Friday, February 27, 2015

World Class Pianist Names To Know

By Olivia Cross


If you play the piano, or any instrument for that matter, you will know how much time and effort it takes to become really good at it. It takes even more to become a professional, and to be recognized as a world class pianist is a huge feat that not many are able to accomplish in their careers. The honor of being called as such belongs to a few of many musicians, and these are some of those pianists that you should know about.

Yuja Wang is a twenty-eight-year-old pianist from Beijing in China. Her mother was once a dancer and her father a percussionist, making her background and upbringing and truly musical one. She was introduced to the piano at the age of 6 years old and was a student at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. She was the youngest entrant in the Music Bridge International Festival in Canada when she turned 11.

Yuja Wang had barely entered her 20s when she was already a performer of classical piano in recitals worldwide. She has won numerous awards and accolades in her time, including Aspen Music Festival's concerto competition and the Gilmore Young Artist award at the beginning of the millennium. Her record company is Deutsche Grammophon, where she is exclusively signed to a 5-disc deal.

Rebecca Penneys is American-born to Russian-Jewish parents in the mid forties. Her childhood was spent in L. A., where she started learning to play the piano when she was just three years old. When she was nine, she had her first solo recital and by the age of eleven, she was a Los Angeles Philharmonic soloist.

Rebecca Penneys was, in 1965, the youngest individual to ever have entered the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland. The competition eventually created the Special Critics' Prize in her honor. She both performs and teaches in summer festivals all over for many years now.

For almost thirty-five years, Penneys has been a teacher at the Eastman School of Music. She is particularly recognized for teaching the keyboard technique known as Motion and Emotion, which is a focused method of improving a pianist's individual performance. She is a teacher at the Rebecca Penneys Piano Festival, and a lot of her students from this festival and elsewhere are international award-winning pianists and teachers in their own rights.

Albert Frantz only really started playing the piano when he was seventeen, which is quite astonishing. Earlier lessons in childhood proved futile and his then piano teacher told his mother she would be better off throwing away all her money. One of his greatest achievements to date is being the first person in over 10 years to win a Fulbright scholarship, which he used to study in Vienna.

Frantz thanks the teachers he had over the years for taking the time to hone his God-given talent and perfect his skill. He advises anyone wishing to learn the piano, or who would like their children to start taking lessons, to find the absolute best instructor possible from the very beginning. Albert Frantz is also a teacher and counts producers like Bosendorfer as clients for playing endorsements.




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