is a versatile pianist equally at home in chamber music or solo performance both on modern,
as well as historical instruments. He resided for ten years in Switzerland performing both as soloist and collaborative artist throughout Switzerland and Germany and toured in
Australia and Europe as a member of the Swiss Chamber Soloists. His recording of Schumann’s Piano Quartet and Quintet won the coveted Prix d’Or prize for outstanding chamber music
recording. His most recent recording is a two-CD set of solo and chamber music by 20th-century composer Dmitri Shostakovitch. Dr. Abbott has served on the faculties of the Zürich and
Schaffausen Conservatories of Music (Switzerland), and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA). He has directed summer courses in both piano and chamber music in Europe as well as
in the United States for over 30 years. He regularly appears in recitals at many college campuses and music festivals across the country and often serves as an adjudicator including
serving on the jury for the final round of the MTNA national high school and collegiate piano competition. He was awarded a Bronze medal and two special prizes at the 1980 International
Music Competition in Geneva. Dr. Abbott recently completed a sabbatical project researching and performing the solo piano and chamber music of Johannes Brahms throughout the Eastern
United States. He has been a member of the faculty of Albion College, Albion, Michigan, since 2005 where he serves as Professor of Piano, Chamber Music, and Music History.
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Mark Anderson
has appeared as soloist with Sir Simon Rattle, Nicholas McCegan, William Boughton, George Cleve,
Alun Francis, and Adam Fischer and in concert halls such as Alice Tully Hall, Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Zurich’s Tonhalle, London’s Wigmore Hall and Tokyo’s
Bunka Kaikan, among others. His formative training was with Aiko Onishi in California and Benjamin Kaplan in London.
A native of the San Francisco Bay area, he is the founder of the Röntgen Piano Trio and has collaborated and recorded in the solo, two-piano, song/lieder and chamber music genres. As a solo recording artist, his thirteen
solo CDs, all on Nimbus Records, have met with consistent critical acclaim. He has recorded two CDs of the solo piano music of Hans von Bülow and in 2013 embarked on research that
explores the solo piano works of Dutch composer Julius Röntgen. His work has led to the release of four CDs of Röntgen’s solo piano music and one of 2-piano music of Röntgen, Reinecke
and Brahms. Included on the Bülow and Röntgen discs are previously unrecorded and unpublished works. Newly discovered works by Rontgen, edited by Mr. Anderson, are now available through
Nimbus Music Publishing. His most recent recital recording of Röntgen’s solo piano music (Rontgen VI) took place in November 2023 and will be released mid-2024.
Mark is artistic director of the Challans Concerts in France each summer. These began in 2022 and have met with sold-out audiences in the beautiful Chateau de la vérie near the Loire
region of France. In summer 2024, he will return with solo and chamber works for performances that will include the Röntgen Piano Trio.
Mark is chair of the keyboard division at University of British Columbia. His students have been prize-winners in all levels of competition and often go on to successful careers in music.
He is regularly invited to give masterclasses and speak at piano pedagogy-related seminars and symposia and continues an active performing schedule in both North America and abroad.
Mark Anderson is a Steinway Artist.
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Richard Becker
is head
of piano studies at the University of Richmond. He is active as a recitalist, composer, chamber musician, and poet,
and his playing has been acclaimed in Europe and America. Performing on many college campuses over the years, and frequently touring the eastern United States, he has also performed at venues such as Alice Tully Hall, the National Gallery of Art, the French Embassy, the Library of Congress, and at the Hudson River, Kemper, Virginia, and Spencer Museums. He has performed at the Salle Cortot and Salle Michelet in Paris where he has six times been artist-in-residence at Cité Internationale des Arts.
Richard Becker’s music has been commissioned by Meet the Composer Grants, by grants from CRS Records, by the Peabody Trio in conjunction with the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, and he has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and nominee for an American Academy of Arts and Letters award. His performances and his music have been heard on NPR, Voice of America, WNYC, WETA, WGMS, and WCVE, and at the American Music Festival of the National Gallery of Art. They have also been featured at CMS and MTNA conferences and during residencies at Marshall, James Madison, Eastern Mennonite Universities,the Longy School of Music and the Peabody and New England Conservatories and at the Eastman School of Music. He coached chamber music alongside the late Blanche Moyse and he performed and coached chamber music with members of the Shanghai Quartet during their the decade of an artist-residency at University of Richmond.
