Sang Woo Kang

Cited by the Los Angeles Times as a “prodigiously talented pianist with great technical virtuosity and interpretive gifts,” pianist Sang Woo Kang has drawn attention as a captivating musician who thrills audiences with interpretive clarity and vision. He successfully balances an active performing career as a soloist and chamber musician with teaching at Providence College, where he is Assistant Professor of Music.

Dr. Kang made his orchestral debut with the Colorado Pueblo Symphony Orchestra at the age of 9, and accolades soon followed. He won top prizes at the Los Angeles Scholarship Competition, CSMTA competition, MTNA competition, and the Mozart Festival Young Artist International Competition, to mention a few. In 1999, Dr. Kang was awarded the Eastman Professional Fellowship, and as a result, was chosen to perform at the Moulin d’Ande Music Festival in France. He later made his solo recital debut at Concert Hall in St. Petersburg Conservatory, Russia.

A devoted teacher and educator, Dr. Kang has taught at Eastman School of Music, Juilliard School, SUNY Fredonia, University of Rochester, Hochstein School of Music in Rochester, NY, New England Music Camp, and Hartwick Summer Music Festival.  In 2005, as a result of his teaching accomplishments in undergraduate piano instruction, Eastman School of Music awarded him with the prize “excellence in teaching.” In 2009-2010, along with his concerts, Dr. Kang will be presenting master classes and workshops in Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Singapore.  He is founder and director of the summer piano institute and seminar at the Atlantic Music Festival, an intensive four week event dedicated to exploring all aspects of piano performance and pedagogy, as well as helping to promote and perform new works by American composers.

An active performer, Dr. Kang’s upcoming international recital performances include Long Sieu Doh Unviersity in Singapore, Sehjong Cultural Center in Korea, multiple venues in Japan, Mahidol Unversity in Thailand, and Moulin D’Ande Festival in Normandy, France. He will also be performing in Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall in NY, and at the Frederick Collection in Boston among other venues. As Artist in Residence at DUMBO Space in Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Kang recorded the clarinet sonatas by Brahms at the Curtis Institute. The album, titled “Appassionato e Amabile,” was released on the EMI label in 2007.

Dr. Kang is a graduate of Juilliard School and the Eastman School of Music, where he received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree.In his free time, Dr. Kang maintains a blog entitled “Music for Time’s Ending,” which covers a variety of topics pertaining to music. Read it here.

Visit his website at www.sangwookang.com. This website will be regularly updated with his concert schedule and other events.

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Bruce Brubaker

In live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, from Paris to Hong Kong, and in his continuing series of recordings for Arabesque — Bruce Brubaker is the new musician, a visionary virtuoso, and an artistic provocateur. Named “Young Musician of the Year” by Musical America, Bruce Brubaker performs Mozart with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Philip Glass on the BBC. Profiled on NBC’s Today show, Brubaker’s playing, writing, and collaborations continue to show a shining, and sometimes surprising future for pianists and piano playing. His blog “PianoMorphosis” appears at ArtsJournal.com.

Brubaker was presented by Carnegie Hall at Zankel Hall in New York, at Trifolion in Echternach, at Michigan’s Gilmore Festival, and at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, as the opening-night performer in the museum’s acclaimed new Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building. He is a frequent performer at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge.

Bruce Brubaker’s CDs for Arabesque include Time Curve (music by Philip Glass and William Duckworth), Hope Street Tunnel Blues (music by Glass and Alvin Curran, featuring Brubaker’s transcription of a portion of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach), Inner Cities (including a live recording of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates and Brubaker’s transcription of part of Adams’s opera Nixon in China), and the first CD in the series, glass cage, named one of the best releases of the year by The New Yorker magazine.

Brubaker has premiered works by Glass, Nico Muhly, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and John Cage. He performed at Sanders Theater in collaboration with Cage during the composer’s tenure as Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University.

Following his New York debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Brubaker was awarded a solo artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His London debut at the Wigmore Hall led to his first broadcast concert on the BBC, an all-Brahms recital. Brubaker has appeared at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival at Avery Fisher Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, London’s Wigmore Hall, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Antwerp’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Finland’s Kuhmo Festival.

Bruce Brubaker has appeared on RAI in Italy and is featured in the documentary film about the Juilliard School, made for the PBS “American Masters Series.” As a member of Affiliate Artists Xerox Pianists Program, he presented residencies and performed with orchestras throughout the United States.

