Featured Soloists: Robert Levin, YaFei Chuang & Steven Lipsitt

Classical Improvisation with Robert Levin & Friends
Date and vanue to be announced

The Goethe Institute

Robert Levin is an internationally-known pianist and Mozart scholar. He has appeared throughout the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia with the orchestras of Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles and Vienna. He is renowned for his improvised embellishments and cadenzas in Classical period repertoire. His recordings include cycles of the complete Bach harpsichord concertos with Helmuth Rilling and the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart (Hänssler), the Mozart piano concertos with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music (Oiseau-Lyre), and the complete Beethoven piano concertos with John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique (DG Archiv). He has recently begun a Mozart piano sonata cycle for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi.

In addition to his performing and recording activities, Levin is a noted theorist and Mozart scholar. His completions of Mozart fragments are published by Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Carus, Peters and Wiener Urtext; they have been recorded and performed throughout the world. His new completion of the Mozart C-Minor Mass, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, was premiered there under the direction of Helmuth Rilling in January 2005. He is President of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition (Leipzig, Germany), a member of the Akademie für Mozartforschung and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University.

Acclaimed by critics in the United States and abroad for performances of stunning virtuosity, refinement and communicative power, pianist Ya-Fei Chuang has appeared at festivals around the world. She has also appeared with the Spectrum Concerts in Berlin, at the Fromm Foundation concerts at Harvard, at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge (USA), and performed in venues such as the Cologne and Berlin Philharmonien, Schauspielhaus Berlin, Gewandhaus Leipzig, National Philharmonic Hall Warsaw, and in Jordan Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, as a duo partner with Kim Kashkashian, Robert Levin, Steven Isserlis, and is a member of the chamber ensemble Mistral.

Prizewinner in the Cologne International Piano Competition at age 18, Ya-Fei Chuang first performed on television in her native Taiwan at the age of eight and gave her first public recital at age nine. She won first prize at the nationally televised ‘Genius vs. Genius’ Competition at age ten and first prize at the National Competition (Taiwan) at age eleven. The following year she received unprecedented fellowships and scholarships from several prestigious foundations in Germany and Taiwan that enabled her to pursue pre-college, under¬graduate, and masters-level studies at the Freiburg Conservatory (Musik¬hochschule) with Rosa Sabater and Robert Levin, completing the six-year course of study in four. During this time she was awarded prizes including the Basel-Colmar-Freiburg Arts Prize and the Mendelssohn Prize in Freiburg. She subsequently concluded her German studies with Pavel Gililov, receiving a concert diploma (final degree) at the Musikhochschule of Cologne. In 1993 Ya-Fei Chuang moved to the United States, where she earned a graduate diploma at the New England Conservatory in Boston, with Russell Sherman.

Ya-Fei Chuang’s mastery of the most challenging solo repertoire is comple¬mented by extensive activities as a chamber musician and duo partner, and by her commitment to contemporary music, including world premieres of works by Stanley Walden and Thomas Oboe Lee, and future projects with John Harbison.

Stephen Lipsitt, now in his ninth season as music director of the Boston Classical Orchestra, began his musical training as a clarinetist. He played in youth orchestras at New England Conservatory and Boston University, and won the first annual Tanglewood Award from the Brookline Chamber Music Society, a prize that included tuition in the Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Orchestra, where he played under conductors Lawrence Leighton Smith, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Seiji Ozawa, and studied with the late Pasquale Cardillo of the Boston Symphony. While earning undergraduate and graduate degrees at Yale in music and conducting, he continued clarinet studies with Keith Wilson (teacher of Richard Stoltzman), and played in orchestras and chamber groups. After a hiatus of many years, he picked up his clarinet again on his BCO educational outreach visits to Boston Public School classrooms, and has occasionally had the opportunity to make chamber music with his BCO colleagues.

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