Richard Becker’s playing has been cited for its “powerful interpretations” by the Washington Post, for being “admirable in taste and technique” by the New York Times, and for being “brilliant and with seamless passagework and elegant phrasing” by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. His playing is grounded in the tradition of Arthur Schnabel acquired during his study with the late Leonard Shure while at Boston University (M. Mus.). His teaching owes much to the relaxation methods of Tobias Matthay, learned from Cécile Staub Genhart during his years at the Eastman School of Music (B.Mus. and Performers Certificate). He taught at the University of Texas and Boston University prior to joining the music faculty of the University of Richmond in 1975.
In recent years, Richard Becker’s poetry has been published by America, Columbia Magazine, Visions-International, Cold Mountain and Poetica Magazine:
Contemporary Jewish Writing and Art and his poetic sequence, “FATES,” was a 2008 chapbook of The Literary Review. Hiscompositions have been recorded by CRS and his performances are
available on Albany Records.
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Jocelyn Chang
came to the United States after making her acclaimed piano concerto debut in the National Concert Hall
in Taiwan, winning an array of awards, and having her performances broadcast nationally. She has appeared internationally as a guest artist and presented master classes for the Music
Teachers’ Association of California, Northern Illinois University, Illinois Wesleyan University, University of West Georgia, California State University, Fresno, InterHarmony International
Music Festival in Italy, and Aletheia University in Taiwan. As an avid chamber musician, Dr. Chang has collaborated with many musicians and faculty artists of the LA Phil, National Symphony
Orchestra (Taiwan), and USC Thornton School of Music. In high demand as an adjudicator for competitions, Dr. Chang has served as a judge for the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA)
and Music Teachers’ Association of California (MTAC) piano competitions.
Dr. Chang is an Associate Professor of Piano and Co-Chair of Keyboard Studies at Pasadena City College. In addition, she has taught at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB)
and the University of Southern California. Jocelyn holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree with Distinction from the USC Thornton School of Music, Master of Music degree from Peabody
Conservatory, and Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the National Taiwan Normal University. She has also studied at the Belarusian State Academy of Music. Her principal mentors are
Daniel Pollack, Boris Slutsky, and Stewart Gordon. Her website is www.jocelynchang.com
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Stewart Gordon
has had a distinguished career as a pianist, teacher, writer, editor, composer, and impresario.
He currently holds the position of Professor of Keyboard Studies at the Thornton School of Music of the University of Southern
California in Los Angles. As a performing pianist, he has played concerts throughout the world and recorded extensively (including the complete Preludes of Rachmaninoff),
both to critical acclaim. As a teacher and author he has produced textbooks, essays, videotapes, and editions. As a composer, his musical theater works have been produced
from coast to coast, and as an impresario, he has directed music festivals and competitions over the past decades in New York, Washington, and Savannah.
Born to the distinguished poet and novelist Guanetta Gordon and a career military officer Lynell Frank Gordon, Stewart Gordon grew up in many parts of the world, locations
where his father served in the United States Army. Thus he was able to receive music instruction from a number of different teachers, some of them very famous: Olga Samaroff,
Walter Gieseking, Cécile Genhart, and Adele Marcus.
After serving as a junior officer in the United States Navy for three years, he began his academic career at Wilmington College in Ohio. He then taught for more than two decades
at the University of Maryland in College Park, where for six years he was chair of the Department of Music. It was at the University of Maryland that he created the international
piano competition now known as the William Kapell and acted as its director for thirteen years.
He then served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs of Queens College of the City University of New York. For Queens College he created and directed the New York area-wide
Cultural Heritage Competitions, as well as the Great Gospel Competitions.
Since 1988 he has served at his present academic post at the University of Southern California. At the same time he began to work with the Savannah, Georgia, community to create an annual
music festival and competition. The Savannah Onstage Music Festival and the American Traditions Competition resulted, and he continued to act as artistic director for both events until 2002.
Dr. Gordon
has authored many books, including A History of Keyboard Literature (Schirmer, 1996)—considered by most to be the standard work in the field—Mastering the Art of Performance
(Oxford, 2006), and Beethoven's 32 Piano Sonatas (Oxford, 2017). As an editor, he has completed a new critical edition of the 32 Piano Sonatas of Beethoven (Alfred) in four volumes (2002,
2004, 2008 and 2010), as well as the Debussy Etudes (2015). He has also recently completed a critical edition of the Mozart piano sonatas, and Vol. I (through K. 311) is now available.
Today he makes his home in Southern California on a hill in Rancho Palos Verdes overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island. Stewart Gordon's web site is http://stewartgordon.com.
