samedi 28 février 2015

World Class Pianist Names To Remember

By Olivia Cross


The piano is an instrument that requires many years of hard work and dedication to master. To be rated as a world class pianist is a huge honor, and very few of the numerous musicians world wide get to experience such a title. These are some of the names to know when it comes to such a rating.

Yuja Wang was born in Beijing, China and she is 28 years old. She is the daughter of musical parents, with a dancer for a mother and a percussionist father. She started learning to play the piano at the age of six and studied at Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music before entering the Morningside Music Bridge International Festival in Calgary, Canada at the age of 11, where she was the youngest of the students.

Yuja Wang had barely entered her 20s when she was already a performer of classical piano in recitals worldwide. She has won numerous awards and accolades in her time, including Aspen Music Festival's concerto competition and the Gilmore Young Artist award at the beginning of the millennium. Her record company is Deutsche Grammophon, where she is exclusively signed to a 5-disc deal.

Rebecca Penneys is American-born to Russian-Jewish parents in the mid forties. Her childhood was spent in L. A., where she started learning to play the piano when she was just three years old. When she was nine, she had her first solo recital and by the age of eleven, she was a Los Angeles Philharmonic soloist.

In the mid sixties, she was the youngest person ever to have entered Warsaw's International Chopin Competition in Poland. The same competition created an award in Penneys' honor, the Special Critics' Prize. She has been both a teacher and a performer in a number of summer festivals over the years.

Rebecca Penneys has been teaching at the Eastman School of Music since 1980. She is recognized for the Motion and Emotion keyboard technique, which focuses on the individual performance of each pianist. She also teaches at the Rebecca Penneys Piano Festival, and many of her students have gone on to win prizes internationally and teach on an international level.

Albert Frantz is a pianist who comes from Pennsylvania. His career in piano started extremely late by most measures, as he only really tapped into his talent when he was 17. This is after his own mom was advised to throw her money in the trash instead of spend it on piano lessons for him by a former piano teacher. Frantz is the first pianist in at least a decade to win a Fulbright scholarship, which led him to Vienna to study.

Frantz attributes his success in playing the piano to those teachers that understood his natural talent and took on the task of helping him hone his skills at such a late age. His greatest advice to learners and parents of young children looking to take piano lessons is to find the best possible teacher from the very start, and not just an entry-level teacher. He performs in concert halls and also teaches as well as playing endorsements for producers such as Bosendorfer.




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