Thursday, September 18, 7:30 p.m.

Anne Hastings Fiedler is a professor of music and head of the keyboard area at the University of Evansville. A finalist and prizewinner in the National Beethoven Piano Sonata Competition, her other distinctions include biographical listings in American Keyboard Artists, Outstanding Young Women of America, and Who’s Who Among American Teachers. She has collaborated nationally with a variety of soloists and ensembles, notably in performances at International Trumpet Guild and International Double Reed Society events. She has been a featured soloist on numerous occasions with the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra, the Evansville Chamber Orchestra, and the University of Evansville Symphony Orchestra. As an active recitalist and chamber musician, her 2007-08 performances will again include multiple appearances on the University of Evansville faculty recital series and with the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra as the principal keyboardist and as a violinist.

Fiedler’s areas of interest and teaching experience include studio piano, music theory, orchestration, pedagogy, and accompaniment. She has reviewed theory texts for McGraw-Hill Publishing and served as an adjudicator for numerous competitions, most recently at the state level for Indiana and Kentucky State Teachers Associations, Indiana School Music Association, and the National Federation of Music Clubs. In the professional community, her service includes the presidency of the Greater Evansville Chapter of the Indiana Music Teachers Association and membership on the Evansville Philharmonic Board and Players Committee.

Fiedler holds a Bachelor of Music with highest honors and a Master of Music from the University of Illinois.

Frederic Chiu

Program: Chopin: 5 Études from Op. 10 and Op. 25
Debussy: Cloches à travers les feuilles from Images, Bk. II
Ravel: Une barque sur l'océan from Miroirs
Prokofiev/Chiu: Three movements from Lt. Kijé
Prokofiev: Toccata in D Minor, Op. 11
Beethoven/Liszt: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67

Frederic Chiu has released over 20 CDs, most recently his latest volume of Chopin, the Etudes Opus 25, Liszt's Années de Pèlerinage (2nd year) and the Grieg Violin Sonatas. The complete piano works of Prokofiev in ten volumes has elicited enthusiasm from Fanfare Magazine to the Wall Street Journal to France's Elle magazine. His release of three rarely played sonatas of Mendelssohn was chosen "Record of the Year" by Stereo Review. His recordings are all on the Harmonia Mundi label (www.harmoniamundi.com).

His first CD, a recital of piano transcriptions, marked him as a champion of this under-explored repertoire, in the model of his teacher, Abbey Simon. Frederic was invited by Leonard Slatkin to open the National Symphony Orchestra's season with the Liszt transcription of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which was met with a standing ovation. His own arrangements, including pieces from Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije Suite and Bach, have had rousing success in concert and on record.

Recent seasons have seen him in Memphis, Omaha, Des Moines, Portland, ME, Jacksonville, Carmel, CA, Syracuse, and San Francisco and performances with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, with Philharmonia Virtuosi, the Elgin Symphony and the Dayton Philharmonic. Mr. Chiu was a featured artist at the Valery Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam. He performed the rarely-played Left Hand Concerto of Prokofiev with the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Estonia National Symphony and the Riverside Symphony at Lincoln Center in New York. He also toured in Japan and China.

Frederic Chiu also traveled across the US with a broken foot, performing with the Budapest Strings the Bach d minor concerto. He also performed the Saint-Saëns Second Concerto at Lincoln Center an on tour with the Orchestre de Bretagne, Stefan Sanderling conducting. He has appeared regularly on the stage of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, presenting Prokofiev's War Sonatas (Nos. 6 ,7 & 8) in lecture recitals and playing with the Philharmonia Virtuosi.

A recipient of prestigious awards - the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Petscheck Award, and the American Pianists Association Fellowship - it was the lack of a certain award that first brought him international notoriety; in a rare foray into the competition circuit, his elimination before the final round of the 1993 Van Cliburn Competition roused enormous protest; prominent stories in the New York Times referred to him as the "Maverick American Pianist."

His concert activities include a large amount of chamber music. He participates regularly in the festival "Consonances" in Saint Nazaire, France, which he co-founded with the violinist Philippe Graffin. He collaborates with Gary Hoffman, Charles Neidich, Jeremy Menuhin, the St. Lawrence Quartet, Shanghai Quartet and Blair Quartet, and is a perennial favorite of the Newport Music Festival.

Growing up with a violinist brother and having worked closely with Josef Gingold at Indiana University, Frederic Chiu reserves a special place for the violin/piano repertoire and plays with Pierre Amoyal who is also a regular recording partner, and Joshua Bell, whom Frederic has toured with in the US, Europe and South America. They gave the world premiere of a work commissioned from Edgar Meyer. Joshua Bell's latest release - The Voice of the Violin - includes a guest appearance by Frederic Chiu, which has been singled out as a highlight of the album.

Eager to bring serious music to a larger audience, he makes special presentations for school children, and also collaborates with personalities outside the traditional realm of his field, including Young and the Restless star Eric Braeden, Tony Award-winning Shakespearean Brian Bedford, French movie idol Sami Frey and psychologist/writer/clown Howard Buten.

