Paul Schenly
Reinberger Chair in Piano; Head, Piano Department, was the winner of the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize. Mr. Schenly holds a Master of Music degree from CIM, where he studied with Victor Babin. He serves as artistic director of the Cleveland International Piano Competition and is the founder/director of PianoFest in the Hamptons. He has played extensively with major orchestras throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco Symphonies, The Cleveland Orchestra, and Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics. He has performed with many of the world's leading conductors, including James Levine, Erich Leinsdorf, Christoph von Dohnányi, Edo de Waart, Mstislav Rostropovich, Robert Shaw, and Aaron Copland. He has appeared in many summer festivals, including the Hollywood Bowl, Ravinia Festival, Blossom, and the Mostly Mozart Festival, and has toured Europe with the Rotterdam Philharmonic and appeared at the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center, and in acclaimed recitals at Carnegie Hall. He serves on the advisory board of the American Pianists Foundation and on the nominating committee for the Gilmore Piano Foundation. He has recorded for Sine Qua Non and RCA and was artist-in-residence at the Ravinia Festival and a faculty member at the Music Academy of the West. Born in Munich, Mr. Schenly lived in South America before coming to the U.S. at the age of five. He was appointed to the CIM faculty in 1971.
Kathryn Brown
E-mail: kxb35@case.edu
Associate Head, Piano Department, performs internationally as recitalist, chamber musician and concerto soloist. She has received numerous international prizes, including the Louis Sudler Prize for the Arts and the Darius Milhaud Prize, and was first-prize winner of the National Young Artists Competition, San Antonio International Keyboard Competition, Pro Piano Competition. She performed her New York Solo Debut Recital at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. One of she has appeared in recital at the Library of Congress and Columbia Artists' Community Concerts Series. She is pianist and co-founder of the Myriad Chamber Players, a 17-member ensemble comprised of members of The Cleveland Orchestra and international soloists. Her chamber music credits include performances at the Marlboro Music Festival in collaborations with members of the Guarneri String Quartet and the Beaux Arts Trio. She teamed with Dmitri Ashkenazy on Ravinia's Rising Stars series, and performed on tour in Estonia, Sweden, and Africa as a winner of the USIA Artistic Ambassadors Competition. As a member of the Verdehr Trio, she appeared in recital at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and in London and Prague. Ms. Brown has been featured on the British Broadcasting Network, the PBS Artistry of... series, Chicago's WFMT Radio, and NPR's Performance Today. An accomplished singer, she is a frequent recitalist and was featured in a title role at the Aspen Music Festival. She also performed in the Phyllis Curtin Seminar at Tanglewood. She studied piano with Deborah Moriarty, Ralph Votapek, and Yong Hi Moon at Michigan State University, Julian Martin at the Peabody Conservatory and studied privately with Maria Curcio in London. She received an Artist Diploma from CIM under the tutelage of Paul Schenly. Ms. Brown has been on the faculty of the California Summer Music for the last nine summers and gives master classes throughout the year. She was appointed to the CIM faculty in 1993.
