The 2011-2012 Piano Series will open with a recital of Liszt and Busoni by guest artist Andreas Klein on Saturday, October 1 at 7:30pm in the Music Recital Hall. Admission is $20 general, and $15 for students and seniors. Andreas Klein has established himself as a dynamic and compelling performer who captivates with a wide range of tonal colors and possesses a brilliant technique. His career as soloist has taken him to the world's most prestigious venues: London's Wigmore Hall, Berlin's Philharmonic Hall, New York's Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and to Berlin, Rome, Milan, Bern, Leipzig and Dresden, to name a few. He has toured Europe, the Middle East and the US, appearing on major concert series in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Cleveland, Houston and Seattle to name a view.

Andreas Klein has been heard frequently on National Public Radio's "Performance Today" and recently on American Public Radio's "St. Paul Sunday", a live video broadcast on WGBH Boston and KUHF Houston. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School and complemented his studies with the legendary Claudio Aarrau and Nikita Magaloff. Copies of his Dissertation on the Chopin Etudes are in the libraries of the Chopin Society in Vienna and Leipzig.

Guest artist Eduardus Halim will be performing the Liszt Transcendental Etudes on Saturday, October 22 at 7:30pm in the Music Recital Hall, on the 200th anniversary of the composer's birthday. Admission is $20 general, and $15 for students and seniors. Halim, a man of Chinese stock who was born in Indonesia and given a Muslim name, learned Javanese dancing as well as the violin and the piano in his early years. He was polished as an artist in New York, where he became a U.S. citizen. He now performs widely a large repertoire drawn mostly from the great realm of European masterpieces. Mr. Halim's first teacher was a Hungarian, Alfonse Becalel. Rapid development led to the boy’s playing Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto at the age of eleven and, at thirteen, a debut recital. Mr. Halim's next teacher was the Belgian-trained Stephen Michael Sulungan. By 1980, when he was nineteen, he came to the United States to enter the Juilliard School as a pupil of the noted Sascha Gorodnitzky. After four years and Gorodnitzky's passing, Mr. Halim turned to the distinguished Rudolf Firkušný.

Since his 1987 debut, Mr. Halim has met success appearing with such orchestra as the Baltimore Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, the Malaysian Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. Eduardus Halim's distinctive approach to the piano is matched by a charismatic personality. He has captured the attention of the media and been profiled by The New York Times (Arts & Leisure), The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Piano Quarterly and Clavier. Mr. Halim is currently a member of the Artist Faculty at New York University, in the Steinhardt School's Department of Music and Performing Arts.

The fall semester rounds out with a performance of Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin and Bernstein by guest artist Kirill Gliadkovsky on Saturday, November 19 at 7:30pm. Admission is $20 general, and $15 for students and seniors. Gliadkovsky was born in Moscow and has studied music since the age of 5. He attended the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow - the most prestigious music institution in Russia - where his teachers included renowned musicians Lev Vlasenko, Mikhail Pletniev (piano) and Leonid Royzman (organ).

Mr. Gliadkovsky earned both his Master's and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees at the University of Southern California with Professors Daniel Pollack (piano) and Cherry Rhodes (organ). Gliadkovsky joined Southern Utah University in August 2007 as head of their piano department. His popularity is also fast growing, being a featured artist in numerous live TV and radio broadcasts and programs on such networks as, CBS, PBS, CBC, WQXR, KBYU, KPAC, Russian State TV and Radio and many recordings on NPR. His performances have been met with great enthusiasm by both audiences and music critics in Europe, Russia and North America. Josef Woodard, a critic at the Los Angeles Times, wrote: "...the intensity and a nicely honed musicality left the audience stunned...enthralling...all in all, a gripping and masterful performance".

Pianist Evgeni Mikhailov will be performing works by Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibiiton on Saturday, February 25, 2012 at 7:30pm. Born in Russia, Mikhailov graduated from the Music School and Music College in Izhevsk and later attended the Kazan State Conservatoire. Since September 1996 he has been a teacher at the Kazan State Conservatoire, and since November 1997 a soloist of the Moscow State Philharmonic Society. Mikhailov has prepared many programs, including the cycle of 10 Sonatas by Scriabin. In 1998 he recorded two CD with those sonatas at the Russian recording firm "Melodiya". He got wonderful reviews of his creative work in the Russian newspapers and magazines, and also in the foreign press including "Piano" (Great Britain), "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (Germany), "Los Angeles Times" (USA), "Kaertner Tageszeitung" (Austria), "Observer" (Sweden), and "Sinfonica" (Uruguay).

The annual Piano Festival is slated for April 14-16, 2012. The Valencia Young Pianist Competition will be held on Saturday, April 14 (not open to public), and rising artist Natasha Peremski will be performing on Saturday, April 14 at 7:30pm in the Music Recital Hall. Admission is $20 general, and $15 for students and seniors. With her consistently striking and dynamic performances, 23-year-old pianist Natasha Paremski reveals astounding virtuosity and voracious interpretive abilities. In September 2010, Natasha was awarded the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year. The past two seasons included appearances with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, and alongside Rob Kapilow at Lincoln Center. They also saw Natasha make her Asian debut with the National Symphony Orchestra in Taipei and in recital in Tokyo, as well as a UK tour with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Moscow, Natasha began her piano studies at the age of 4 with Nina Malikova at the Andreyev School of Music there. In 1995 she emigrated with her family to the United States and became a US citizen in 2001. She studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music before moving to New York to study with Pavlina Dokovska at Mannes College of Music, from which she graduated in 2007. Her growing list of awards includes the Prix Montblanc 2007, the 2006 Gilmore Young Artist Award, top prize in the 2002 Bronislaw Kaper Awards sponsored by the Los Angeles Philharmonic; top prize in the Young Artists in Carnegie Hall 2000 International Piano Festival, and many others. Natasha made her professional debut at age nine with the El Camino Youth Symphony in California. At the age of fifteen she debuted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and recorded two discs on the Bel Air Music Label with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitry Yablonsky, the first featuring Anton Rubinstein's Piano Concerto No. 4 coupled with Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody and the second featuring all of Chopin's shorter works for piano and orchestra.

Also as part of the Piano Festival in Spring 2012, free masterclasses with our piano faculty (Richard Cionco, Lorna Peters, and Kirsten Smith) will be offered on Sunday, April 15 from 12-6pm in Capistrano Hall 151, and the finalists of the Valencia Young Pianist Competition will present a free concert on Monday, April 16 at 7:30pm in the Music Recital Hall.