Frederic Chiu's activities as a teacher are highly demanded, both in private and in masterclasses. His Deeper Piano Studies program, a philosophic and holistic approach to piano playing, draws together concert pianists, promising students and piano teachers from around the world for innovative and original workshops. He will be presenting an introduction to his DPS program at the Metropolitan Museum in the Spring of 2007.

*Deeper Piano Studies ... has less to do with hitting the keys than with conceptualizing. It includes games meant to sharpen the memory (participants are blindfolded and asked to describe the room) and the eye for structure. (Players must describe a page of music without simply listing the notes and rhythms, by, for example, describing patterns and sequences.)
*“When you apply what they’ve learned to playing the piano,” Chiu said, “you find that a lot of the process becomes sitting at the piano and thinking about what you’ve done, rather than repeating the music over and over.” So far 50 students have moved through the first two levels of Chiu’s four-level program. No doubt it requires a particular kind of pianist: most simply want to get their octaves faster. *“The funny thing is,” Chiu said, “if you go through this method, your octaves will go faster.”
~from the New York Times, by Allan Kozinn

Philip Thomson

Program:
Beethoven: Sonata in C minor, op. 13. Pathétique
Gounod: Funeral March for a Marionette
Villa-Lobos: Dansa Do Indio Branco
Liszt: Invocation
Resignazione
Cantique d'amour
Two Consolations
Ave Maria
Miserere
Romance
St. Francis de Paule Marchant sur les Flots

Philip Thomson was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. He began piano studies in his home town at the age of five with Carol O'Neil, who remained his teacher until he entered the University of Toronto as a student of Swiss pianist Pierre Souvairan. His graduate studies were at The Juilliard School with the renowned pianist Abbey Simon; there, he won the Juilliard School's Liszt concerto competition, and performed Liszt's Concerto #1 in E-flat in Alice Tully Hall. While still a student, he was already concertizing widely in Canada, and has played with all of Canada's major orchestras and in every important concert centre in the country. He has also performed in Hungary, Austria, England, Ireland, France, the U.S., the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and China.

Mr. Thomson came to world-wide attention when he recorded the world-premiere of the Maxwell edition of Liszt's "De Profundis" with the Hungarian State Orchestra, which was released on the Hungaroton label in 1990. Its universal critical praise secured for him the opportunity to perform in the subsequent year the Hungarian, Italian, American, and Canadian premieres of the work. "De Profundis" is a 40-minute tour de force for piano and orchestra, whose manuscript had lain in archives in Weimar for 160 years - astoundingly, without serious musicological study.

Philip Thomson was subsequently invited by Naxos Records to record many of Liszt's solo works. He released three CDs of Liszt, all of which received excellent reviews from the major musical journals throughout the world.

In the mid to late 1990s, Mr. Thomson became interested in the music of the Russian composer Felix Blumenfeld. In his time (1863-1931), Blumenfeld was renowned as a pianist, composer, teacher, and conductor. His piano students included Vladimir Horowitz, Simon Barere, and other titans of the age. For unknown reasons, his music fell out of the repertoire and out of print after his death. Mr. Thomson was able to obtain most of it from archives around the world, and in 1990 recorded Blumenfeld's complete preludes and impromptus for the Ivory Classics label. It has garnered, as have Mr. Thomson's other recordings, wide critical acclaim.

Mr. Thomson enjoys good food, chess (he was the chess champion of the province of New Brunswick for a year), logic puzzles, and good card tricks. An avid and expert cruciverbalist, Mr. Thomson has had his work in this field published in the New York Times.

Philip Thomson has been on the faculty of The University of Akron since 1994.

Garnet Ungar

Program:
Schubert: Hungarian Melody, D. 817
Three Piano Pieces, D. 946
Sonata in A Major, D. 959

Garnet Ungar has appeared throughout North America as a soloist with orchestras, in recitals and master classes at major universities, and in solo and chamber broadcasts on National Public Radio and the CBC. He has performed in Switzerland and England, and his recording of the Brahms second piano concerto with the Varna Philharmonic in Bulgaria is distributed nationally on the Americus label. John Bell Young's review in Clavier magazine praised the performance as “powerful and precise … having solidity and passion, a magisterial presence, structural integrity, immediacy and intensity.” In 2007 he will travel to Sweden, England, Canada, and throughout the United States for solo recitals. Ungar has served on the piano faculties of Mount Royal College in Calgary and the University Settlement House in Toronto. He currently serves as an associate professor of piano at the University of Evansville and on the piano faculty of the Music at Maple Mount summer institute in Kentucky. He regularly adjudicates competitions including at the Hong Kong Schools Music Festival. His students habitually capture top prizes in local and state competitions and perform frequently with professional orchestras.
Born in Montréal, Québec, Ungar earned degrees in piano performance from the Universities of Toronto, Calgary, and Houston, where his principal teachers were Abbey Simon, Ruth Tomfohrde, William Aide, and Marilyn Engle. Additional studies include sessions at the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, where he obtained an associate performer’s diploma, with Marek Jablonski at the Banff School of Fine Arts, Marc Durand and Anton Kuerti at the Centre d’Arts Orford in Québec, and Bernard Ebert at the Académie de Musique de Sion in Switzerland. His hobbies include Web design, rebuilding plumbing and electrical systems, and working on his dairy farm.