Sergei Babayan
Piano, is the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Gilliam Artist-in-Residence at CIM. Acclaimed for the immediacy, sensitivity and depth of his interpretations, Mr. Babayan's performances reveal an emotional intensity and bold energy, equipping him to explore stylistically diverse repertoire. He is known for his innovative programming, often including modern works by composers such as Lutosławski, Ligeti and Arvo Pärt, and extending the boundaries of mainstream repertoire for which he continues to be acclaimed, excelling in Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann as much as the Russian heritage of Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Prokofiev. His philosophy that a recital should reveal a spiritual dimension, results in playing which sustains an intensity that never fails to captivate. His performances of J.S. Bach have always garnered him both public and critical acclaim, and he firmly believes that the natural evolution of the keyboard instrument has led to the modern piano that allows the music to be fully expressed in this modern incarnation. A student of such legendary teachers and musicians as Gornostayeva, Naumov, Pletnev and Vlasenko at the Moscow Conservatory, he was not permitted to leave the country and be free to compete and study in the West. He was the first pianist from the former USSR who was able to compete without government sponsorship after the collapse of the system. Immediately after his first trip outside of the USSR, Mr. Babayan won consecutive first prizes in several major international competitions including the 1990 Robert Casadesus International Piano Competition (now the Cleveland International Piano Competition; 1990 Palm Beach International Piano Competition; 1991 Hamamatsu Piano Competition; and 1992 Scottish International Piano Competition. He is also a Laureate of the Queen Elizabeth International Piano Competition, the Busoni International Piano Competition and the Esther Honens International Competition in Calgary, Canada. Since that time, Mr. Babayan has had major engagements and concert tours throughout Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, South America, China and the U.S. His New York recitals at Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall, performances with The Cleveland Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony and Detroit Symphony have been met with huge critical acclaim, as have his many subsequent recital and concerto performances throughout all the major cities in the U.S. His concert schedule has included performances and broadcasts throughout major European cities and extensive tours of Japan. He has appeared in recital in such important venues as Salle Gaveau in Paris, Wigmore Hall in London, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Warsaw Philharmonic, Severance Hall in Cleveland, Bolshoy Zal of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Mariinsky Theatre in St.Petersburg, Herkulessaal in Munich, Liederhalle in Stuttgart, Meistersingerhalle in Nurnberg, Konzerthaus in Berlin, Brahmsallee in Karlsruhe, Beethovenhalle in Bonn and many others. In recent seasons, he has performed recitals in New York, London, Hannover, Manchester, Bruxelles, Glasgow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, Grenoble, Tours, Warsaw, Tokyo, Beijing, Osaka, Sapporo, Rio de Janeiro, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami and New Orleans. Mr. Babayan has appeared at numerous major music festivals in France, Germany, the UK, Poland, Spain, China and the U.S. His concerts have been broadcast by WQXR, WCLV, Radio France, Polish Radio and Television, BBC-TV and NHK Satellite Television. He has made several highly praised recordings for the EMC, Connoisseur Society and Pro Piano labels. His recordings of Scarlatti, Ligeti, Messiaen, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Ravel, Schubert, Liszt, Vine, Respighi and Prokofiev have garnered high acclaim, including a "Critic's Choice" in The New York Times praising his "extraordinary technique and ability to play densely harmonized works with illuminating transparency and a daunting measure of control." American Record Guide joined in the accolades, praising his "phenomenal level of color and imagination." Of the recording of Scarlatti sonatas, American Guide said: "It can stand proudly beside that of Horowitz ..." Mr. Babayan has appeared with many major orchestras throughout the world, including The Cleveland Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Nationale de Lille and the New World Symphony. His performances with the Detroit and Baltimore Symphonies were received with great enthusiasm by audiences and critics alike. Mr. Babayan has collaborated with such conductors as Michael Christi, Valery Gergiev, Hans Graf, Neeme Järvi, Kazimierz Kord, Theodore Kuchar, David Robertson and Yuri Temirkanov. His concerto repertoire is constantly growing; at this point he has performed 51 concertos. Mr. Babayan is an enthusiastic advocate of new music and has an immense repertoire. His unusual and imaginative recital programming has always elicited interest and praise. Deep interest and love for the music of Bach has led him to study more recently with Helmuth Rilling. Always in search of the new, Mr. Babayan studied conducting in order to deepen his understanding of the orchestra. In this role, he has already performed music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schnittke, Part, Vasks, Schedrin and Prokofiev. Last season, Mr. Babayan was invited by Valery Gergiev to perform Lutosławski's piano concerto at the International "Stars of the White Nights" Festival in St. Petersburg with the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre. The performance was received with huge enthusiasm by the audience and was highly acclaimed in the major Russian press. Reviews have included: "Mr. Babayan belongs to an elite breed of new pianists. This is elegant playing, intelligent yet colorful, rational yet never wanting for passion and tenderness, irreproachable on every level." (American Record Guide; "One would be hard put to name a Bach interpreter of his standing today. The only comparison that springs to mind is the famous recording of Dinu Lipatti ... His performance has tonal spectrum many orchestras would envy. Babayan is no mere pianist. He is a master-musician for whom the piano is his voice, his orchestra." (The Scotsman); "It would seem that when Ravel transcribed La Valse for piano solo, he somehow must have had in mind the then-nonexistent Babayan." (Musical America); "His reading of Goldberg Variations was beautifully lucid and at the same time marvelously singing ... We can bet that this artist, who takes after Vladimir Horowitz as much as Glenn Gould, will have many surprises in store for us." (Le Monde de la Musique). Of the Mozart Concerto in C Major, K. 503: "Babayan's performance of K.503 at Severance Hall with The Cleveland Orchestra on Tuesday was a wonderful lesson in how this music can be approached freshly and imaginatively without violating its spirit. It bore the mark of a distinctive personality, yet it also did honor to Mozart." (The Plain Dealer); "an unequaled touch, perfectly harmonious phrasing and breathtaking virtuosity, his music seemed to speak directly to us." ( La Figaro, Paris); "Orchestrating his tone like an organist or a harpsichordist switching manuals, he colored melodic lines with an amazing variety of touches and dynamics." (The Plain Dealer) Mr. Babayan was appointed to the CIM faculty in 1992.
