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Live Music: Classical

Thursday, November 12, 2009 8 p.m.

Pianist Naomi Niskala has appeared as soloist and chamber musician in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, and her performances have been broadcast on BBC Radio and NPR’s Performance Today. Her competition awards include first prize at the Kingsville International Isabel Scionti Solo Piano Competition and a top prize at the International Stravinsky Awards Competition in Illinois. Attending two summers each at Tanglewood’s Music Center and Ravinia Festival’s Steans Institute, Niskala also toured on the first “Musicians from Ravinia’s Steans Institute” tour with violinist Miriam Fried. Upon invitation from Zarin Mehta and the Ravinia Festival, she performed as chamber musician in Israel, Turkey, and Greece. Niskala also performs as a member of ADCA, a chamber ensemble based in New York City. She has established herself as one of the prominent scholars of the solo piano works of American composer Robert Helps (1928-2001), and has been invited to perform and lecture on these works at universities and halls in the United States, Canada, Japan and Germany. Her release of the first complete recordings of Helps’ solo piano works on two discs with Albany Records in 2007 was met with high acclaim, and the first volume was declared one of the ten “2007 Best of the Year” discs by Classics Today. Recent performance highlights include the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Series at Davies Symphony Hall and Spectrum Concerts Berlin at Philharmonie Hall in Germany, as well as performances this season in Jacksonville, Florida, at the Icicle Creek Music Center in Washington State, the Wuerth-haus in Berlin, the Eastman School of Music, Eastern Washington University, the University of Manitoba, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the College of Staten Island, New York, and Niigata University in Japan. Upcoming engagements include a concerto performance with the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic of Russia and a return to Berlin’s Philharmonie Hall to perform and record the piano chamber works of Robert Helps with Spectrum Concerts Berlin for Naxos Records. Born to Japanese/Finnish-American parents, Niskala began studying piano at the age of three. She was raised in Rochester, New York and later Tokyo, Japan. Niskala holds degrees from the Yale School of Music, Stony Brook University and the New England Conservatory of Music, and also attended Tufts University. She received her Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in Piano Performance with Gilbert Kalish at Stony Brook, and an Artist Diploma with Claude Frank at Yale. Other teachers include the late pianists Patricia Zander and Maria Luisa Faini. Niskala also studied chamber music with pianists Leon Fleisher, Peter Serkin, and Menahem Pressler, violinists Louis Krasner and Eugene Lehner, and bassist Julius Levine. Niskala has taught on the faculties of Wesleyan University (Connecticut), the University of South Florida’s School of Music, and the University of North Dakota. During the summer she teaches at the Interlochen Center for Arts, and she is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania where she teaches piano and theory. Naomi will be performing an all Beethoven Program: Sonata in C major, Op. 2 no. 3 (1795) Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 27 no. 1 (1800-01) Sonata in D minor, Op. 31, no. 2 “Tempest” (1801-02) Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 81a “Les Adieux” (1809-10)

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BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Penn State School of Music
WEBSITE: http://www.music.psu.edu/upcoming