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is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Piano Pedagogy at the
University of South Carolina, where he studies with Nicholas Susi. At U of SC, he has assistantships teaching collegiate students group
piano for collegiate students, teaching private and group lessons for pre-college students at the
U of SC Center for Piano Studies, and in accompanying.
As a performer, Jordan is primarily a classical pianist with experience as both a soloist and
collaborative pianist. As a soloist, he was given the opportunity through the annual Classical
Music Festival to perform in the Haydnsaal located at the Schloss Esterhazy in Eisenstadt,
Austria. Soon after graduating from Viterbo in Wisconsin, he was invited back to play a part in Viterbo’s
125th Anniversary Gala broadcast on PBS Wisconsin. As a collaborator, Jordan has frequently
worked with singers and instrumentalists; of his most recent accomplishments as a collaborative
pianist, he and his cooperating singer placed first in Bowling Green State University’s annual
Conrad Art Song Competition which gave them an additional opportunity to perform at the
Toledo Art Museum.
Jordan also holds degrees from Viterbo University where he received Bachelor of Music in Piano
Performance and in Music Education and a Master’s of Music in Piano Performance from
Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
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holds a B.A. from Bennington College, where her teachers included Julian DeGray and Claude Frank,
and an M.A. from Columbia University. She also studied
composition with Otto Luening and Lionel Nowak. She spent all six years at these schools on full scholarship. She then received a Fulbright Scholarship to study with composer Phillip
Jarnach, who was Director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg. Upon her return from Europe, she worked at Columbia Records as Assistant to the President, Goddard Lieberson.
She is highly active as a composer, and her compositions are principally in the area of chamber music and vocal works. She has also written orchestral pieces, an opera, music for dance and
ballet, incidental theatre music, plus an assortment of pieces for various solo instruments. She does a great deal of arranging as well. Her compositions are published by Arsis Press, Carl
Fischer, Boston Music Company and Kjos Publishers; they are also obtainable in A.C.A.'s Composer Editions. Recordings on CD are available on the Newport Classics, Capstone and I Virtuosi labels,
the last of which is an all-Lauer disc of piano works entitled "Five Flower Rags." played by the composer. Lauer's compositions are widely performed, and have been well reviewed, both in this
country and abroad. She has won many prizes and several commissions, and has served as composer-in- residence. She has been the subject of two one-woman concert programs, both of which were
performed in New York City and Connecticut. A busy pianist, both as soloist and chamber music player, she has appeared in concert halls, on television, radio and in video format from Maine to
Florida, from New York to Michigan. This includes fifteen solo recitals at Lincoln Center. As a teacher, she has worked most recently for years as Professor in the Music Department of the
University of Bridgeport, with responsibilities for piano, theory, ear training, and computers-in-music. She pioneered a muIti-disciplinary course which featured works by Schoenberg, Stravinsky,
Mann and Nietzsche, on the subject of revolution in the arts. She has also taught Music Appreciation at Norwalk Community College. .
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has had a long but interrupted affiliation
with the Matthay Association. In 1971, while a student of Donald Hageman, he was the recipient of the first Clara Wells
award. He was awarded the prize again in 1974. For the next ten years or so, Jim was active in the Association's annual
festivals, and highlights for him included playing recitals in Toronto and San Jose. In 1976 he became the principal
pianist for the San Francisco Ballet which gave him opportunities to perform as a piano soloist at numerous venues including
Wolf Trap, Blossom Center, the Edinburgh Festival, and the White House. However, in the mid-80's he went through a period of
disillusionment with the music "business" and abruptly decided to move to Las Vegas to become a poker dealer. After a few years,
though, he hit an emotional and spiritual bottom. The silver lining, though, is that he became a believer in Jesus Christ. This
newfound faith became the impetus for him to return to the piano seriously about 30 years later, around 2014, in Chattanooga,
Tennessee. In that endeavor he has been helped greatly by the piano teachers Steven Wilber, Cahill Smith, and currently, Lynn
Worcester Jones. In 2018 he had the great privilege of presenting a recital at the Matthay festival in Jackson, Tennessee. He has been
active since and is sincerely grateful to be back. He has been employed as a waiter at St. John's Restaurant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. for the past 20 years.
