Piano Faculty

JAMES GILES regularly performs to acclaim in important musical centers in America, Europe, and Asia. The past few seasons have included a tour of China, performances in Italy and Bosnia, and a recital at Warsaw’s Chopin Academy of Music. Last season, in addition to recitals in Chicago, Oklahoma, and Buffalo, he appeared with the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic in Russia. During 2008-2009, he will return to China for recitals and teaching at the Shanghai Conservatory; perform at the Virginia Waring Competition’s Gala Benefit honoring Byron Janis; and perform concertos by Michael Daugherty and Timothy Dunne in Chicago and Ithaca.  In an eclectic repertoire encompassing the solo and chamber music literatures, Giles is equally at home in the standard repertoire as in the music of our time. He has commissioned and premiered works by William Bolcom, C. Curtis-Smith, Stephen Hough, Lowell Liebermann, Ned Rorem, Augusta Read Thomas, Earl Wild, and James Wintle.  Most of these new works are featured on Giles’ new Albany Records release entitled American Virtuoso. His Paris recital at the Salle Cortot in 2004 was hailed as “a true revelation, due equally to the pianist’s artistry as to his choice of program.” After a recital at the Sibelius Academy, the critic for Helsinki’s main newspaper wrote that “Giles is a technically polished, elegant pianist.” And a London critic called his 2003 Wigmore Hall recital  “one of the most sheerly inspired piano recitals I can remember hearing for some time” and added that “with a riveting intelligence given to everything he played, it was the kind of recital you never really forget.” In the fall of 2005, and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Giles joined three other pianists as a part of a “Pianists for New Orleans” tour. They raised over $70,000 for the Musical Arts Society of New Orleans, a non-profit group that supports classical music in the city. He has performed with New York’s Jupiter Symphony, the London Soloists Chamber Orchestra in Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Kharkiv Philharmonic in Ukraine, and with the Opera Orchestra of New York in Alice Tully Hall. After his Tully Hall solo recital debut, critic Harris Goldsmith wrote: “Giles has a truly distinctive interpretive persona. This was beautiful pianism – direct and unmannered.” Other tours have included concerts in Chicago’s Dame Myra Hess Series, Salt Lake City’s Assembly Hall Concert Series, and in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Musikhalle in Hamburg, and the Purcell Room at London’s South Bank Centre. He has given live recitals over the public radio stations of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Indianapolis. His compact disc of works by Schumann and Prokofiev is available on England’s Master Musicians label. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with members of the National and Chicago symphonies and with members of the Pacifica, Cassatt, Chicago, Ying, Chester, St. Lawrence, Essex, Lincoln, and Miami quartets, as well as singers Aprile Millo and Anthony Dean Griffey.  A native of North Carolina, Dr. Giles studied with Byron Janis at the Manhattan School of Music, Jerome Lowenthal at The Juilliard School, Nelita True at the Eastman School of Music, and Robert Shannon at Oberlin College. The pianist received early career assistance from the Clarisse B. Kampel Foundation and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Florence with the legendary pianist Lazar Berman. He was the recipient of a fellowship grant and the $25,000 Christel Award from the American Pianists Association and now serves on the APA’s National Advisory Board. He won first prizes at the New Orleans International Piano Competition, the Joanna Hodges International Piano Competition, and the Music Teachers National Association Competition. As a student, he was awarded the prestigious William Petschek Scholarship at The Juilliard School and the Rudolf Serkin Award for outstanding graduate at the Oberlin College Conservatory. He has written for Piano and Keyboard magazine and has presented lecture-recitals at the national conventions of the Music Teachers National Association, the College Music Society, and Pi Kappa Lambda. He has served on the juries of several international piano competitions, including the Cleveland International Piano Competition (screening jury), New Orleans International Piano Competition, and the Oberlin International Piano Competition. Dr. Giles is on the piano faculty at Northwestern University. He has served as conference artist for the music teachers associations of Oklahoma, Arizona, and Nevada and frequently gives master classes at colleges and universities nationwide. He has been a guest professor at the Sibelius Academy in Finland and at Indiana University, where he has twice taught the students of Menahem Pressler. He has served on the faculties of the University of North Texas and the Interlochen Arts Academy. He is the founder of the Las Vegas Piano Institute, an educational summer program for young pianists, and is the chair of the piano department at the Eastern Music Festival during the summers, now in his 14th year.  More information may be found at www.jamesgiles.net.

