David Dubal (born Cleveland, Ohio) is an American pianist, teacher, author, lecturer, broadcaster, and painter. [1]
David Dubal (born Cleveland, Ohio) is an American pianist, teacher, author, lecturer, broadcaster, and painter. [1]
Dubal has given piano recitals and master classes worldwide, and has also judged international piano competitions (to include the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition). He recorded several albums jointly with pianist Stanley Waldoff for the Musical Heritage Society label, and four compact discs of these recordings have been released on the ArkivCD label. [2] [3] [4] [5] (His album of Aram Khachaturian solo piano works [6] has never been given a compact disc release, although it has been archived at YouTube. [7] ) Dubal appeared in the 2013 Dutch film Nostalgia: The Music of Wim Statius Muller, commenting on the musical compositions of Wim Statius Muller, who was Dubal's teacher at Ohio State University. [8] Dubal taught at the Juilliard School from 1983 to 2018, and at the Manhattan School of Music from 1994 until 2015.
Dubal's drawings [9] and paintings [10] have garnered attention and praise. [11] [12] In 2020, a book titled Selected Paintings and Drawings of David Dubal was published by TIMP Universal, New York. [13]
Dubal has written several books, including The Art of the Piano, Evenings with Horowitz, Conversations with Menuhin, Reflections from the Keyboard, Conversations with Joao Carlos Martins, The Essential Canon of Classical Music (an encyclopedic guide to the prominent composers of the Western canon), and Remembering Horowitz (with 125 essays by accomplished pianists and a disc of Vladimir Horowitz and Dubal in conversation). [14] He also wrote and hosted The Golden Age of the Piano, an Emmy Award-winning documentary produced by Peter Rosen. [15] Several of his articles on music have appeared in The Wall Street Journal , [16] [17] [18] [19] and his piece "Let's Tickle the Ivories" was published in The New Criterion . [20]
Dubal is currently the host and instructor of the weekly Piano Evenings with David Dubal series, [21] held at Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church in New York City. Dubal "provides historical and musical context for each week's repertoire selections, performed by a rotating lineup of acclaimed pianists." [22]
Dubal has lectured numerous times at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art since the 1980s. Some of his most recent lectures there were two given in 2009 on Felix Mendelssohn, [23] a 200th birthday lecture on Frederic Chopin and Robert Schumann in 2010, [24] three lectures in 2011 on Russian Romantic composers, [25] and four lectures in 2012 on La Belle Époque. [26] He gave three lectures (on Chopin, Liszt, and the history of the piano [27] ) at the 1993 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Dubal has given interviews on the subjects of the great pianists, music history and tradition, and the century of social change to the Snapshots Music and Arts Foundation, and these interviews are available to hear at their website. [28] [29] [30]
Dubal is the host of The Piano Matters, a program of comparative piano performances that can be heard on WWFM and other US radio stations. [31] He also hosts Reflections from the Keyboard, [32] a weekly exploration of piano recordings, heard on WQXR-FM.
In the late 1990s, Dubal hosted a series of radio programs titled The American Century, focusing on musical works of the 20th century written by American composers. Many episodes of this series have been archived at YouTube.
From 1971 to 1994, Dubal served as music director of New York City classical music radio station WNCN-FM. In 1975 and 1976, he hosted a regular program of comparative performances titled A Musical Offering, focusing on the piano music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt, and more than a hundred of these programs have been archived at YouTube. In 1980, his series of interviews with Vladimir Horowitz, Conversations with Horowitz, was awarded a George Foster Peabody Award. [33]
In the early 1980s, Dubal interviewed Claudio Arrau for a series titled Conversations with Arrau consisting of six programs on the great pianist's life and career. In 1985, he interviewed Yehudi Menuhin at the WNCN-FM studios; much of this conversation was used in the book Conversations with Menuhin. Dubal also hosted a series of WNCN-FM programs titled For the Love of Music, in which he interviewed pianists, including Murray Perahia, Mitsuko Uchida, and Alexis Weissenberg, composers, including John Corigliano, Phillip Ramey, William Mayer and Laurent Petitgirard, and other prominent people in the arts, including Quentin Crisp, Shlomo Mintz, and Wanda Wiłkomirska. More than a hundred of these interviews have been archived at YouTube.