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is a past President of the American Matthay Association for Piano and a former
editor of the Matthay News. His principal teachers include Donald Hageman, Robert Elliott
Hopkins, Mitchell Andrews, and Genita Speicher, and he holds degrees from Ball State, Youngstown
State, and Manchester universities. He has given presentations on Matthay principles and his
students, silence in music, Chinese music, and contemporary music in various professional
settings. He served the Tennessee Music Teachers Association and the Southern Chapter of the
College Music Society as president, and edited Tennessee Music Teacher. McRoberts has taught
for thirty years at Union University, and previously taught at Blue Mountain University. He
serves as organist at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Tennessee, reads thirty books a year,
and enjoys walking.
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holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music, the University of California at
Irvine, and the University of Chicago. Originally from southern California, Dr. Marsh studied
composition with the late Roy Harris and was a recipient of the Los Angeles Young Artists
Foundation Scholarship and a finalist for the Debut Award. While at Eastman, he received both
the José Echaniz Prize and Ethel Lannin Prize for his performances, studying with Frank Glazer
and Cécile Staub Genhart. At Chicago, his composition teachers included John Eaton, Shulamit
Ran and Ralph Shapey. In 1996, Dr. Marsh joined the faculty of the Fine Arts Department at
Roanoke College, where he currently serves as the Naomi Brandon and George Emery Wade
Professor of Music. Dr. Marsh teaches applied courses in piano and composition and offers
courses in the theory and history of Western classical, world, and popular musics. Over the
years, Dr. Marsh has performed as recitalist, chamber pianist, concerto soloist, and conductor,
and has won numerous awards for his compositions. Having presented scholarly papers at
regional, national, and international venues, his work has appeared in American Music,
Pedagogy, Musik Forschung, and is included in Schnittke Studies from Routledge’s Ashgate
Publishers. His recent work in composition explores harmonic transformations and neotonality
using traditional and non-traditional scales; recent scholarly writing focuses on the
phenomenology of performance in Chopin and Fauré. As a sound artist, his work has been
included in installations in France, Germany, and the United States. Recent projects have
included “Whispers on the 41 st Latitude,” a community-based project with photographer
Beatrix Reinhardt sponsored by The Foundation at Monroe County Community College
(Michigan), and “Titian to Monet: An Immersive Experience,” produced in collaboration with
multimedia designer David Franusich (iCAT, Virginia Tech) for the Taubman Museum of Art’s
first immersive installation, featuring masterpieces from the Joslyn Art Museum. Currently Dr.
Marsh is collaborating with tabla player Dr. Anil Shende in a project focused on performing
raag improvisations on the piano.
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Anton Nel
is the winner of the 1987 Naumburg International Piano Competition at Carnegie Hall, and he continues to tour internationally as recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician
and teacher. Highlights in the U.S. include performances with the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, and Detroit Symphonies
(he has a repertoire of more than 100 works for piano and orchestra.) In addition to recitals in virtually every U.S. state he has appeared overseas at the Wigmore Hall
in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, as well as major venues in China, Korea, and South Africa. Much sought after as a chamber musician he
regularly appears with some of the world’s finest instrumentalists and singers at festivals on four continents. He holds the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair
at the University of Texas at Austin and also gives an annual series of masterclasses at the Manhattan School of Music and the Glenn Gould School in Toronto. During the
summers he is on the artist-faculties at the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival, and the Orford Music Academy in Quebec. Mr. Nel also
frequently performs as harpsichordist and fortepianist. His recordings include four solo CDs, chamber music recordings (including the complete Beethoven and Brahms cello/piano
works with Bion Tsang) , and works for piano and orchestra by Franck, Faure, Saint-Saens and Edward Burlingame Hill.
Highlights of Mr. Nel’s four decades of concertizing include performances with the Cleveland
Orchestra, the symphonies of Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, and London,
among many others. (He has an active repertoire of more than 100 works for piano and
orchestra.) An acclaimed Beethoven interpreter, Anton Nel has performed the concerto cycle
several times, most notably on two consecutive evenings with the Capetown Philharmonic in 2005.
Additionally, he has performed all-Beethoven solo recitals, complete cycles of the violin and
cello works, and most recently a highly successful run of the Diabelli Variations as part of
Moises Kaufman’s play 33 Variations. He was also chosen to give the North American premiere
of the newly discovered Piano Concerto No. 3 in E Minor by Felix Mendelssohn in 1992. Two
noteworthy world premieres of works by living composers include "Virtuoso Alice" by David Del
Tredici (dedicated to, and performed by Mr. Nel at his Lincoln Center debut in 1988) as well as
Stephen Paulus's Piano Concerto also written for Mr. Nel; the acclaimed world premiere took
place in New York in 2003.
