Concerto winner announced

I am pleased to announce the result of the third annual Cornell Concerto Competition.
It was an event in which an enormous amount of talent, dedication, and communal support brought much inspiration to all that participated and sat in the audience.

After a full day of preliminary rounds with sixteen participants, the final round of five students were chosen as the following;

Emily Looney (Saxophone) Glaznunov Concerto in Eb
Jung Bin Lee (piano) Liszt Totentantz
Andrew Yeo (violin) Lalo Symphonie Espagnol
Jian Liu (violin) Chuasson Poème
Charlene Kluegel (violin) Sibelius Concerto

At the 7 pm final round in Barnes Hall, all five finalists performed. A winner was chosen by the panel of judges. The 2007 Cornell Concerto Competition winner is Charlene Kluegel. She will perform Jean Sibelius' violin concerto on the March 4th concert by the Cornell Symphony Orchestra.

I would like to thank the five judges for their hard work this past Saturday.

Chris Kim
director of orchestras


Bios of the judges follow;

*Kristin Taavola *is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Cornell University. Her research combines music-theoretic and ethnomusicological perspectives in studying twentieth- and twenty-first century art music, as well as musics from Asia and Indonesia.. She has published on Zen and contemporary Japanese art music, as well as musical processes in the music of Bali and the compositions of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. Currently, her interest in harmony and mode has turned to France, specifically fin-de-siécle Paris and the music of Satie. She also plays the flute, and has performed in various Balinese angklung gamelan, or percussion orchestra. She has previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Eastman School of Music.

A native of Canada, *Dr. Mayron Tsong* was one of the youngest musicians to complete a Performer's Diploma in Piano from the Royal Conservatory of Toronto at age 16. Since that time, she has performed extensively across the United States, including New York, Chicago, Houston, Denver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, West Palm Beach, South Carolina, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington, Indiana, California, Oregon, Michigan, Louisiana, Arizona, Texas, across Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, China, Taiwan and Russia as a soloist and chamber musician. She has been featured as a soloist with the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic (Russia), Symphony North (Houston), the University of North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, the Longview Symphony Orchestra (Texas), the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra (Canada), the Lethbridge Symphony Orchestra (Canada), and the University of Calgary Orchestra (Canada). She has collaborated with renowned artists such as James Campbell, Antonio Lysy, George Taylor, Jeffrey Zeigler (of the Kronos Quartet), the Brentano String Quartet and the Miró String Quartet. Ms. Tsong's solo and collaborative performances have been broadcast by CBC Radio Two - Calgary, Radio Canada - Montreal, WDAV ­ North Carolina, WFMT Radio - Chicago and Radio 4 - Hong Kong. Numerous prizes have included First Prize in the Canadian Music Competitions, the Millenium Prize for Russian Performing Arts, and the prestigious Arts B Grant, awarded by the Canada Council. From 1994-1998, Ms. Tsong was a three-time recipient of The Female Doctoral Students Grant, a competition that encompasses all disciplines nationwide, awarded by the Government of Canada.

Ms. Tsong holds graduate degrees in both Piano Performance and Music Theory, and she obtained her Doctor of Musical Arts under the tutelage of John Perry at Rice University. Her dissertations discuss the piano etudes of György Ligeti. She has also studied with such renowned musicians as György Sebök, Robert Levin, Marek Jablonski, Anton Kuerti, Marilyn Engle, Dr. Robin Wood, and Charles Foreman.

Having served on faculty at California State University in Humboldt and as Chair of the Piano Area at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, Ms. Tsong is currently Assistant Professor of Piano at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Active as a teacher, clinician, adjudicator and judge in the United States, Canada, China and Hong Kong, Ms. Tsong was Artist in Residence at the Banff Centre, where she was invited to give masterclasses in 2001. In the summers, she has taught and performed at the Sequoia Chamber Music Festival in Northern California, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan, Lutheran Summer Music in Minnesota and the Young Musicians
and Artists Camp in Oregon.

A Steinway Artist, Ms. Tsong is a member of the performer¹s roster of the College Music Society, the Scriabin Society, the Canadian Universities Music Society, Minorities and Women Doctoral Directory, the Canadian Music Centre, and she is an Honorary Member of the Tingshuset Music Society in Sweden. She is currently recording her first album for Centaur Records.

Born in Chicago, *Jeffery Meyer *began his musical studies as a pianist, and shortly thereafter continued on to study composition and conducting. He is presently the Director of Orchestras at the Ithaca College School of Music, as well as the founder and Artistic Director of the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic in St. Petersburg, Russia. Jeff has worked with orchestras in the United States and abroad, including ensembles such as the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. In recent concert seasons, he has been seen conducting, performing as piano soloist and chamber musician, as well as conducting from the keyboard in the United States, Canada, Russia, and Germany.