Dubal was honored by composer Virgil Thomson with a musical portrait titled "David Dubal: In Flight"; it has been recorded by pianist Jacquelyn Helin [34] and a version orchestrated by Thomson was also recorded. [35] [36] An analysis of "David Dubal: In Flight" can be found in Anthony Tommasini's book Virgil Thomson's Musical Portraits. In 1986, Dubal was recognized for his work at WNCN-FM with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for broadcasting. [37] In 2006, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree from the State University of New York. [38]
Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz was a Russian-born American classical pianist. Considered one of the greatest pianists of all time, he was known for his virtuoso technique, tone color, and the public excitement engendered by his playing.
Rosalyn Tureck was an American pianist and harpsichordist who was particularly associated with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. However, she had a wide-ranging repertoire that included works by composers Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms and Frédéric Chopin, as well as more modern composers such as David Diamond, Luigi Dallapiccola and William Schuman. Diamond's Piano Sonata No. 1 was inspired by Tureck's playing.
Charles Welles Rosen was an American pianist and writer on music. He is remembered for his career as a concert pianist, for his recordings, and for his many writings, notable among them the book The Classical Style.
William Kapell was an American pianist and recording artist, killed at the age of 31 in the crash of a commercial airliner returning from a concert tour in Australia.
Alexander Davidovich "Lexo" Toradze was a Georgian-born American pianist, best known for his classical Russian repertoire, with a career spanning over three decades. He regularly appeared as soloist with many of the world's major orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He was a professor of piano at Indiana University South Bend from 1991 to 2017.
Garrick Olof Ohlsson is an American classical pianist. He is the only American to have won first prize in the International Chopin Piano Competition, at the VIII competition in 1970. He also won first prize at the Busoni Competition in Italy and the Montreal Piano Competition in Canada. He was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ohlsson has also been nominated for three Grammy Awards, winning one in 2008.
Alexis Sigismund Weissenberg was a Bulgarian-born French pianist.
Earl Wild was an American pianist known for his transcriptions of jazz and classical music.
György Sándor was a Hungarian pianist and writer.
Rudolf Firkušný was a Moravian-born, Moravian-American classical pianist.
Misha Dichter is an American pianist.
Louis Philip Kentner was a Hungarian, later British, pianist who excelled in the works of Chopin and Liszt, as well as the Hungarian repertoire.
Gunnar Johansen was a Danish-born pianist and composer. He was one of the chief proponents of the music of Ferruccio Busoni, whose mature keyboard works he recorded in their entirety, as well as the complete keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Abram Chasins was an American composer, pianist, piano teacher, lecturer, musicologist, music broadcaster, radio executive and author.
Mordecai Shehori is an Israeli-American pianist.
Joseph Meyer Bloch was an American concert pianist and professor of piano literature at the Juilliard School in New York City. During a career at Juilliard that spanned five decades, Bloch's students included Emanuel Ax, Van Cliburn, Misha Dichter, Garrick Ohlsson, Jeffrey Siegel, Şahan Arzruni, and Jeffrey Swann. During his time at the school, with the exception of an attempted retirement in the 1980s, Bloch taught every piano student at Juilliard. While other Juilliard piano instructors taught prowess at the keyboard, Bloch focused on what The New York Times described as "the who, the why and the what-if" of the piano, not "the how-to". For one year, 1995–96, Mr. Bloch co-taught the Juilliard piano literature courses with Bruce Brubaker. After Mr. Bloch’s retirement in 1996, Brubaker continued teaching the piano literature courses at Juilliard for nine years.
Wim Statius Muller was a Curaçaoan composer and pianist, nicknamed "Curaçao's Chopin" for his romantic piano style of composition. While he was a Juilliard graduate, his musical career did not begin in earnest until after he retired from a career in security and counterintelligence.
Martin Canin was an American pianist and prominent piano pedagogue who was on the faculty of The Juilliard School from 1976 to 2016 and of Stony Brook University from 1965 to 1993.
Barbara Nissman is an American pianist. She is especially known for her interpretations and performances of the works of Alberto Ginastera and Sergei Prokofiev which feature prominently in her repertoire. She is also a writer and a producer of a new DVD series, and a guest clinician presenting concerts, master classes and lectures world-wide.
Sophia Agranovich is a Soviet-born American classical concert pianist, Centaur Records recording artist, music educator and artistic director. She holds Bachelor and Master degrees from the Juilliard School, where she taught piano as a teaching fellow. She continued her doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her live performances and discography have won top international awards and critical acclaim. Her albums are charting in top 10 across all musical genres on One World Music Radio and on World Top Radio Airplay Charts. A Steinway Artist, she is concertizing at major venues worldwide, and has been described by Fanfare Magazine as "a bold, daring pianist in the tradition of the Golden Age Romantics" and praised by the American Record Guide for her "magnificent shading and superior musicianship."
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