The Johannesburg-born Mr. Nel is a graduate of the University
of the Witwatersrand, where he studied with Adolph Hallis, and the University of Cincinnati where he worked with Bela Siki and Frank Weinstock. His website is antonnel.com.
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Aiko Onishi
is one of America's most distinguished pianists and teachers. She was born in Tokyo and began her piano studies with her mother, Teiko, an accomplished pianist and a graduate of the
New England Conservatory of Music. After winning a Japanese national competition, she was invited to study at the
Eastman School of Music with Cécile Staub Genhart, with whom she credits her foundation as a pianist. After earning her B.M.
with Distinction, Performer's Certificate, and Artist's Diploma, she continued to study with Frank Mannheimer, with whom she worked extensively
over the next sixteen years. During the winter of 1964-65, she had the privilege of studying with Dame Myra Hess in London. Miss Onishi has
concertized and given lectures in over 60 cities in the United States and she has played in all of the major cities in Japan. For six years
he was a professor at the Toho School of Music in Japan and for twenty-one years she served on the faculty of San Jose State University in California.
During those years she produced many outstanding students, some of whom have won prizes at international competitions including the Leeds, Busoni, Casadesus,
Kapell, Chopin, Munich, University of Maryland and the Washington International Bach Competition. She is the author of Pianism,
a highly acclaimed pedagogical work which has been praised throughout the world.
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is a past President
of the American Matthay Association.
His biography of Matthay, England's Piano Sage:
The Life and Teachings of Tobias Matthay, was published by
Scarecrow Press in December of 2011, and the paperback and Kindle versions were published by the H. W. Marston Press in December of 2020. His highly acclaimed
A Dictionary for the Modern Pianist
was published by Rowman & Littlefield in November 2016.
He has studied with Stewart Gordon,
Donald Hageman,
Frank Mannheimer,
and Denise Lassimonne. He has concertized extensively throughout North
America and in 1986 he performed the 24 preludes of Rachmaninoff in New
York's Lincoln Center. He made his London debut in 1988. His numerous
articles have appeared in such journals as the American Music Teacher, the
Piano
Quarterly, and International Piano, and in the summer 1993 issue of American Music he presented new research
concerning musical figures active in
post-Revolutionary Philadelphia. He is also a
contributor to the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the new edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music,
and
his other articles include pieces for the American Musical Instrument Society
Journal,
Symposium (the journal of the College Music Society), the Piano Journal of the European Piano Teachers' Association, and Emeritus Voices, a journal published by Arizona State University.
He has also recently annotated a series of CDs for APR
commemorating Matthay's pupils—including Harriet Cohen, Irene Scharrer,
Myra Hess, Bartlett & Robertson, and an extensive collection of rare discs featuring Matthay's own recordings. For the Hyperion label, he has also
annotated a highly praised disc of the solo works
of Charles Griffes performed by Garrick Ohlsson, and he has annotated numerous discs commemorating historic pianists for
for the Deutsche Grammophon and Decca labels, as well as two early collections devoted to Wilhelm Kempff: a set
of electrical recordings for APR (fall 2021), and a 3-CD set of all the pianist's acoustical recordings for
Marston Records (fall 2022).
His own acclaimed recording of
The Philadelphia
Sonatas of Alexander Reinagle (c.1750-1809) was released on the
Titanic label in 1998. A professor emeritus of music
at Wittenberg University in Ohio,
he has also taught numerous courses for Arizona State University, and presently serves as the
Director of ASU's Emeritus College Academy for Continued Learning. He holds
the B. Mus.
and the M. Mus. degrees from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from the
College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. In May of 2019, he was named an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in London.
He maintains a studio in Tempe, Arizona, and his website is
www.pianosage.net
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is the current President of the American Matthay Association, and professor emeritus of piano at Pennsylvania State University. He has performed throughout the world,
having recorded solo recitals for the French, German and Spanish national radios, Radio 4 Hong Kong, and America’s PBS Television. His recent projects include a comprehensive, acclaimed
series of Beethoven recitals and compact discs called Piano Masterworks of Beethoven including all the 32 Sonatas and many other beloved works of the Beethoven repertoire. Recent concerto
performances include Mozart’s Concerto No. 27 with the Penn’s Woods Festival Orchestra in 2023. Other recent performances include Beethoven presentations and master classes in Beijing and
Zhengzhou, China. In 2015 he performed a lecture-recital at the London International Piano Symposium. His critically-acclaimed recitals included Piano Entente, a series of recent-music
programs presented in New York and London. His repertoire of contemporary music features dozens of works of distinguished American, British and French composers of the most recent decades,
including several African-Americans and women. His workshops have included lecture-recitals on the topics of technical and musical teachings of Tobias Matthay. He was the winner of teaching
awards from the Pennsylvania Music Teachers Association and from Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture.