An active participant in the music of our time, he has collaborated with many composers, and commissioned and premiered many new works. He has been featured numerous times as both a conductor and pianist as part of the “Sound Ways” International New Music Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a pianist, Jeff has been in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and in residence at the Aspen Festival as part of the Furious Band, a New York-based group dedicated to contemporary music. He performs frequently with percussionist Paul Vaillancourt as part of the piano and percussion duo Strike. He has been broadcast on CBC Newfoundland, has recorded and performed with the Philadelphia Virtuosi (Naxos), and has been heard as a soloist at the Aspen Festival. During the 2001-2002 academic year he lived and studied in Berlin and Leipzig as the recipient of a DAAD grant in music. He was selected as a semi-finalist in the 2004 Pedrotti International Competition for Conductors, a finalist in the 2003 Vakhtang Jordania International Conducting Competition, and a semi-finalist in the 2003 Beethoven Sonata International Piano Competition, Memphis, Tennessee.

Jeff is an active adjudicator, guest clinician, and masterclass teacher and has served on the faculties of the Dorian Keyboard Festival, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, Marrowstone Music Festival, and the Lutheran Summer Music Academy and Festival. He holds degrees in piano as well as composition and completed his Doctorate of Musical Arts at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he studied with Gilbert Kalish.

When the Worshipful Company of Musicians awarded the prestigious Constant & Kit Lambert Fellowship to *Karl Lutchmayer*, the only time in its history that it has been awarded to an instrumentalist, the accolade recognised an artist who in addition to a busy international concert career is also a high profile lecturer, and has even successfully combined the two disciplines to create the 'Conversational Concert' format of public lecture-recitals, which is regularly featured in the national press.

Born in London, he studied with Peter Wallfisch and John Barstow at the Royal College of Music, where he was a major prize winner, and his studies included extensive research into the music of Ferruccio Busoni for his Masters' degree. He subsequently undertook periods of study with Lev Naumov at the Moscow Conservatoire, Gyorgy Sandor, and Martino Tirimo.

His wide-ranging repertoire, extending from the Renaissance to the present day, allows him to create exciting and innovative programmes; and his recitals and concerto appearances in Russia, Greece, Malta, India, Germany, the USA, and at venues and festivals throughout the United Kingdom have received wide acclaim. He has performed for Radio 3, All India Radio, and Classic FM, worked with international conductors such as Sir Andrew Davis and Lorin Maazel, and been a soloist with numerous orchestras including the Philharmonia, The Erneast Read Symphony Orchestra, The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, the Bombay Symphony orchestra, as well as numerous provincial orcjestras.

As the Constant & Kit Lambert Fellow he returned to the Royal College of Music, where he created a piano repertoire course, gave lectures on the Masters Degree programme, coached contemporary piano music and designed, established and delivered the pioneering Performance in Perspective series of lecture-recitals. It was through this work that he was first invited to guest-lecture at the Juilliard and Manhattan Schools in New York, and appointed Professor of Performing Practice at Trinity College of Music, London. He has also been a key-note speaker at the Incorporated Society of Musicians' Annual Conference, and is reguarly invited to give pre-concert talks at the Wigmore Hall. He has more recently, been in demand as a professor of piano, and as a coach for artists in their early careers, and as well giving frequent masterclasses, he has now been invited to join the keyboard faculty at Ithaca University, New York, for a semester in 2007.

A passionate advocate of contemporary music, he has given numerous premières, and had works written for him by Julian Anderson, Richard Causton, and Kenneth Hesketh. He regularly performs with his own chamber collective, Dialogos, as well as the Continuum Ensemble, with whom he has appeared as chamber musician and soloist He has also been the soloist in several performances of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony, and took part in the Stockhausen festival at the Barbican Centre.

He made his New York debut in the 'Interpretations' contemporary music series, and recently gave a recital devoted to premières of works by British composers in Montreal where he also performed and lectured at McGill university. He is also much in demand as a chamber musician in which capacity he has performed at the Cheltenham, Spitalfields, Brighton and Huddersfield festivals and worked with the Duke, and Belcea Quartets.

*David Weaver* began studies in composition in 2000 while a sophomore at Swarthmore College. While completing a B.A. in physics he took extensive courses in music including composition with Gerald Levinson. From 2002 to 2005 he worked as a laboratory researcher in cell biology at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia. His scientific discoveries have appeared in The Journal of Cell Biology. In 2005 he began pursuing music full-time as a D.M.A student in composition at Cornell University where he studies with composers Steven Stucky, Roberto Sierra, and Kevin Ernste. Recent works have included an interactive electroacoustic gallery installation at Cornell University. His instrumental works have been performed at Cornell, Swarthmore College, and in New York City.