Malcolm Bilson as a graduate fellow. Pecak is pursuing a DMus degree in fortepiano and historical performance practices in the class of Tom Beghin at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
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Carmel Raz
Carmel Raz is a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in Music at Columbia University. Her PhD (Yale 2015) examined physiology, perception, and early Romantic auditory cultures. She also holds degrees in violin and composition from the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and the University of Chicago, respectively. She has received the 2015 Theron Rockwell Field Dissertation Prize, a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, a Mellon Graduate Achievement Award, and a fellowship from the Baden Württemberg Stiftung. Her articles have appeared in 19th Century Music, the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, and the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. She is also active as a composer and violinist, and regularly performs with the Israel Contemporary Players and the Meitar Ensemble, as well as in various improvised music ensembles. For more information, please visit carmelraz.com.
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Hardy Rittner
Hardy Rittner, born in Rüsselsheim in 1981, studied piano and early piano at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg in the classes of Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and Siegbert Rampe. After receiving his diploma with distinction in 2003, he continued his education under Klaus Hellwig at the University of the Arts in Berlin, passing his concert examination in February 2010. It was also in 2010 that he completed a program in the study of music theory under Prof. Dr. Hartmut Fladt. Rittner attended master classes taught by Paul Badura-Skoda, Dominique Merlet, Christian Zacharias, and Andrei Gavrilov and benefited from the mentorship of Maria João Pires, Sylvain Cambreling, Ivo Pogorelich, and Krystian Zimerman. During the summer of 2007 the German president invited Rittner to concertize at Bellevue Castle, and most recently he has debuted with success in sold-out performances in the large halls of the Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin and at the Oetker Hall in Bielefeld. His Brahms CD release on MDG, the first recording worldwide of the composer’s early piano works on original pianofortes of the nineteenth century, received outstanding reviews and numerous awards—as has his recording of Arnold Schönberg’s complete piano oeuvre. In October 2009 Rittner was awarded the Echo Klassik Prize in the category “Young Artist of the Year”. In May 2012, MDG released Rittner’s recording of all of Chopin’s Études on a Conrad-Graf Piano from 1835, which is highly praised throughout the press. Six of the Chopin etudes were aired all over Germany at the ARD Radio Festival 2012.
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Anthony Romaniuk
Award winning Australian pianist and harpsichordist Anthony Romaniuk is quickly garnering attention as one of the brightest future stars of his generation. Equally at home in early and modern music, he maintains a busy schedule of solo recitals (on fortepiano and modern piano), collaborations in chamber music, continuo and song, as well as concerti and ensemble direction from the keyboard. On the recital platform, the 2014–2015 season will see Romaniuk make his recital debut in Sydney, Basel, and Florence as well as numerous appearances throughout Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. This season will also see chamber music engagements with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (including a CD recording), cellist Pieter Wispelweij and the Australian String Quartet. A graduate of the Manhattan and School of Music and currently studying with noted pedagogue Sally Sargent, Romaniuk is inspired by his background in jazz to bring an improvisational approach to his craft. He has received numerous prizes and awards including First Prize at the 2011 Westfield International Fortepiano Competition and Laureate at the 2010 Musica Antiqua Competition in Bruges. Romaniuk is currently based in Belgium where is a faculty member at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles.
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Maria Rose
Maria van Epenhuysen Rose holds degrees in Piano Performance from the Groningen Conservatory, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She also has an MA in Classical Languages from the University of Toledo and a Ph.D. in Musicology from New York University (2006) with the dissertation “L’Art de Bien Chanter”: French pianos and their Music before 1820. Rose is the author of many articles on piano performance practice and is an active performer on historical instruments; she has appeared in solo recitals and chamber music concerts across Europe and the United States. She has also recorded piano works by Hummel, Clementi, Field, Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn for Musical Heritage Society and Newport Classic/Sony labels. Most recently, she recorded songs by nineteenth-century French women composers with Florence Launay. Rose has taught at the University of Toledo, the Cooper Union, New York University, and Montclair State University. She presently works as editor and translator at the International Office of RILM at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.
