George Theophilus Walker was an American composer, pianist, and organist, and the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he received for his work Lilacs in 1996. Walker was married to pianist and scholar Helen Walker-Hill between 1960 and 1975. Walker was the father of two sons, violinist and composer Gregory T.S. Walker and playwright Ian Walker.
Dame Mitsuko Uchida, DBE is a Japanese-British classical pianist and conductor. Born in Japan and naturalised in Britain, she is particularly notable for her interpretations of Mozart and Schubert.
Orli Shaham is an American pianist, born in Jerusalem, Israel, the daughter of two scientists, Meira Shaham and Jacob Shaham. Her brothers are the violinist Gil Shaham and Shai Shaham, who is the head of the Laboratory of Developmental Genetics at Rockefeller University.
Natalie Leota Henderson Hinderas was an American pianist, composer and professor at Pennsylvania's Temple University.
Alan Feinberg is an American classical pianist. He has premiered over 300 works by such composers as John Adams, Milton Babbitt, John Harbison, Charles Ives, Steve Reich, and Charles Wuorinen, as well as the premiere of Mel Powell's Pulitzer Prize winning Duplicates. He is an experienced performer of both classical and contemporary music and is well known for recitals that pair old and new music.
Malcolm Frager was an American piano virtuoso and recording artist.
Eleanor Sokoloff was an American pianist and academic who formed a piano duo with her husband, Vladimir Sokoloff. She taught piano on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music from 1936 until her death in 2020.
Jackson Berkey is an American composer, pianist and singer, best known for his work with Mannheim Steamroller, which he co-founded with Chip Davis in 1974.
Yuja Wang is a Chinese pianist. Born in Beijing, she began learning the piano there at age six, and went on to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. By the age of 21, she was already an internationally recognized concert pianist and signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. She has since established herself as one of the leading artists of her generation. Wang currently lives in New York.
Rebecca Penneys is an American-born pianist of Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish descent. She is a recitalist, chamber musician, orchestral soloist, educator, and adjudicator. In 1965, she was the youngest contestant to have ever entered the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland:
Daniil Olegovich Trifonov is a Russian pianist and composer. Described by The Globe and Mail as "arguably today's leading classical virtuoso" and by The Times as "without question the most astounding pianist of our age", Trifonov's honors include a Grammy Award win in 2018 and the Gramophone Classical Music Awards' Artist of the Year Award in 2016. The New York Times has noted that "few artists have burst onto the classical music scene in recent years with the incandescence" of Trifonov. He has performed as soloist with such orchestras as the Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony and the Munich Philharmonic, and has given solo recitals in such venues as Royal Festival Hall, Carnegie Hall, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Berliner Philharmonie, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Concertgebouw, and the Seoul Arts Center.
Pan Asia Symphony Orchestra is a Hong Kong-based classical music orchestra. The Orchestra has performed frequently in the Hong Kong City Hall, regional town halls and civic centres a few hundred times over the past 34 years. A number of internationally famous conductors and soloists have been invited to perform with it.
Robert S. Freeman was an American pianist, music educator, and musicologist who is known for leading several music schools in the United States. He was director of the Eastman School of Music from 1973 to 1996. Freeman was senior educational liaison to Music in the Air (MITA) at UCLA, and he served on the board of the National Center for Human Performance at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas.
Natalya Antonova is a Russian pianist and educator at the Eastman School of Music.
Kate Liu is a Singaporean American classical pianist. On October 20, 2015 she won the third prize, the audience favorite award, and the Polish Radio Award for the best performance of a mazurka in the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland.
Jeremy Siskind is an American pianist, composer, and educator known for his innovative blending of jazz and classical music.
Nerine Barrett is a Jamaican classical pianist, one of the few black women who have achieved international recognition as a pianist. She was selected in 1966 by the Young Concert Artists to appear at Carnegie Hall and the following year won the Mozart Memorial Prize of the Haydn-Mozart Society of London. In the 1980s, she began teaching music as a professor at the Hochschule für Musik Saar and later at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold. She continued to perform both as a solo artist and as part of the Trio Paideia.
Kelly Hall-Tompkins is a professional violinist and the founder of Music Kitchen-Food for the Soul, a program that lifts the spirits of homeless New Yorkers through live classical music recitals. She has performed as "The Fiddler", as a violin soloist, in the Grammy and Tony-nominated Broadway revival production of Fiddler on the Roof. Hall-Tompkins has appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Dallas Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, Tulsa Philharmonic, Chamber Orchestra of New York, and a Brevard Festival Orchestra under the baton of Keith Lockhart, in addition to numerous concerts and recitals in cities around the world." In late 2020, Tompkins was featured in the PBS Great Performances Documentary on Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles.
William Thomas Appling was a renowned American conductor, pianist, educator and arranger. As a conductor he led the William Appling Singers & Orchestra for almost twenty-five years and conducted other choirs and musical organizations, premiering new works by many American composers. As a pianist he played under the batons of conductors including Robert Shaw, Louis Lane, and Darius Milhaud, and he was the first African American to record the complete piano music of Scott Joplin. As an educator he taught at American schools and universities including Vassar College, Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Music and Western Reserve Academy. He made a number of recordings as both conductor and pianist, and his choral arrangements have been performed and recorded by such prominent ensembles as Chanticleer, Cantus and Dale Warland Singers.
Cécile Staub Genhart (1898–1983) was a Swiss American pianist, pedagogue and teacher. Born in Basel, she played with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1922. She moved to the United States and joined the faculty of Eastman School of Music in 1926. She spent over 40 years teaching at Eastman.
