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 (including the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition). He recorded several albums jointly with pianist Stanley Waldoff for the Musical Heritage Society, [2] and four compact discs of these recordings have been released on the ArkivCD label. (His album of Aram Khachaturian solo piano works [3] has never been given a compact disc release, although it has been archived at YouTube. [4] ) 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. [5] Dubal taught at the Juilliard School from 1983 to 2018, and at the Manhattan School of Music from 1994 until 2015.
Dubal's drawings [6] and paintings [7] have garnered attention and praise. [8] [9] In 2020, a book titled Selected Paintings and Drawings of David Dubal was published by TIMP Universal, New York. [10]
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). [11] He also wrote and hosted The Golden Age of the Piano, an Emmy Award-winning documentary produced by Peter Rosen. [12] [13] Several of his articles on music have appeared in The Wall Street Journal , [14] [15] [16] [17] and The New Criterion . [18]
Dubal is currently the host and instructor of the weekly Piano Evenings with David Dubal series, 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." [19]
Dubal has lectured numerous times at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art since the 1980s, to include lectures on Beethoven, [20] a 200th birthday lecture on Frederic Chopin and Robert Schumann in 2010, three lectures in 2011 on Russian Romantic composers, and four lectures in 2012 on La Belle Époque. [21] He gave three lectures (on Chopin, Liszt, and the history of the piano [22] ) 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. [23] [24] [25]
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. [26] He also hosts Reflections from the Keyboard, [27] 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. [28]
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 [29] and a version orchestrated by Thomson was also recorded. [30] [31] 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. [32] In 2006, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree from the State University of New York. [33]
Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz was a Russian and American pianist. Considered one of the greatest pianists of all time, he was known for his virtuoso technique, timbre, 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. She was one of the greatest pianist of the 20th Century.
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.
Oscar William Kapell was an American classical pianist. The Washington Post described him as "America's first great pianist", while The New York Times described him as "one of the last century's great geniuses of the keyboard" and Times critic and pianist Michael Kimmelman, writing in The New York Review of Books, remarked: "Was there any greater American pianist born during the last century than Kapell? Perhaps not." In 1953, at age 31, Kapell died in the crash of BCPA Flight 304 while returning from a concert tour in Australia.
Ronald Bertram Smith was a British classical pianist and teacher.
Garrick Olaf Ohlsson is an American classical pianist. In 1970 Ohlsson became the first, and remains the only, competitor from the United States to win the gold medal awarded by the International Chopin Piano Competition, at the VIII competition. He also won first prize at the Busoni Competition in Bolzano, 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.
Ruth Laredo was an American classical pianist.
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.
Emanuel "Manny"Ax is a Grammy-winning American classical pianist. He is known for his chamber music collaborations with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinists Isaac Stern and Young Uck Kim, as well as his piano recitals and performances with major orchestras in the world.
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.
Peter Roy Katin was a British classical pianist and teacher.
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.
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 Ukrainian-born American classical concert pianist, 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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