All recitals are held at 7:30pm in the Music Recital. Admission for each is $20 general, $15 student/senior, unless otherwise noted.

The fall 2012 Piano Series will open with a recital by faculty professor Richard Cionco on Saturday, September 29 at 7:30pm. The concert will feature works by Bach, Schumann, Janacek, and Liszt. A Steinway Artist, Mr. Cionco is currently celebrating his 20th year on the faculty at Sacramento State. He graduated from the University of Maryland and The Juilliard School, and his major teachers include Rudolf Firkusny, Thomas Schumacher, and Audrey Bart Brown. He studied chamber music at Juilliard under Albert Fuller. A scholarship and fellowship recipient at Juilliard, he was also awarded the Carl M. Roeder Memorial Prize in Piano and upon graduation, the Helen Fay Prize, for exceptional achievement and character. A winner of many competitions, he is also a recipient of a Solo Recitalists Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a career grant from the Bagby Foundation for the Musical Arts in New York City.

An additional recital in the fall will feature guest artist Ju Ying Song on Saturday, October 20 at 7:30pm. Her recital will feature romantic works by Beethoven, Schubert, and Debussy. Ms. Song earned her MM and DMA from Juilliard, and is currently on the faculty of the New School for Music at Mannes College. Numerous awards include Pro Piano Artist of the Year, Pro Musicis International Award, Grand Prize at Palm Beach Invitational Piano Competition, $25,000 Christel Award from American Pianists Association, Sudler Prize for outstanding achievement in the arts from Stanford University, and Petschek Award, Juilliard’s highest honor awarded to a pianist. Ms. Song has appeared in concert in New York at Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Avery Fisher Hall in Mostly Mozart Festival; in Paris at Théâtre de l’Athénée and Salle Cortot; in Washington, D.C., at National Gallery and Kennedy Center; and in Taipei at Taipei National Concert Hall.

The annual Piano Festival will be held February 23-25, 2013. The preliminary round of the Valencia Young Pianist Competition will be held on Saturday, February 23 (not open to the public). A maximum of six finalists will be chosen to perform in the Final Round on Monday, Feb. 25 at 7:30pm, in front of an audience at Capistrano Music Recital Hall. This recital is free and open to the public. View the Piano Festival website for more info.

As part of the Piano Festival, guest artist Ning An will be performing on Saturday, February 23 at 7:30pm. His recital will feature works by Bach, Schumann, Liszt, and Piazzola. Mr. An was the First Prize Winner of the 2003 William Kapell Piano Competition. He made his concerto debut at the age of sixteen, performing the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra in February of 1993. He has since appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic, the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Belgian National Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Flemish Radio Symphony, the Stuttgart Philharmonic, and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra. Mr. An’s recent Carnegie Hall debut, an all-Chopin program presented by the Chopin Foundation of the United States in Weill Recital Hall, was praised in the New York Concert Review for “the almost sculpted clarity of his playing, and his ability to maintain balance and tension in large-scale dramatic forms...". He received his BM and MM from the New England Conservatory of Music, and is currently an Artist in Residence at Lee University, Tennessee. His principal teachers were Russell Sherman and Olga Radosalvjevich.

Guest artist Jeremy Denk will perform at 3:00pm on Sunday, March 10. Mr. Denk has appeared as soloist with many major orchestras, including the Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, New World, St. Louis, and San Francisco Symphonies, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and London Philharmonia. After graduating from Oberlin College and Conservatory in piano and chemistry, he earned a master’s degree in music from Indiana University as a pupil of György Sebök, and a doctorate in piano performance from the Juilliard School, where he worked with Herbert Stessin. The New York Times describes Denk’s playing as “bracing, effortlessly virtuosic, and utterly joyous,” and reviewers frequently comment on the freshness and originality of his musical interpretations.