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Sandra Rosenblum
Reviewers have described Sandra Rosenblum’s book, Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music: Their Principles and Applications, variously as “indispensable,” “balanced,” “imaginative.” Selected a Choice Outstanding Academic Book, it has been translated into Korean and Italian. Rosenblum’s work spans performance practices from the early Classic period to Chopin. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Proceedings of the Second and Third International Chopin Congresses (theThird in press), Journal of Musicological Research, Early Music, NOTES, Performance Practice Review, CANOR (Toruń), Journal of the Conductors’ Guild, and Fontes Artis Musicae, among others. Book chapters include “‘A composer known here but to few’: The Reception and Performance Styles of Chopin’s Music in America, 1830–1900” in The Age of Chopin (ed. H. Goldberg); and historical introductions to Muzio Clementi’s Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Pianoforte, 1801 (facs.). Rosenblum has given papers and master classes across the United States, in England and Poland, and regularly serves as coach and juror. She has received fellowships and awards from the Radcliffe Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, NEH, the Wilk Prize of the Polish Music Center (University of Southern California), and the Billings Prize in Music from Wellesley College. She was formerly Chair of Performing Arts at Concord Academy.
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Lucy Russell
Lucy Russell is among the most distinguished of international violinists who have achieved eminence on both historical instruments and their modern counterparts. She became leader of the Fitzwilliam String Quartet in 1995; with them she has played all over Europe, North America, South Africa, Canada, and Israel and made recordings for Linn Records, Divine Art Records, the BBC, and various foreign radio stations. The quartet plays on both modern and historical set ups and will be recording late Beethoven string quartets on heavy gut this Fall. Russell is much in demand as Leader of several Early Music orchestras and has worked in this capacity for The King’s Consort, Classical Opera Company, and Dunedin Consort. She has also been a key player with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. She has made numerous recordings over the years as an orchestral and chamber player and regularly teams up with Rachel Podger and her ensemble Brecon Baroque. Her first solo CD with John Butt—of Bach’s obbligato violin sonatas–has just been released by Linn Records. She is Professor of Baroque Violin at the Royal College of Music in London. For more information, please visit fitzwilliamquartet.org.
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Sezi Seskir
Sezi Seskir received her first degree in piano in her native Ankara, Turkey. She then studied with Prof. Konstanze Eickhorst at the Lübeck Musikhochschule in Germany, where in 2005 she completed degrees both in artistic and pedagogical piano. In addition to giving many recitals in Europe, the United States, and Turkey, she also performed with various orchestras as a soloist, performing Schumann’s A-minor piano concerto Op. 54, Ravel’s Concerto in G major, and W.A. Mozart’s A-major piano concerto K.414. Seskir completed her DMA degree with Malcolm Bilson in Cornell University. Her research focuses on the use of tempo rubato in Robert Schumann’s keyboard music, as well as historical keyboards and performance practices of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. She has given guest lectures at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Princeton University and Trinity College of London. She presented her work on Schumann at the King’s College of London, at American Musicological Society’s 2010 and 2012 meetings, and at the Basel Musikhochschule in Switzerland. Her article based on this last presentation recently appeared in a collected edition titled Schumann Interpretieren (Studio Punkt Verlag, 2014). Seskir is currently a faculty associate at Bucknell University and is the editor of Schumann’s keyboard works for the Schumann complete edition and the Bärenreiter publishing house. For more information, please visit seziseskir.com.
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Antonio Simón
Born in Jaén (Spain), he holds modern piano degrees from both the Madrid Real Conservatorio Superior de Música and the Zagreb Music Academy. Among his teachers were Ana Guijarro, Vladimir Krpan, and Javier Herreros. Simón is lately devoted to period instruments performance and has recently finished a Master in Fortepiano under the guidance of Richard Egarr in the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. A prizewinner in several piano competitions (Internacional de Andorra, Internacional Ciudad de Palma, Ciudad de Albacete, Manuel de Falla), he has performed throughout Spain, Italy, Portugal, Croatia, and Russia in major festivals such as the Donatske Veceri in Zadar and the Quincena Musical in San Sebastián. He has also recorded for Spanish Radio Clásica (RNE) and the Albert Moraleda label. Since 2006, he performs regularly with cellist Trino Zurita on modern as well as period instruments. Together they have recently recorded for the Spanish label Columna Música the complete cello and piano works of Franz Liszt on historical instruments from the Museo de la Música in Barcelona. Antonio Simón teaches piano at the Málaga Conservatorio Superior de Música and has recently presented in the University of Málaga his doctoral dissertation, Liszt in the Iberian Peninsula.
