Mark Gasser | |
|---|---|
 Mark Gasser at a recording session in Newcastle, NSW, in March 2007 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | 6 July 1972 Sheffield, England |
| Genres | Baroque, Classical, Romantic 20th century |
| Occupation(s) | Pianist, classical musician, academic |
| Instrument(s) | Piano |
Mark Gasser [1] (born 6 July 1972) [2] is a British concert pianist.
Gasser was born in Sheffield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1972 to Austrian and Scottish parents. He studied with John Humphreys at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and with Frank Wibaut at the Royal Academy of Music, and is a fellow of both institutions. Later he also studied with Alfred Brendel and Peter Donohoe. [3]
Gasser plays large-scale standard repertoire piano works, in particular the Viennese Classics (Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert) and Grieg, Mendelssohn, Busoni, and Rachmaninoff, and the French Impressionists Debussy and Ravel. His repertoire ranges from Bach's Goldberg Variations to Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus , [4] as well as collaborations with living composers.
As a chamber musician he has performed in all the major chamber music festivals in the United States, Europe and Australia [5] [6] and has toured with the virtuoso cellist Mats Lidström.
His concerto repertoire includes more than 70 works ranging from Bach to music from the present day. Gasser collaborates with contemporary composers and has premiered and recorded compositions by 20th-century composers such as Alfred Schnittke, Ross Edwards, [7] Constant Lambert, Benjamin Britten, Henri Pousseur, Henry Cowell, Toru Takemitsu, George Crumb, [8] James MacMillan, Alistair Zaldua, Michael Tippett, John Webb, James Dillon, Phillip Whilby, Richard Barrett, Cat Hope, Aldo Clementi, Mike Vaughan, John Cage, Luigi Dallapiccola, John Adams, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Olivier Messiaen, [9] Luigi Nono, Edgard Varèse, Judith Bingham, Pierre Boulez, Joël-François Durand, Frank Zappa, György Ligeti and Ronald Stevenson. Gasser has also worked with contemporary artists such as Pink, Jarvis Cocker and Björk.
Gasser performed Stevenson's Passacaglia on DSCH [10] [11] at Carnegie Hall [12] [13] as a charity concert shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, to raise money for the families of rescue workers who died in the September 11 attacks, and most recently at the Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House (2012) to launch Yamaha's CFX Concert Grand Piano in Australia. [14] [15]
Gasser was a founding member of the Thallein Ensemble and has performed in some of the world's major concert halls and music festivals and has been a soloist with a number of symphony orchestras. He was named "Bösendorfer Artist of the Year" In 2002. [16] Since 21 October 2009 Gasser has been an exclusive Yamaha Artist. [15] [17]
From 2011 – 2013 Gasser was a staff member of the Keyboard Faculty of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth, Western Australia [18] where he also achieved the award of PhD. [3] From 2013–2015 Gasser was CEO and Artistic Director of the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts in Brisbane, Queensland. He currently lives in Melbourne.
Gasser has taught masterclasses at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Christ's Hospital UK, Newcastle University, Australia, Hale School AU, Birmingham Conservatoire UK, Juilliard School, New York, University of Oxford UK, Australian National Academy of Music, Purcell School UK, Royal Holloway University UK, The King's School, Canterbury UK, Trinity College of Music UK, University of Cambridge, UK, Darmstadt, Germany, Central Queensland University, AU Newcastle Grammar School, Australia, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, City University of New York and the Conservatoire de Paris.
Constantin "Dinu" Lipatti was a Romanian classical pianist and composer whose career was cut short by his death from effects related to Hodgkin's disease at age 33. He was elected posthumously to the Romanian Academy. He composed few works, all of which demonstrated a strong influence from Bartok.
Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.
The 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87 by Dmitri Shostakovich are a set of 24 musical pieces for solo piano, one in each of the major and minor keys of the chromatic scale. The cycle was composed in 1950 and 1951 while Shostakovich was in Moscow, and premiered by pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva in Leningrad in December 1952; it was published the same year. A complete performance takes approximately 2 hours and 32 minutes. It is one of several examples of music written in all major and/or minor keys.
The Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 77, was originally composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1947–48. He was still working on the piece at the time of the Zhdanov Doctrine, and it could not be performed in the period following the composer's denunciation. In the time between the work's initial completion and the first performance, the composer, sometimes with the collaboration of its dedicatee, David Oistrakh, worked on several revisions. The concerto was finally premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky on 29 October 1955. It was well-received, Oistrakh remarking on the "depth of its artistic content" and describing the violin part as a "pithy 'Shakespearian' role."
Bösendorfer is an Austrian piano manufacturer and, since 2008, a wholly owned subsidiary of Yamaha Corporation. Bösendorfer is unusual in that it produces 97- and 92-key models in addition to instruments with standard 88-key keyboards.
Ronald James Stevenson was a Scottish composer, pianist, and writer about music.
Francis George Scott was a Scottish composer often associated with the Scottish Renaissance.
Adam Makowicz is a Polish pianist and composer living in Toronto. He performs jazz and classical piano pieces, as well as his own compositions.
Awadagin Pratt is an American concert pianist born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
DSCH is a musical motif used by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich to represent himself. It is a musical cryptogram in the manner of the BACH motif, consisting of the notes D, E-flat, C, B natural, or in German musical notation D, Es, C, H, thus standing for the composer's initials in German transliteration: D. Sch..
The pedal piano is a kind of piano that includes a pedalboard, enabling bass register notes to be played with the feet, as is standard on the organ.
The South African College of Music, abbreviated as SACM, is a department of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. It is located on the university's Lower Campus in Rondebosch, Cape Town.
Jacques-Louis Monod was a French composer, pianist and conductor of 20th century and contemporary music, particularly in the advancement of the music of Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and uptown music; and was active primarily in New York City and London during the second half of the twentieth century.
Rena Kyriakou was a pianist and composer born in Herakleion, Crete, Greece.
Erik William Chisholm was a Scottish composer, pianist, organist and conductor sometimes known as "Scotland's forgotten composer". According to his biographer, Chisholm "was the first composer to absorb Celtic idioms into his music in form as well as content, his achievement paralleling that of Bartók in its depth of understanding and its daring", which led some to give him the nickname "MacBartók". As composer, performer and impresario, he played an important role in the musical life of Glasgow between the two World Wars and was a founder of the Celtic Ballet and, together with Margaret Morris, created the first full-length Scottish ballet, The Forsaken Mermaid. After World War II he was Professor and Head of the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town for 19 years until his death. Chisholm founded the South African College of Music opera company in Cape Town and was a vital force in bringing new operas to Scotland, England and South Africa. By the time of his death in 1965, he had composed over a hundred works.
The Passacaglia on DSCH is a large-scale composition for solo piano by the British composer Ronald Stevenson. It was composed between 24 December 1960 and 18 May 1962, except for two sections added on the day of the first performance on 10 December 1963. The composer presented a copy of the score to Dmitri Shostakovich, its dedicatee, at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival.
Józef Wieniawski was a Polish pianist, composer, conductor and teacher. He was born in Lublin, the younger brother of the famous violinist Henryk Wieniawski. After Franz Liszt, he was the first pianist to publicly perform all the études by Chopin. He appeared with Liszt in recitals in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Brussels, Leipzig and Amsterdam.
Igor Levit is a Russian-German pianist who focuses on the works of Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt. He is also a professor at the Musikhochschule Hannover. He lives in Berlin.
Ory Shihor is an Israeli-American pianist, pedagogue, and co-founder of the Los Angeles based Ory Shihor Institute.
Franz-Josef Birk is a German classical pianist and music producer.