Brubaker has given masterclasses and forums at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Columbia University, Leipzig’s Hochschüle für Musik, the École Normale in Paris, Ghent’s Orpheus Instituut, North Carolina’s Eastern Music Festival, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Brubaker’s articles about music have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Piano Quarterly, Dutch Journal of Music Theory, and Chamber Music magazine. He was co-editor and a contributor to Pianist, Scholar, Connoisseur: Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner (Pendragon Press, 2000), a collection paying homage to his former teacher. His essay “Time Is Time” appears in Unfolding Time (2009), available in the U.S. from Cornell University Press. He presented the closing recital in Harvard University’s Crosscurrents conference in 2008. He is the U.S. representative for “Behind the Music: The Performer as Researcher,” a research initiative based in Australia.

Brubaker was the creator in 2000–2001 of “B-A-C-H,” a six-concert series in New York examining the connections between J. S. Bach and the composers who followed him. The previous year, at the turn of the millennium, he organized “Piano Century,” in which 100 pianists performed 101 twentieth-century pieces in eleven concerts. In 2004, Brubaker created and performed Pianomorphosis, a 70-minute multidisciplinary performance piece for the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Michigan. Brubaker’s performance piece Haydnseek, was created together with Nico Muhly. Brubaker is the founder and artistic director of the chamber music festival SummerMusic in his native Iowa.

Brubaker trained at the Juilliard School, where he received the school’s highest award, the Edward Steuermann Prize, upon graduation. At Juilliard, where he taught from 1995 to 2004, he has appeared in public conversations with Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, and Meredith Monk.

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Gabriel Chodos

Gabriel Chodos chaired the NEC piano department for 25 years. Renowned as a teacher, concert artist, and recording artist, Chodos also spent many summers as a mainstay of the Aspen Music Festival faculty. With Aube Tzerko—a Schnabel student—as his principal teacher, and with Schoenberg assistant Leonard Stein as his theory teacher, Chodos is in a direct line from two 20th century masters of the European classical tradition.

Known in particular for his interpretations of music from the heart of the pianist's repertoire—Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms in particular—Chodos has been heard in NPR broadcasts of these composers, who also form the bulk of his substantial recorded output.

Chodos has performed throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Israel. In the U.S., his performance venues have included the 92nd Street Y, Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Hall, Symphony Hall, and the Library of Congress. He has been a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Chamber Symphony, Radio Philharmonic Orchestra of Holland, and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

A winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition in New York, Chodos also received a Fulbright Scholarship, Martha Baird Rockefeller grants, and an NEA Solo Recitalists Grant.

He has given masterclasses and lecture-demonstrations at Yale University, Indiana University, the Rutgers Summerfest, the Chautauqua Festival, the Guildhall School of Music in London, the Hochschule für Musik in Leipzig, the Estonian Music Academy in Tallinn, the Toho Gakuen School of Music, and Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo.

B.A. in philosophy, Phi Beta Kappa, and M.A. in music, UCLA; Diploma in Piano, Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst, Vienna. Principal piano studies with Aube Tzerko; also with Leonard Shure, Josef Dichler, Carlo Zecchi. Recordings on Fleur de Son, Centaur, Orion, Victor/Japan, and CRI. Former faculty of University of Oregon, SUNY/Buffalo, Dartmouth College, and the Aspen Music Festival.

Photo by Christian Steiner

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Jerome Lowenthal

Jerome Lowenthal, born in 1932, continues to fascinate audiences, who find in his playing a youthful intensity and an eloquence born of life-experience. He is a virtuoso of the fingers and the emotions.

Mr. Lowenthal studied in his native Philadelphia with Olga Samaroff-Stokowski, in New York with William Kapell and Edward Steuermann, and in Paris with Alfred Cortot, meanwhile traveling annually to Los Angeles for coaching with Artur Rubinstein. After winning prizes in three international competitions (Bolzano, Darmstadt, and Brussels), he moved to Jerusalem where, for three years, he played, taught and lectured.

Returning to America, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic playing Bartok’s Concerto No. 2 in 1963. Since then, he has performed more-or-less everywhere, from the Aleutians to Zagreb. Conductors with whom he has appeared as soloist include Barenboim, Ozawa, Tilson Thomas, Temirkanov, and Slatkin, as well as such giants of the past as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux and Leopold Stokowski. He has played sonatas with Itzhak Perlman, piano duos with Ronit Amir (his late wife), Carmel Lowenthal (his daughter), and Ursula Oppens, as well as quintets with the Lark, Avalon and Shanghai Quartets. He has recently recorded the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with cadenzas by eleven different composers. His other recordings include concerti by Tschaikovsky and Liszt, solo works by Sinding and Bartok, and chamber music by Arensky and Taneyev.