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Tilman Skowroneck
Bremen-born Tilman Skowroneck studied harpsichord with Bob van Asperen, Anneke Uittenbosch, Ton Koopman, and Gustav Leonhardt. In 1991 he was engaged as harpsichordist and fortepianist in the Swedish baroque ensemble Corona Artis. With this ensemble he played an abundance of concert productions and made several recordings. In 1999, he studied fortepiano and performance practices with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University. In 2007, he defended his doctoral dissertation about Beethoven’s piano works. His book Beethoven the Pianist was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Between 2009 and 2011 he held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swedish Research Council for a research project about Viennese fortepianos, carried out at the University of Southampton. Skowroneck works as a thesis supervisor at several institutions of the University of Gothenburg and freelances as a harpsichordist and translator. He is also the editor of the newsletter of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies.
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Viviana Sofronitsky
Viviana Sofronitsky has followed in the footsteps of her father Vladimir Sofronitsky, a distinguished Russian pianist. She earned a DMA from the Moscow Conservatory, studied in Oberlin, and received historical fortepiano and harpsichord performance degrees from the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag. She won prizes at the Bach Tage Berlin and Musica Antiqua competitions in Brugge. Sofronitsky has recorded with the AVI, Centaur, Passacaille, Suoni e colori, Globe, ETCetera, and Pro Musica Camerata labels (the latter featuring Mozart”s complete works for keyboard and orchestra, including 27 concertos and early works). Her current projects include recording Chopin and Liszt on romantic fortepiano. Russian-Canadian citizen Viviana Sofronitsky is based in Prague from which she travels with her fortepianos. For more information, please visit sofronitsky.com.
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Petra Somlai
Petra Somlai was born in Hungary where she graduated in conducting and piano performance at the Béla Bartók Conservatory (Budapest) and completed her modern piano degree at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music (Budapest) in 2007. During these years the focus of her interest gradually turned to the authentic interpretation on period instruments. She studied fortepiano and harpsichord with David Ward (England), and later under the direction of Fabio Bonizzoni, Menno van Delft, and Bart van Oort at the Sweelinck Conservatory at Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatory at The Hague where she graduated summa cum laude in 2011. In 2010 Petra Somlai won first prize and the audience award at the International Fortepiano Competition in Bruges (Belgium). The same year, she received the National Junior Prima Primissima Award of Hungary as outstanding young artist. She performs at major international early music festivals such as the Brugge Musica Antiqua Festival; Utrecht Early Music Festival; Haydn Festival Eszterháza; Budapest Beethoven Festival; Bach Festival Dordrecht; Klara Festival Brussels; AMUZ Festival Antwerp; and Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci; and has given concerts all over Europe, the USA, and Japan. Since 2012 she has performed often as a conducting soloist with various orchestras. Petra Somlai joined the faculty of University of North Texas in 2013 as a professor of Early Keyboards. For more information, please visit petrasomlai.com.
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Jiayan Sun
“Technically flawless, poetically inspired, and immensely assured playing,”—the Toronto Star praised Jiayan Sun, who has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, Severance Hall in Cleveland, National Concert Hall in Dublin and Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, collaborating with many distinguished conductors such as Michail Jurowski, Sir Mark Elder, Stefan Sanderling, Leon Fleisher and prestigious orchestras including the Cleveland Orchestra, Halleacute, Chinese National, RTÉ, and National, Fort Worth, and Toledo Symphony Orchestras. His performances have been broadcasted on BBC, RTÉ, China Central Television, and classical music radio stations in North America. He was awarded First Prize in the inaugural CCC Toronto International Piano Competition, Third Prize in the Leeds International Piano Competition, Second Prize in the Dublin International Piano Competition, and Fourth prize and audience prize in Cleveland International Piano Competition. Born in 1990 in Yantai, Shandong Province, China, Sun moved to the United States in 2006. He has earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from The Juilliard School, and continues his studies in the doctoral program there under the tutelage of Yoheved Kaplinsky and Stephen Hough, with additional studies with Malcolm Bilson and Richard Goode. An accomplished performer on early keyboard instruments, he is also a devoted composer.
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David Sutherland
David Sutherland is a maker of keyboard instruments in Ann Arbor. After completing graduate work in musicology at the University of Michigan and beginning a teaching career he became interested in harpsichord making, apprenticed in the shop of Frank Hubbard in Boston, and returned to Ann Arbor to set up shop in 1974. In recent years he has become interested in the works of Bartolomeo Cristofori, inventor of the piano action, and has made copies of pianos by Cristofori and by his followers, Giovanni Ferrini and Gottfried Silbermann, the first German piano maker. He has conducted research on the early piano and is at work on a book to be entitled The First Age of the Piano, 1700–1781.