Emanuela Friscioni
E-mail: exf31@case.edu
Piano, began studying piano in Italy at age five and made her debut at the age nine. She received a diploma in piano performance from the"Giuseppe Verdi" Conservatory in Milan, with full marks, and went on to study with Annamaria Pennella. Other teachers have included Paul Badura-Skoda, Aldo Ciccolini and Bruno Canino. Ms. Friscioni has won many national and international first prizes, including those at the Tortona, Moneglia, Camaiore, Chieti, and Kawai Piano Competitions. She has performed throughout Italy, in Switzerland, France and other European countries. She made her U.S. debut in July 2000 with Cleveland Orchestra violinist Gino Raffaelli. Since then, she has enjoyed a career that has seen her perform solo recitals, orchestral engagements and chamber music appearances. Among her collaborations, she played Schubert's Quintet Op.114"The Trout" with members of The Cleveland Orchestra and was again invited by Orchestra members in 2004 to play an all-Brahms program. Ms. Friscioni's recent performances have included Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with the National Repertory Orchestra; Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Canton Symphony; chamber music and solo performances at the Music in the Mountains festival; and Franck's Symphonic Variations with the Lakeside Symphony Orchestra. She has also performed recitals in California, New Mexico, New York and Ohio. Her piano duets with her husband, pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi, have earned them many prizes and wonderful reviews. Ms. Friscioni is also an accomplished professor of piano, first in Italy, where many of her pupils have won prizes and scholarships, and now in the U.S. As a teacher and artistic director, she founded and manages the Classical Piano Performance Academy at Cuyahoga Community College. She was appointed to the CIM faculty in 2004.
HaeSun Paik
E-mail: haesun.paik@cim.edu
Pianist HaeSun Paik has been hailed as a "sensitive and thinking musician first and an awesome technician second" (Los Angeles Times), with a "big and individual personality" (New York Times), whose performances are "a wonder - elastic, mercurial, charged with meaning, surprising" (Boston Globe). Having won top prizes at international piano competitions including the Queen Elisabeth, Leeds, William Kapell, and the Tchaikovsky, Ms. Paik has performed concerts around the world in solo recitals, concerti with orchestra, and as a chamber musician.
HaeSun Paik has appeared as a soloist under the baton of Mikhail Pletnev, Sir Simon Rattle, Vassily Sinaisky, Dmitri Kitaenko, Stanislav Skrovaczewski, and Myung Whun Chung. She has performed with the Boston Symphony, National Symphony, London Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Radio France Philharmonic, KBS Symphony, NHK Symphony, Tokyo Philharmonic, Osaka Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony, Belgium National Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic, Moscow Philharmonic, and the Russian National Orchestra, among many others.
