We are excited to welcome these guest artists to UMKC in the 2023-2024 school year: Robert McDonald (November), Jeremy Denk (February), and Jonathan Feldman (April).

UMKC piano students have worked many distinguished guest artists in recent years, including: Richard Goode, Logan Skelton, Jerome Lowenthal, Robert Weirich (UMKC emeritus professor), Peter Takacs, Margo Garrett, John Weems, Nancy Weems, Peter Mack, Anne-Marie McDermott, Dmytro Choni, Enrico Enlisi, and Terrence Wilson. Virtual guests have included: Emmanuel Ax, Hung-Kuan Chen, and Robert Shannon.

Past events:

Hung-Kuan Chen – Master class, November 6, 2020

Pianist Hung-Kuan Chen was born in Taipai and raised in Germany. His early studies fostered strong roots in Germanic Classicism tempered with the sensibility of Chinese philosophy. The winner of the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition and Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the recipient of an Avery Fisher Grant, Chen has collaborated with conductors including Christoph Eschenbach and Hans Graf, and his colleagues include the Tokyo and Shanghai string quartets, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinists Cho-Liang Lin and Roman Totenberg, clarinetist David Shifrin, and pianist Tema Blackstone. An adjudicator in international competitions, including the Van Cliburn Competition, Busoni Competition, Honens Competition, and International China Competition, Chen is a former faculty member of Boston University, the New England Conservatory, and the Shanghai Conservatory, and he has been a visiting professor at Yale since 2010. He holds an Artist Diploma from the New England Conservatory where he studied with Russell Sherman. His early studies were with Hans Leygraf in Germany at the Hannover Hochschule and with Béla Böszörményi-Nagy. He has been on the faculty at Juilliard, both in the college and Pre-College Division, since 2014.

https://www.juilliard.edu/music/faculty/chen-hung-kuan

Emanuel Ax – Q&A, October 16, 2020

Pianist Emanuel Ax was born in Lvov, Poland, and performs in recital and with major symphony orchestras aroundt the world. He appears regularly at the BBC Proms, Blossom Festival, Edinburgh Festival, Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart Festival, the Tanglewood Festival, and Ravinia Festival, among many others. Frequent chamber music performance collaborators incluse Isaac Stern, Yo-Yo Ma, and Young Uck Kim. Among his many world premieres of 20th- and 21st-century music include Joseph Schwantner’s Piano Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony under Leonard Slatkin (1988). He has recorded more than 20 discs for RCA records and has been an exclusive Sony Classical recording artist since 1987. He received Grammy Awards in 1985 and 1986 for recordings of Brahms and Beethoven with Yo-Yo Ma. He was also the winner of the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in 1974, the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists in 1975, and the Avery Fisher Prize in 1979.

Ax holds a Diploma from Juilliard where he was a student of Mieczylaw Munz, and did his graduate work at Columbia University. He has been on the Juilliard faculty since 1990.

https://www.juilliard.edu/music/faculty/ax-emanuel