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Edward Swenson
Piano restorer Edward Swenson graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1963. He participated in the Oberlin-in-Salzburg program during his junior year. After graduation he returned to Austria for two years with the David Robertson Memorial Scholarship awarded by the Austrian Ministry of Education. In 1965 he received a Reifezeugnis (MA) in music history from the Universität Mozarteum and was also awarded the Lilli Lehmann Medallion. After a year studying in Italy with a Fulbright grant, Swenson completed his PhD in musicology at Cornell. From 1970 until 2011 Swenson was a professor of music history at the Ithaca College School of Music. He also performed frequently as a tenor soloist, including a recital entitled “Three Pianos and one Tenor,” which featured nineteenth-century songs accompanied alternately by three period pianos. Restored pianos from Swenson’s workshop can be found in numerous private collections and museums, including the Schubert Club in St. Paul, the Beethoven Center at San José State University, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of the Arts in Tokyo, and the University of Melbourne. Swenson’s research interests focus on the history, evolution, restoration, and technical development of the pianoforte, with particular emphasis on the Viennese builder Conrad Graf. For more information, please visit mozartpiano.com.
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Bart van Oort
After completing his modern piano and fortepiano degrees at the Royal Conservatory at The Hague, Bart van Oort won the first prize and the audience prize at the Mozart Fortepiano Competition in Brugges, Belgium (1986). He subsequently studied with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University, receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Historical Performance Practice in 1993. Van Oort has been teaching fortepiano from that time on, and is a lecturer in Historical Performance Practice at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Since 1997 Van Oort has made more than sixty recordings of chamber music and solo repertoire, including the prize-winning 4-CD box set The Art of the Nocturne in the Nineteenth Century and the Complete Haydn Piano Trios (10 CDs) with his ensemble, the Van Swieten Society. Recent releases include Mozart Piano Concertos K. 466 in D Minor and K. 467 in C Major and J. C. Bach Sonatas op. 5 and op. 17 (2 CDs). With the Van Swieten Society, he is recording the complete Beethoven Symphonies in contemporary chamber music arrangements. Simultaneously, he has embarked on a 4-CD project with late-nineteenth-century nocturnes from France (recorded spring 2015), Russia, Germany, and the rest of Europe.
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Ken Walkup
After attending Cornell University in the early 1970s, Ken Walkup studied piano technology at the North Bennet Street School in Boston with teachers Bill Garlick and David Betts. Returning to Ithaca in July 1975, he started a private piano tuning and repair practice and began servicing pianos for the Cornell University Department of Music in November of that year. During a career spanning almost forty years, he has acquired broad and deep experience in almost all areas of piano work, including concert tuning of both modern and early pianos, piano rebuilding, in-home piano service, and sales of rebuilt pianos.
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Shaena Weitz
Shaena Weitz is a PhD candidate in historical musicology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She holds a BM in classical saxophone performance and a MM in musicology from the New England Conservatory of Music. Her dissertation examines the nineteenth-century French music journal Le Pianiste and aspects of power and politics as they relate to canon formation and the music press. She has presented papers internationally at the Central European Musicians and the Birth of Piano Virtuosity in France conference and the Biennial Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, and in the United States at the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. Her research has been supported by the CUNY Dissertation Year Fellowship, and she has an article forthcoming in an edited collection entitled Piano Culture in 19th-Century Paris.
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Andrew Willis
For several decades Andrew Willis has explored the historical development of keyboard instruments and their performance practice while maintaining a commitment to the study, performance, and teaching of the widest possible range of repertoire. Keenly interested in the history of the piano, he participates frequently in conferences, festivals, and concert series. A past president of the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society and a Trustee of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, he served as a finals juror of the Westfield International Fortepiano Competition in 2011. As Professor of Music in the UNCG School of Music, Theatre and Dance, he teaches performance on instruments ranging from harpsichord to modern piano and since 2003 has directed the biennial Focus on Piano Literature symposium. He has recorded solo and ensemble music on historically contemporaneous pianos of three centuries for the Albany, Bridge, Claves, Centaur, and CRI labels, with collaborators including Julianne Baird, soprano, Brent Wissick, cello, and Sue Ann Kahn, flute. Willis received the DMA in Historical Performance from Cornell University, where he studied fortepiano with Malcolm Bilson, the MM in Accompanying from Temple University under George Sementovsky and Lambert Orkis, and the BM in Piano from The Curtis Institute of Music, where his mentor was Mieczyslaw Horszowski.
