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| Photo: Christian Steiner |
23-year-old Russian pianist Gleb Ivanov is “eerily like the ghost of Horowitz…His talent is larger than life,” wrote The Washington Times.
Mr. Ivanov won the 2005 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and was also awarded a grant from the Jack Romann Special Artists Fund of YCA. He won critical praise for his debut recitals at Carnegie's Zankel Hall in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, presented by Young Concert Artists during the 2005-2006 season. He made his New York concerto debut in April 2007 with the Orchestra of St. Luke's at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center as part of YCA's annual Irene Diamond concert.
During the 2007-2008 season, Mr. Ivanov appears as soloist with the Florida West Coast Symphony, Bowling Green (KY) Western Symphony Orchestra and Danville (IL) Symphony Orchestra. He has been reengaged at the Louvre in Paris and in the U.S. gives recitals and educational residencies in nine states. He was also invited to participate and perform in Pianofest, the summer festival in East Hampton, NY .
Mentored by the late Mstislav Rostropovich, Mr. Ivanov performed with the famous maestro, as soloist with the Nizhny Novgorod Philharmonic. He has performed Liszt's Concerto No. 1 with the Moscow State Orchestra under the baton of Dmitri Orlov, Prokofiev's Concerto No. 3 in the Great Hall at Moscow Conservatory with Anatoli Levin conducting, and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 13 at the Kremlin conducted by Misha Rachlefsky. He has also performed at the Pushkin, Glinka, and Scriabin Museums in Moscow .
Mr. Ivanov won First Prizes at the 1994 and 1996 International “Classical Legacy” Competitions in Moscow, the Laureate Prize at the 1997 Moscow International Festival for Young Soloists, and the prize for Best Performance of a Beethoven Sonata at the First International Vladimir Horowitz Competition in Kiev in 1995. In 2003, he received scholarships from the Rostropovich Foundation and the Russian Performing Arts Foundation. He is a recipient of a Musical Studies Grant from the Bagby Foundation.
Born in Moscow, Mr. Ivanov comes from a family of musicians, and he began to accompany his father's vocal recitals at the age of eight. He has also played the clarinet and the accordion, and holds a diploma in clarinet from Lyardov High School. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, studying with V.V. Sedova, N.G. Sooslova, and L.N. Naumov, and worked with Nina Svetlanova at the Manhattan School of Music, where he received The Harold and Helene Schonberg Piano Scholarship.
Visit Gleb on his page at Young Concert Artists: www.yca.org
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 him a 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. Moreover, there he met fellow pianist Gleb Ivanov, and they performed for the first time together.
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 .
Cellist Iris Jortner was born and raised in Tel Aviv. She is active in solo playing, chamber music performances, and teaching. She performed at numerous festivals, including Verbier, Banff, Tanglewood, Taos, Prussia Cove “Open Chamber Music”, Kfar Blum, Dubrovnick, Rolandseck, the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, and Isaac Stern's Encounters both in Jerusalem and Cologne. She collaborated with Yefim Bronfman, Michael Tree, Itamar Golan, Levon Chilingrian, the Orion Quartet, the Avalon Quartet, and the Apple Hill Chamber Players.
Ms. Jortner was a founding member and cellist of the Aviv Quartet between 1997-2002. With the quartet she won the Grand Prix at the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, first prize in the Charles Hennen Competition in Holland, and second prize in the Prague Spring Competition in the Czech Republic. Performances with the quartet took place at Wigmore Hall, the Louvre, Theatre du Chatelet, Weill Recital Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, Cologne Philharmonic Hall, Vienna Concert House, and Sydney Opera House.
She has toured in Australia, Canada, China, Cyprus, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, and the USA. She has recorded for the Israeli Broadcasting Service, the French Television, the Australian Broadcasting Service, WQXR, Albany Records, and Naxos. She recently performed a concert at the Manoel Theater in Valletta, Malta, featuring music for oud, cello, and piano, which was recorded for Live Classics. The recording was selected as “CD of the week” by the Munich Public Radio Station.