YOSHIKAZU NAGAI has performed as soloist and chamber musician internationally in such venues as the Shanghai Concert Hall in China, National Recital Hall in Taiwan, Carnegie Recital Hall and Merkin Concert Hall in New York, Kennedy Center's Terrace Theatre, Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall in Canada, and Seattle's Benaroya Hall. His extensive recital schedules in recent seasons have included performances in Taipei, Hong Kong, Italy, San Francisco, San Antonio, New York, Seattle, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., among others. Mr. Nagai has also appeared at the Aspen Music Festival, the Sarasota Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, Spoleto Music Festival, Eastern Music Festival, the Phillips Collection and in collaboration with Robert Mann, Anthony Marwood, and Yi-Bing Chu. In addition, he is a frequent soloist with orchestras throughout the U.S., and his performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio's "Performance Today,” RAI (Italian National TV), Hong Kong National Radio, KUHF-Houston, KBYU-Salt Lake City, WCLV-Cleveland, and worldwide over the internet. Mr. Nagai won first prize at the 2002 Washington International Piano Competition and has also won major prizes at the San Antonio International Piano Competition, Missouri Southern International Piano Competition, New Orleans International Piano Competition, and the Concert Artists Guild International Music Competition (inaugural SVCCS performance prize). Mr. Nagai is currently professor of piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he teaches piano and chamber music. He is also on the piano faculty at the Beijing International Music Festival and Academy at Central Conservatory in China, as well as a former faculty member at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where he taught piano, chamber music and piano literature. Recognized by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA) for excellence in teaching, he frequently gives master classes and serves as juror throughout the United States and Asia. Current and former students of Mr. Nagai are top prizewinners of national and international competitions including the Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition, Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Piano Competition, Music Teachers National Association Piano Competition, Missouri Southern International Piano Competition, Vladimir Viardo International Piano Competition, Lennox International Young Artists Piano Competition, and Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Mr. Nagai studied with John Perry at Rice University and received his Master of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he was awarded the Malvina Podis Prize in Piano upon graduation with Paul Schenly. Other teachers include Sergei Babayan and Duane Hulbert. Mr. Nagai returns for his seventh season at EMF. www.yoshinagai.com

GIDEON RUBIN Soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Classical Orchestra, Mannes Orchestra, New World Symphony, and many solo and chamber music recitals throughout the US and Europe. Performance of John Adams’s “Grand Pianola Music” at San Francisco’s Davies Hall featured on “Jim Lehrer News Hour.”  Performed on live radio broadcasts in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Israel.  Performed as a member of the Garth Newel Piano quartet in residence in Virginia and on tour in Sicily.  Served as pianist/keyboardist for the New World Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, performing in Alice Tully Hall and major venues of Europe.  B.A. degree from Harvard cum laude, M.M. from Boston University, and Doctorate from the University of Southern California. Studied with Edward Aldwell, Russell Sherman, Benjamin Pasternack, and Norman Krieger. Served on faculty of Pomona College, and currently Music Director and Piano Faculty member of the Los Angeles Music and Art School and the founder/conductor of the LAMAS Youth Orchestra.  His original compositions have been performed in Los Angeles, Virginia, North Carolina, and Boston. www.gideon-rubin.com

 

2009 Pianists in Residence

DOUGLAS HUMPHERYS was the gold medalist at the inaugural Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition. Since then, his performance career has taken him across Asia, Europe, and North America. During recent years, he has performed solo concerts in many of the major cities of Asia, including Beijing, Cheng-Du, Chonqing, Dalian, Guanzhou, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenyang, Tainan, Taipei, Tokyo, Wuhan, Xiamen, and Xian. In Europe, he has concertized in the cities of Berlin, Dublin, Hamburg, Novgorod, Prague, and Venice, with additional concert engagements in Germany, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, and Serbia. He has presented concerts throughout the United States and Canada, and in the summer of 2008 he will travel to Buenos Aires to perform, teach and adjudicate for Teachers del Norte-Pianists del Sur, a project sponsored in part by the United States Embassy in Argentina. In high demand as a teacher, he has taught literally hundreds of master classes at universities, conservatories, music academies, and festivals throughout the world. In addition, he has presented lectures to the European Piano Teachers Association, the Music Teachers National Association, the World Conference on Piano Pedagogy, and the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy. A frequent adjudicator, he has served on the jury of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition eleven times, and has also adjudicated the Rachmaninoff International Young Artists Piano Competition, the Chinese 2005 National Competition in Beijing, the PTNA National Piano Competition in Tokyo, the Hilton Head International Piano Competition, and the Bösendorfer International Piano Competition. His experience in this regard led him to create and direct the Eastman Young Artists International Piano Competition, which is held biennially in Rochester, New York. Mr. Humpherys completed graduate degrees at The Juilliard School (M.M.) and the Eastman School of Music (D.M.A.), where he is currently a professor of piano and chair of the piano department. In recent years, he completed appointments as visiting professor of piano at the University of Michigan and at Yonsei University in Korea. He has traveled to the Czech Republic three times as a faculty member of the South Bohemia Summer Music Festival. During the summer of 2007, he taught at the Chinese-American International Piano Institute, associated with the Sichuan Conservatory of Music in Cheng-Du, China. He has recorded a wide variety of repertoire on compact disc and has been featured in live broadcasts of performances on affiliates of PBS Television and National Public Radio.

