Renana Gutman, piano

and

Paul Miller, viola/viola d'Amore with William McNally, piano

 

Sunday, March 30, 2008 @ 2:00

 

PROGRAM

♪Mozart, Wolfgang Amade ...........................................................................Fantasy in c minor, K. 475

♪Liszt, Franz .....................................................................................................Sonata in b minor, S. 178

 

I N T E R M I S S I O N

 

♫Hindemith, Paul.......................................Kleine Sonata for Viola d'amore and Piano, Op. 25, No. 2

♫Brahms, Johannes.............................................Sonata for Viola and Piano in E-flat, Op. 120, No. 2

 

 

♪ Praised by the New York Sun for playing “with great vigor and aplomb” and for the “true poetry in her phrasing,” Renana Gutman has performed across three continents as an orchestral soloist, recitalist and collaborative artist.

A top prize winner at Los Angeles Liszt competition, International Keyboard Festival in New York, and Tel-Hai Internationl Master Classes, she has performed with orchestras including Jerusalem Symphony, Belgian “I Fiamminghi”, Mannes College Community Orchestra and Doctors Orchestral Society of New York. Her versatile recordings have been heard and seen on British BBC, American NPR and Israeli “Voice of Music” radio stations and television.

An ardent interpreter of Beethoven, she was one of four young pianists selected by the renowned Leon Fleisher to participate in his workshop on Beethoven piano sonatas hosted by Carnegie Hall where she presented performances of “Hammerklavier” and “Appassionata” to critical acclaim.

This upcoming summer she will spend her third residence at the Marlboro Music Festival where she has previously collaborated with Richard Goode, Mitsuko Uchida, and members of the Guarneri and Mendelssohn string quartets. Much affiliated with vocalists, she has performed with Lincoln Center soprano Susan Naruki and Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford. Her readings of contemporary and twentieth century composers such as Crumb, Currier, Ives, Saariaho, Kurtag, and Ben-Haim were heard at Yellow Barn Chamber Music Festival, Walden Music School, New Music Mannes and several universities in the United States. A recent debut of her piano trio with violinist Diana Cohen and cellist Tanya Ell was received in Cleveland with great enthusiasm.

A native of Israel , Renana started piano playing at the age of six. Soon recognized as a prodigy garnering multiple awards and honors, she became a recipient of America Israel Cultural Foundation Scholarship with distinction from 1992-2004, and later on of Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Scholarship.

Her most influential teachers were pianists Natasha Tadson in Israel and Richard Goode at Mannes College of Music in New York where she completed her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees. Other instructors and mentors were Victor Derevianko, Andras Schiff, Martin Isepp, Pnina Salzman, Marcel Baudet and Vladimir Feltsman.

Currently residing in New York, Renana is a piano faculty member of Opus 118 Harlem School of Music. She is also a skillful organist and choral conductor and likes to dedicate her free time towards creative writing, study of languages and dance.

 

 

♫ A native of Poughkeepsie, New York, Paul Miller began studying the violin at the age of three.  Among his teachers are Carole Cowan, Betty-Jean Hagan, Stanley Bednar, Michele Auclair, and John Graham. After completing studies at Vassar College and the New England Conservatory, Paul entered the PhD program in Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music, where he hopes to complete his doctorate in May 2009 with a dissertation entitled “Stockhausen and the Serial Shaping of Space”.  While at Eastman, Paul also earned a Masters' degree in viola performance.

Committed both to contemporary music performance and baroque performance practice, Paul's career has spanned both sides of the Atlantic.  In 2005, he gave the world premiere of a solo viola piece by Stockhausen at the composer's summer festival in Kurten, Germany.  His performances of works on viola and viola d'amore at the Darmstadt International Summer Vacation courses earned him a Stipendiumpreis in 2006.  In the United States, Paul has performed with the baroque ensembles such as Tempesta di Mare, the Washington Bach Consort, and the Tafelmusk Baroque Orchestra in Toronto, Canada.

In addition to performing, Paul keeps a busy schedule teaching violin, viola and music theory at the Settlement Music School.  He also teaches music theory and music history at Temple University.  After completing his doctorate, Paul hopes to pursue a career at a college or university teaching music in a way that links performance issues to theory.

Visit Paul on his website at www.theoryofpaul.net

 

♫ Pittsburgh native William McNally, founder and director of Music4MS, has been musically inclined since the age of three, and began his formal piano studies at age seven. Shortly after his ninth birthday, he performed for the first time in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall as a winner of the AMSA World Piano Competition; he has since played there two more times, once in Stern Auditorium as principal bassist of the Mt. Lebanon H.S. Orchestra, and once again in Weill Hall in a solo piano recital as winner of the Artists International Competition.

A multifaceted musician, Mr. McNally has been widely recognized as a ragtime pianist and composer. While still a high school student, a newly written rag garnered him a first prize in Pennsylvania and finalist placement in the PTSA national arts competition, where there were nearly 30,000 contestants in the musical composition field alone. He has a particular interest in the modern and classically trained ragtime composers, Bolcom or Godowsky for example, and currently studies the lineage and musical architecture between them and composers from ragtime's golden era, such as Scott Joplin and Zez Confrey.

Mr. McNally is a veteran of numerous summer festivals, including Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood Institute, and Mannes' International Keyboard Institute and Festival. At the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, he was selected to be the solo pianist in Stravinsky's Petrushka, and for his performance of the Ravel piano trio the Santa Barbara Independent called hima pianist with, “great sympathy and insight.” Returning to Pianofest in the Hamptons for his second year this past summer, he served as house manager. While there, he was acclaimed nearly as much for his roast chickens as his playing.

With his wife, fellow pianist Daria Rabotkina, Mr. McNally studied at the Mannes College of Music, receiving Bachelors and Masters of Music degrees in piano performance. There, he studied with Jacob Lateiner and Jerome Rose, and was coached by Harris Goldsmith, Chin Kim and Hiroko Yajima, among others. Following Mannes, he received a second Masters degree from Temple University , this time with a double major in piano pedagogy and chamber music. There he studied piano with Harvey Wedeen and collaborative piano with Lambert Orkis. He has performed in the master classes of such artists as Sergei Babayan, Claude Frank, Paul Schenly, Peter Serkin, Arie Vardi and Earl Wild, to name a few.

Currently, Mr. McNally serves as Adjunct Professor of Piano and Staff Accompanist at Temple University , as well as Associate Staff at the Settlement Music School .