Steven Herbert Smith’s degrees include the DMA and M.Mus. from the Eastman School of Music, as well as the Artist’s Diploma from the Mozarteum of Salzburg, Austria. His artist teachers have included
Cécile Genhart and Kurt Neumüller. More recently he worked in Vienna with the celebrated pianist Paul Badura-Skoda regarding aspects of the Beethoven repertoire.
The recorded Piano Masterworks of Beethoven is available via the Amazon website, as a complete CD boxed set of all Smith’s public performances in the series. In the American Record Guide for
January 2016, Alan Becker gave the set a comprehensive, rave review: “Above all, the music unfolds with an ease and naturalness that gets to the core of Beethoven’s argument. ….(It features)
helpful interpretations … fully worthy of comparison with many of today’s outstanding performers. [In the Diabelli Variations, the] final fugue is one of the most impressive performances I have
heard. The remaining variation sets are all delivered with stunning attention to contrast and brilliance. The Op. 51 Rondos and Op. 126 Bagatelles further enhance the desirability of the album.
This is a set to place beside the others I have mentioned (Ashkenazy, Brautigam, Brendel, Gilels, Goode, Kempff, Schnabel).”
Steven Herbert Smith’s recordings of sixty-seven works, including eighteen by Beethoven, can also be heard here
on YouTube.
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is a
versatile pianist and educator, specializing in healthy piano performance
techniques. In collaboration with Chinese medical students, she created a grant-funded
program named “How Pianists Coexist with Tenosynovitis” recognized as an honored
program at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music. She was invited to write a front-page article
in “Music Weekly” one of the most popular music publications in China. She is a lecturer in
high demand for workshops, pedagogical workshops, and masterclasses around the world.
She is the founder of the International Piano Professionals Association (IPPA) and the IPPA
Conero International Music Festival.
She currently serves as an adjunct piano professor at Ottawa University and as an assistant
professor of the practice in piano pedagogy at the University of Kansas. She studied with
Dr. Scott McBride Smith at the University of Kansas and graduated with honors for her
doctoral dissertation, “Applying the Rotation Principle to Avoid Injury in Piano Practice.”
In her performance career, Wang has earned multiple competition prizes, including the first
prize in the 2011 Zhong-sin International Music Competition in Singapore, where she was
invited to perform at the award ceremony with the jury. In June 2011, she won the first prize
in the Second Deutschland and China Gemeinsam Competition in Sichuan Province. Wang
has graced stages in China, Canada, Singapore, Italy, Israel, and the US. Since 2017, she
has been invited every year to perform at the Chinese New Year Concert in Kansas City.
In 2021, Wang received invitations from CCTV (China Central Television) and KCCA
(Kansas City Chinese Association) to perform for the “24-Hour Global Virtual Concert.”
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has served on the Board of the American Matthay Association for Piano. He has been hailed by the Boston Globe as a “pianist of skill and fantasy,” and is a widely acclaimed soloist and
chamber musician, having performed throughout the United States and at international venues in Europe, Japan, and Africa. He has appeared in such diverse venues as Stadthaus Winterthur,
Switzerland, Hanjo Bohlke Aula, Namibia, the utopian arts community, Arcosanti, and the 13th century Kamakura Buddhist temple, Enkaguji. He made his New York Carnegie Hall debut with the St.
Florian Piano Trio, an ensemble that has performed the complete trios of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart at one of Tokyo’s most prestigious recital halls, Bunkakaikan. His performances have
been broadcast on NHK Television, Japan, Namibian National Radio, KUSC and KPFK in Los Angeles, and WGMS Washington D.C.
Dr. Young is a fellowship recipient to the Tanglewood Music Center, the Music Academy of the West, the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Mozarteum, Salzburg, and is an alumnus of University
of the Pacific (BM), Peabody Conservatory (MM) and the University of Southern California (DMA). His principal mentors are Ann Schein, Jerome Lowenthal, Leon Fleisher and Gwendolyn Koldofsky.
He has given master classes at the Shanghai Conservatory, in high schools and colleges in Taiwan and at universities in California and Oklahoma. He is Co-Chair of Keyboard Studies at Pasadena
City College and has taught at Pomona College, Biola University Conservatory of Music, and UC Irvine.
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