Teaching, too, is an important part of Mr. Lowenthal’s musical life. For eighteen years at the Juilliard School and for thirty-nine summers at the Music Academy of the West, he has worked with an extraordinary number of gifted pianists, whom he encourages to understand the music they play in a wide aesthetic and cultural perspective and to project it with the freedom which that perspective allows.

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Martin Canin

Martin Canin was born in New York City and is a graduate of the Juilliard School where he was a student of, and subsequently an assistant to the eminent pedagogue, Mme. Rosina Lhevinne. He was appointed to the faculty in 1972 and he continues to teach a class of highly gifted students, many of whom have been winners of major national and international competitions. In addition to his work at Juilliard, he served on the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook for 30 years and he continues to teach on the summer faculty of the Bowdoin College Festival and School in Brunswick, Maine.

During the course of his extensive and unusually successful teaching career, Mr. Canin has taught numerous winners of national and international piano competitions. In addition to teaching, Mr. Canin has performed widely and successfully as both recitalist and as a chamber music player. Harold Schonberg writing in the New York Times remarked that "Mr. Canin equaled the achievement of any American pianist this reviewer has heard" and the eminent critic Virgi. I Thompson wrote about him that "piano playing so beautiful from every point of view is rare."

Besides his work as a teacher and performer, Mr. Canin has done extensive writing and lecturing and he has been a judge at numerous international competitions in Europe, Asia and the United States. He has given master classes throughout the world and has also been a contributing editor of the magazine, "Piano Quarterly". He has also edited a number of works for Editions Salabert.

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Natalya Antonova

Natalya Antonova made her debut with the Leningrad Philarmonic at the age of 16. As a soloist of two major concert managements, “State Concert” and “Soviet Union Concert”, she concertized in Russia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Ukraine, Armenia, Byelorussia, and other countries like Germany, France, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, South Korea, etc.

When she accepted an invitation from the Leningrad Conservatory, she became the youngest professor ever appointed for this position in the history of the school. After 10 years of serving, she accepted a position of Professor of Piano in the Russian Academy of Music in Moscow (formerly the Gnessin Institute of Music).

Antonova has given hundreds of master classes and lectures throughout the world including the Moscow Academy of Music, Paris Conservatory, Budapest Conservatory, Peabody Conservatory, New England Conservatory, and Seoul National University.

She has participated in many International Festivals in such countries as Hungary, Germany, South Korea, USA, Russia, etc. Each summer she conducts piano classes in the frame of the International Festival in Paris, France.

Antonova has judged numerous competitions such as Gina Bachauer in Utah, Corpous Christi International Competition in Texas, Sibelius International Competition in Ohio, Hilton Head International Competition and Missouri International Competition.

She is currently a tenured professor at the Eastman School of Music.

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Sean Duggan

SEÁN DUGGAN, OSB, pianist, is a monk of St. Joseph Abbey in Covington, Louisiana. He obtained his music degrees from Loyola University in New Orleans and Carnegie Mellon University, and received a Master’s degree in theology from Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. From 1988 to 2001 he taught music, Latin and religion at St. Joseph Seminary College in Louisiana and was director of music and organist at St. Joseph Abbey.

In September, 1983 he won first prize in the Johann Sebastian Bach International Competition for Pianists in Washington, D.C., and again in August, 1991. Having a special affinity for the music of Bach, in 2000 he performed the complete cycle of Bach’s keyboard works eight times in various American and European cities. For seven years he hosted a weekly program on the New Orleans NPR station entitled “Bach on Sunday.” He is presently in the midst of recording the complete cycle of Bach’s keyboard (piano) music which will comprise 24 CDs.

Before he joined the Benedictine order he was pianist and assistant chorus master for the Pittsburgh Opera Company for three years. He has performed with many orchestras including the Louisiana Philharmonic, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Leipzig Baroque Soloists, The Prague Chamber Orchestra, The American Chamber Orchestra and the Pennsylvania Sinfonia. From 2110 to 2004 he was a visiting professor of piano at the University of Michigan. Currently he is associate professor of piano at SUNY Fredonia. During the fall semester of 2008 he was also a guest professor of piano at Eastman School of Music. He has been a guest artist and adjudicator at the Chautauqua Institution for several summers, and is also a faculty member of the Golandsky Institute at Princeton, New Jersey. He continues to study the Taubman approach with Edna Golandsky in New York City.

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