Ms. Paik has appeared frequently in recital at prestigious venues throughout the U.S. including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center and Jordan Hall in Boston. Her international tours have brought her to major concert halls around the globe. She has appeared at numerous international music festivals including the Beethoven Festival in Munich, Radio France Festival in Montpellier, Courchevel Music Festival in France, Beijing International Music Festival and Academy, Orford Music Festival in Canada, International Keyboard Institute & Festival in New York, PianoSummer at New Paltz (New York), and the Busan Music Festival in Korea.
A superb collaborative artist, Ms. Paik has performed with many distinguished artists including cellists Anner Bylsma and Mischa Maisky, violist Nobuko Imai, and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. Her recent recording with cellist Laurence Lesser of the complete works by Beethoven for cello and piano has been released by Bridge Records. Her debut and subsequent solo recordings can be heard on the EMI label.
One of the most sought after pedagogical influences in Korea, Ms. Paik was the youngest pianist of her generation to be appointed as a music professor at Seoul National University, where she taught for ten years. She will join the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music in the fall of 2013. She is Artist-in-Residence at Catholic University of Daegu and serves as the Artistic Director of the Busan Music Festival in Korea. She gives master classes at institutions and festivals worldwide and has served as a juror in many international competitions including the Bosendorfer, the Cleveland and the Honens international piano competitions.
HaeSun Paik's artistic development has been influenced by her studies with Russell Sherman and Wha Kyung Byun, and through her studies at the International Piano Foundation in Lake Como (Italy) where she worked with international artists including Alicia de Larrocha, Karl Urlich Schnabel, Rosalyn Tureck, and Alexis Weissenberg.
Antonio Pompa-Baldi
E-mail: axp84@case.edu
Piano, is a graduate of Conservatorio U. Giordano. He completed further studies at the Accademia Internazionale Aldo Ciccolini and the Accademia Internazionale F. Ferrara. Teachers have included Annamaria Pennella, Aldo Ciccolini, Paul Badura-Skoda, Bruno Canino and Jorg Demus. Born and raised in Foggia, Italy, he came to the U.S. in 1999 to participate in the Cleveland International Piano Competition, at which he won first prize. He was also a top prize winner at the 1998 Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition and won the silver medal at the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (along with the award for Best Performance of a New Work). Mr. Pompa-Baldi has toured extensively in four continents and has collaborated with leading conductors including Hans Graf, James Conlon, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Keith Lockhart, Christopher Seaman, Fabio Mechetti, Daniel Hege, Louis Lane, Pascal Rophé, and Stefan Sanderling. He has released recordings of the music of Edvard Grieg, an all-Brahms disc, and piano sonatas, and his performance of Prokofiev's Concerto No. 3 with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra was presented by PBS in the documentary Concerto. He has also been seen and heard on French National Television, Radio-France, Cleveland's WCLV, Boston's WGBH, and National Public Radio's Performance Today, and appeared in the PBS documentary on the Eleventh Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, Playing on the Edge. Mr. Pompa-Baldi is a Steinway Artist and was formerly an assistant professor of piano at Oberlin College Conservatory. He was appointed to the CIM faculty in 2003.
Olga Radosavljevich
E-mail: oxg2@case.edu
Piano, received a Bachelor of Music degree, Master of Music degree and Artist Diploma from CIM. The Olga Radosavljevich Preparatory Scholarship in Piano was established at CIM in 2000. She was the recipient of the Distinguished Teacher Award from The White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. A piano student of Arthur Loesser, Victor Babin, and Vitya Vronsky at CIM and Danica Stanisavljevich at the Music Academy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, she was also a theory student of Verna Straub, Alvaretta West, and Marcel Dick. She has appeared in recital and with orchestras throughout Greater Cleveland; Tacoma, Washington; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; and Yugoslavia; she has given chamber music performances with David Cerone, Brian Reagin, Ronald Gorevic, Katherine Gradojevich Manker and Brian Manker. She served as executive assistant for the ENCORE School for Strings from 1985 until 1988. She has been a member of the accompanying staff of the Meadowmount School of Music and director of CIM's Preparatory Piano Summer Program, Camp KLAVIER, since 1989. In 2005, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from CIM. Ms. Radosavljevich was head of the CIM Preparatory piano department from 1985-2004. She was appointed to the CIM faculty in 1960.