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Olga Witthauer
Olga Witthauer was born in Aachen, Germany, where she received her early musical training. She holds an artist diploma in piano from Cologne Music University and a master’s degree in fortepiano from Sibelius Academy, where she studied with Tuija Hakkila. She was awarded first prizes in national music competitions and the jury prize of the international Bach competition Würzburg in 2007. Witthauer has taken part in masterclasses with Bart van Oort, Richard Egarr, Mitzi Meyerson, and Robert Levin, among others. She has studied with Tom Beghin at McGill university and with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell university. Witthauer actively performs as a soloist and in various chamber music ensembles, both on modern and historical instruments. Her recent performances included concerts in Helsinki, Vienna, Tokyo and at the Utrecht Early Music Fabulous Fringe series. Witthauer is currently studying for her doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, with a focus on the piano works of Jan Ladislav Dussek.
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Miri Yampolsky
Pianist Miri Yampolsky made her orchestral debut as a soloist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Zubin Mehta at the age of 16, playing Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 1. Since then, she appeared with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Chamber Orchestra, as well as the Mainz Symphony, Orquesta Sinfonica de Valencia, Chicago Chamber Orchestra, National Orchestra of Johannesburg, Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, the Peninsula Music Festival orchestra, and Cornell Symphony and Chamber Orchestra. A first prize winner of the Valencia International Piano Competition Prize Iturbi in Valencia, and the ARD International Music Competition in Munich, Yampolsky is an avid and active chamber musician, with appearances in festivals such as Tanglewood, Ravinia, Davos, Berlin Festwoche, Tucson Winter International Chamber Music Festival, Olympic Music Festival, Icicle Creek Chamber Music Festival, Peninsula Music Festival, Schwetzingen Festival, Citta di Castelo; Klassikfest Kaisrstuhl, Lucena International Piano Festival, and Salzburg’s Mozarteum. Yampolsky’s teachers include Hannah Shalgi, Michael Boguslavsky, and Chaim Taub in Israel; Prof. Dmitri Bashkirov and Marta Gulyas at the Escuela Superior De Musica “Reina Sofia” in Madrid, and Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Yampolsky is on the faculty at Cornell University and is a co-artistic director of the international chamber music festival Mayfest.
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Yi-heng Yang
In recent seasons, Yi-heng Yang has appeared at The Boston Early Music Festival, The Finger Lakes Chamber Music Festival, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Friends of Mozart (NYC), MusicIC (Iowa City), The Midtown Series at St Bart’s (NYC), Music Matters (Connecticut), Serenata of Santa Fe, Sunday Chatter (Albuquerque), Apple Hill Chamber Music Festival (NH), The Cobbe Collection (UK), The Finchcocks Collection (UK), and The Frederick Collection (MA). A dynamic collaborator, she works with such groups as The Sebastians, Gretchen’s Muse, and Trio Pasqualati, and will be directing a festival of chamber music this Fall at the Frederick Collection of Historical Pianos. Upcoming recordings include the complete Mendelssohn Violin Sonatas on period instruments, with Abigail Karr. She holds a doctorate in piano performance from The Juilliard School, where her teachers were Veda Kaplinsky, Julian Martin, and Robert McDonald. She studied fortepiano there with Audrey Axinn and also earned a Masters of fortepiano from the Amsterdam Conservatory, where she worked with Stanley Hoogland. Yang lives with her husband and son in New York City, and is on the piano faculty of The Juilliard School’s Evening Division.
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Andrew Zhou
A pianist with a penchant for adventurous, thoughtful, and challenging programming, Andrew Zhou has concertized in major venues in Los Angeles, Boston, and Paris. He has collaborated with conductors David Robertson and Brad Lubman, and has worked with composers Unsuk Chin, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Roberto Sierra, Christopher Stark, and Christian Wolff. Finalist and winner of four special prizes in the Concours International de Piano d’Orléans, Andrew has toured the Centre région of France in a series of recitals and master classes. He has been a fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center and this year returns to the Lucerne Festival Academy. After studies with Bruce Brubaker at New England Conservatory and with Thomas Schultz at Stanford University, he is now completing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Keyboard Studies with Xak Bjerken at Cornell University. At Cornell, he was the recipient of the Manon Michels Einaudi Grant as well as a Don Randel Fellowship, which allowed him to create and execute an undergraduate seminar on the subject of music and diplomacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His academic work unites and counterpoints sound studies, disability studies, recording technologies and histories, and performance practice. Zhou has recently released a CD entitled Vienne et après (Tessitures), which includes first studio recordings of works by Matthias Pintscher and Olga Neuwirth.
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