Since her Lincoln Center recital debut in 1996 and her nomination as 1994 Pro Piano Artist of the Year, J.Y. SONG has established herself as a musician with broad and idiosyncratic musical tastes. Critic Harris Goldsmith has noted her "truly astounding technical and imaginative resources" and has described her performances as "tigerishly intense" and "exquisite.” She recently gave the Mexican premiere of the Concerto for piano and orchestra by Clara Schumann, on four days’ notice. J.Y. Song’s recordings on the Pro Piano label have received rave reviews in international publications. Her recording of Debussy Etudes received a Diapason d’Or, and was designated a “Desert Island Selection” by Gramophone’s International Piano Quarterly. Billboard described the same record as a "gem," and In Tune remarked "besides sheer technique, Song displays magnificent intellect in all her mood painting. Piano fans, ahoy!" J.Y. Song’s 2000 release, “...and that is death,” featuring piano music by Liszt and Busoni, was similarly lauded in the press, and Fanfare spoke of “the sheer thrill of her playing.” In addition to exploring traditional repertoire, J.Y. Song has been an enthusiastic supporter of new music, recording works by the Argentinean composer Ezequiel Viñao and the Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen Ye. Excerpts from this last CD were used by the celebrated film director Hou Hsiao-Hsien in his movie Cafe Lumière, which was shown at the 2004 Venice and New York Film Festivals, among others. Numerous awards include Juilliard’s highest award to a pianist, the Petschek Award, the first ever $25,000 Christel Award in 1999, and the Pro Musicis International Award. The past season included recitals at Piano aux Jacobins in France, solo tours in Asia, and appearances in many venues in the United States, including the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Exploring new media of expression, J.Y. Song was featured in an innovative music video of her performance of Liszt’s Totentanz. Born in Taiwan and raised in Switzerland, J.Y. Song studied at the Conservatoire de Genève and the Conservatoire de Lausanne with Alexei Golovine and Jean-François Antonioli. She later attended Stanford University, graduating with distinction and honors with a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology and Immunology as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Music. While conducting research on malaria and co-authoring a paper which appeared in Molecular and Biochemical Parasitology, J.Y. Song received numerous awards from Stanford, including the Robert Golden Medal and the prestigious Sudler Prize for outstanding achievement in the creative arts. Currently on the piano faculty and the artistic advisor for chamber music at Mannes College of Music in New York, J.Y. Song holds a D.M.A. from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Jerome Lowenthal. She is currently the artistic director of the Classics Abroad Paris Piano Program, at the École Normale de Musique de Paris.

Hailed by the New York Times as “a marvelous pianist,” PETER TAKÁCS has performed widely, receiving critical and audience acclaim for his penetrating and communicative interpretations.  Born in Bucharest, Romania, he gave his first recital at the age of seven and, upon emigration to France, continued his studies at the Paris Conservatory.  Upon his arrival in the United States, Mr. Takacs received full scholarships to Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, and the Peabody Conservatory, where he completed his artistic training with the distinguished pianist Leon Fleisher. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including first prize in the William Kapell Competition, the C. D. Jackson Award for excellence in chamber music at the Tanglewood Music Center, and a Solo Recitalist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.  He has performed with major orchestras in this country and abroad, and he has been in demand at prestigious summer festivals throughout the world.  His recording of the Beethoven Piano Sonata cycle is scheduled to be released on the CAMBRIA label in 2009. Mr. Takács is professor of piano at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he has been teaching since 1976.