Daniel Shapiro
E-mail: dxs50@po.cwru.edu
Piano, received a Bachelor of Music degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Southern California, and Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in piano performance from the Peabody Conservatory. Teachers have included Leon Fleisher, John Perry, Joanna Graudan, and Reginald Stewart. Dr. Shapiro continues to gain recognition as a leading interpreter of Schubert, Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven, whose 32-sonata cycle he has twice performed. He has given critically acclaimed recitals and concerto appearances across the U.S., in Brazil, Britain, Ireland, Spain and France, and at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Dr. Shapiro has performed with orchestras including the National Symphony, the Sâo Paulo State Symphony Orchestra, the Academy of London, the Colorado National Repertory Orchestra, the Knoxville Symphony and the Los Angeles Debut Orchestra. He received the top prize at the 1992 William Kapell International Piano Competition, and also won the American Pianists' Association Beethoven Fellowship Award. As a chamber musician, he has performed regularly with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Chicago and Cleveland Orchestras, and has also performed with the Cavani and Miró Quartets. He has participated at the Marlboro and Ravinia Festivals and the Fellowship Program at Tanglewood. As a conductor, Mr. Shapiro studied with Daniel Lewis, Victor Yampolsky, Fritz Zweig, and Gustav Meier. He was previously on the piano faculty of the University of Iowa, and was appointed to the CIM faculty in 1997.
Francesca Brittan
Francesca Brittan, appointed Assistant Professor of Music at Case in 2009, is a scholar of nineteenth-century music and aesthetics. She holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University (2007), and was a Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge between 2006-08. Her current book project centers on music and fantastic aesthetics in nineteenth-century France, drawing together musical, literary, visual, and scientific texts. Recent publications related to the project include “Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography” (Nineteenth-Century Music, 2006) and “On Microscopic Hearing: Fairy Magic, Natural Science, and the Scherzo fantastique” (forthcoming in JAMS); also, a scholarly edition of Jean-Etienne Soubre’s Sinfonie fantastique. Brittan also works on popular music, especially blues and early rock and roll; her essays on these and related topics have appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and in the collection On Bathos (Continuum, 2009).
In addition to her scholarly activities, Brittan is also active as a harpsichordist and fortepianist. She has been the recipient of several international grants for performers, including the Chalmers Award, and spent three years at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (1998-2000), where she worked with Patrick Ayrton and Bart van Oort. She is particularly interested in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century melodrama and related traditions of romantic declamation, and, in recent years, has given a series of performances showcasing this material in Europe and North America.
Grace Huang
Grace Huang, Preparatory piano faculty and head of the secondary piano department in the Conservatory division, was appointed to the CIM faculty in 2009. She received a BM in Piano Performance from the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University as a student of Craig Nies and her MM and DMA degrees in Piano Performance from the University of Minnesota under the tutelage of Lydia Artymiw. Festival appearances include Aspen, Eastern, Madeline Island, Hampden-Sydney and PianoTexas, where she was a featured concerto soloist with the Fort Worth Symphony in 2011. She has performed in master classes for Arie Vardi, Paul Badura-Skoda, Ursula Oppens, Misha Dichter, John Lill and Santiago Rodriguez, among others. Solo, collaborative and chamber music performances continue to take her throughout the U.S. and abroad. Recent engagements include performances at the Classical Music Festival in Eisenstadt, Austria, as well as solo recitals in Taiwan.
A dedicated teacher, Dr. Huang’s students are recipients of honors at the local, state and regional levels. In the summers she serves on the piano faculty of CIM's Summer Sonata program. She is also active as an adjudicator and clinician; recently she was invited as guest master class presenter and recitalist at Charleston Southern University in Charleston, SC. A member of Music Teachers National Association, Huang is Immediate Past President of NE Ohio Music Teachers Association, has held other leadership roles within the local and state levels, and has been a featured presenter at the Illinois State Music Teachers Association's state conference. She has written articles for Piano Pedagogy Forum and Georgia Music News. She previously taught on the faculties of Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, Millikin University, St. Cloud State University, and the University of Georgia.