Ms. Jortner was a recipient of the American-Israel Cultural Foundation Scholarships, received the “Performer of Connecticut ” Award, and a special award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was awarded prizes by the Ministries of Education of Israel and Germany, and received special awards at Tanglewood for outstanding chamber music performances.
Iris received her Bachelor's of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music, her Master's degree from the Amsterdam Conservatory, her Professional Studies diploma from the Mannes College of Music, and a Chamber Music diploma from the Hochschule fur Musik in Cologne, Germany. She studied with Uri Vardi, Aldo Parisot, Bernard Greenhouse, Paul Katz, Dmitri Ferschtman, Timothy Eddy, and members of the Alban Berg Quartet, among others. She served on the cello faculty of Marywood University (Pennsylvania) and Opus 118 Harlem Center for Strings (NYC), and is on the faculty of the Apple Hill Summer Festival (New Hampshire). Last summer Iris taught at the Summer Institute of North Carolina School of the Arts, and performed at the Schlern Festival in Italy. Since September 2006 she has been on the faculty at the University of Virginia, where she teaches cello and chamber music.
Visit Iris on her page at http://www.virginia.edu/music/facultyperfmore.html#jortner
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| Photo: Christian Steiner |
Daria Rabotkina, co-founder of Music4MS and winner of the 2007 Concert Artists Guild International Competition, has been lauded as “…a pianist full of fire and warmth” (The Plain-Dealer). Ms. Rabotkina's growing career has already led to solo appearances with the San Francisco and New World Symphonies under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas and with the Kirov Orchestra and Valery Gergiev in a four concert North American tour. Whether in front of an orchestra, in the recital hall or in a chamber music setting, this “Russian virtuoso” (The Miami Herald) impresses audiences and critics alike.
Other featured performances include concertos with the Montreal Symphony, Moscow State Symphony, Sendai Philharmonic, Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Kazan State Symphony, collaborating with conductors Vladimir Feltsman, Fabio Mechetti and Giancarlo Guerrero.
Highlights of recent recital engagements include the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and Merkin Concert Hall in New York, as well as performances in Denmark, Switzerland and Japan. Festival appearances abroad include Russia's White Night's Festival, Finland 's Kuhmo Festival, France's Chopin Festival and Germany's MusikFest in Kreuth. In the US, Ms. Rabotkina has appeared at Music Academy of the West, where she studied with Jerome Lowenthal, and PianoSummer in New Paltz with Vladimir Feltsman.
In addition to her October 2007 victory at the CAG Competition, Ms. Rabotkina has garnered competition prizes at the Virtuosi per Musica di Pianoforte in the Czech Republic, Tbilisi Competition in Georgia, Jacob Flier Piano Competition in New Paltz, Sendai Competition in Japan, World Piano Competition in Cincinnati, Jacksonville Competition in Florida and the Montreal International Musical Competition.
Daria Rabotkina was born into a musical family in Kazan, Russia, and began her studies at age five with her parents, Guzel Abdoullina and Sergei Rabotkin. She continued her studies with Nora Kazachkova while attending the Special Music School. She holds Bachelors and Masters of Music degrees from Mannes College of Music in New York City where she studied with Vladimir Feltsman and was coached by Leon Pommers, Pamela Frank, Todd Phillips, Timothy Eddy and Jacob Lateiner. She has participated in master classes with Earl Wild, Edward Aldwell, Eteri Andjaparidze, Andras Schiff and Richard Goode.
In her spare time, Ms. Rabotkina works on website design and harbors a passion for drawing, particularly the portraits of Sergei Rachmaninov. She is married to pianist William McNally, and is currently pursuing a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music under the tutelage of Natalya Antonova.
Visit Daria on her website at www.dariarabotkina.com
