Competition Jury
Senior Division
Elisabeth Pridinoff
Elisabeth Pridonoff has appeared with orchestras and on recital series in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Asia and has performed and taught at the major conservatories in China, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan, and Korea. She is a visiting artist teacher at the Ichionkai School in Tokyo (the largest private independent pre-college music school in Japan) where she does two residencies per year and in the summers she also serves on the faculty of the Amalfi Coast Music Festival in Italy in addition to her position at the Brevard Music Center. She previously taught at the Barcelona Piano Festival, International Piano Week in Belgium, the International Institute for Young Musicians (IIYM), and in the summer of 2007 she did a guest residency at the Chautauqua Festival. A graduate of the Juilliard School, she holds masters degrees in both piano and voice having studied piano with Sasha Gorodnitsky and Adele Marcus, and voice with Hans Heinz and Anna Kaskas.
Her students hold positions throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia and have been first-prize winners in the Horowitz (Bryan Wallick), Missouri Southern (Jackson Leung), American Pianists Association Biennial Fellowship Auditions (Derison Duarte), Shreveport Wideman (Sheri Adams), Midland-Odessa (Lin Lin, and Remi Fujisawa), Pinault International Piano Competition in New York City (Yangkyung Lee), and the Catania International Music Festival Concerto Competition (Polina Bespalko). She and her husband Eugene Pridonoff have performed internationally as the Pridonoff Duo throughout the U.S. including performances in Mexico, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Czech Republic, Belgium, Italy, Spain, New York City in Tully and Merkin Halls, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and were featured in an interview and cover photo in the March 2005 issue of Clavier Magazine. Elisabeth Pridonoff is a Steinway Artist.
Barry Snyder
Barry Snyder, internationally acclaimed pianist and teacher entered onto the international stage as a result of his winning three major prizes at the 1966 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (silver medal, Pan American Union Award and Chamber Music Prize).Since then, Snyder has recorded over forty CDs and given concerts and master classes around the world spanning over four decades.
Solo recitals, collaborative recitals and masterclasses have taken him to venues in such cities as Moscow, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Bangkok, London, Barcelona, Berlin, New York, Washington D.C., Seattle and Vancouver. Snyder has performed diverse concerti with orchestras of Baltimore, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Houston, Montreal, Warsaw and Singapore collaborating with such conductors as Robert Shaw, Leopold Stokowski, David Zinman, Charles Dutroit, Sixten Ehrling and Arthur Fiedler.
As a chamber musician Snyder has worked with Hermann Prey, Jan deGaetani, Zvi Zeitlin(recorded the complete works of Stravinsky for violin and piano), Ani Kavafian, Asako Urushihara (recorded the complete Schumann and Brahms works for violin and piano), Sylvia Rosenberg, Bonita Boyd and Steven Doane (recorded the complete works of Gabriel Faure for cello and piano; winner of Diapason d’Or award). Collaboration also with string quartets include the Curtis, Cleveland and Chilingarian Quartets. Snyder was a founding member of the Eastman Trio performing with them for many years.
Barry Snyder’s commitment to performing 20th and 21st century music has resulted in a number of premieres of works specifically written for him: Verne Reynolds’ Florilegium,Vols.I,II and III, Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Winds; Carter Pann’s Improvisations on the Name Barry Snyder, Fantasy Inventions; Sydney Hodkinson’s Concerto’A Shifting Trek (the concerto was written for Snyder) and first performances by Augusta Reed Thomas, John La Montaine and Toshio Hosakawa.
Snyder has been Professor of Piano at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music since 1970. In demand as a teacher, Snyder has given master classes in such schools as the Royal Northern College of Music(Manchester,U.K.),Trinity College, the Guidhall and Royal Academy(London), the Academy of Music(Krakow,Poland),Normal University(Taipei,Taiwan), Hochschule fur Musik(Freiburg,Germany), Beethoven Conservatory(Buenos Aires), Conservatorium and University of Australia(Perth), the Manhattan School of Music, University of Michigan, Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Houston. Barry Snyder is listed in the publication The Most Wanted Piano Teachers.
Recent engagement highlights have included performances and master classes at the Heifetz International Summer Institute, Wolfeburo, New Hampshire and the Scotland International Piano Institute (Glasgow), a tour of Korea for the third time, and judged and performed at the first Beethoven International Piano Competition in Bangkok, Thailand.
Future engagements include a performance of the Hodkinson Concerto at the Aspen Summer Music Festival, recital with Sylvia Rosenberg, violinist at Weill Hall in New York City and performances and masterclasses in Bedford, U.K., Taiwan and Beijing and Shanghai China.
Barry Snyder studied with renowned teachers Wilbur Hollman,Vladimir Sokoloff and Cecile Genhart as well as John Celentano and Brooks Smith for chamber music.
Nelita True
American pianist, Nelita True, made her debut at age seventeen with the Chicago Symphony in Orchestra Hall and her New York debut with the Juilliard Orchestra in Avery Fisher Hall. Her career has taken her to the major cities of Western and Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Mexico, Iceland, New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, Canada, and to Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as all fifty states in America. She was a visiting professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia and has been in the People’s Republic of China more than 20 times for recitals and master classes.
Ms. True is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Michigan as a student of Helen Titus and of The Juilliard School as a student of Sascha Gorodnitzki. She earned her DMA with Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory. In Paris, Ms. True studied with Nadia Boulanger on a Fulbright grant. Formerly Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, Nelita True is currently Professor of Piano at the Eastman School of Music.
S & H Productions of Kansas City produced a series of four videotapes, “Nelita True at Eastman,” featuring her performances, lectures, and teaching. She has been the subject of feature articles in Clavier, Piano Today, The European Piano Teachers’ Journal, and was the subject of the cover story of Keyboard Companion. Her discography includes more than 100 works for Advance, Mark, Educo, and Academy Records. She has served on the jury of many prestigious international piano competitions in the United States and abroad.
Junior Division
Constance Carroll
Carroll has received acclaim for her performances as a recitalist, a chamber musician, and as an orchestral soloist. She has been featured artist at many state conventions of the Music Teachers Association throughout the country, as well as presenting lecture-recitals at national MTNA conventions in Houston and Kansas City.
A devoted teacher, she numbers among her students winners of local, regional and national competitions, and has presented recitals, master classes and lectures at numerous universities and colleges in this country.
Carroll received her education at the University of Arizona and the Eastman School of Music. As a Fulbright scholar, she studied for a year in Vienna and Salzburg, Austria. She then was appointed to the music faculty at Louisiana State University and served as staff accompanist for three years. After leaving LSU, Connie raised her family and taught at universities in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and for twenty-one years was Artist-in-Residence at Centenary College of Louisiana. She was reappointed to the music faculty at LSU in 1995, and in 1996 became the first recipient of the Barineau Professorship of Keyboard Studies.
In recent years, Carroll has been on the faculties of Brevard Music Center, the University of Houston High School Piano Camp, the Frank Mannheimer Piano Festival, and the University of Kansas summer piano workshop. She has also served as juror for the New Orleans International Piano Competition, the Missouri Southern International Piano Competition, the American Pianists Association competition, and the national finals of the MTNA Student Competitions.
In the spring of 2001, Carroll was honored with an Excellence in Teaching Award by LSU and was given the Outstanding Teacher of 2001 Award by LMTA. In the spring of 2002, she was honored at the MTNA national conference in Cincinnati, Ohio by being designated an MTNA Foundation Fellow.
Carroll has performed with the Shreveport Symphony numerous times, and will be performing the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor with the Baton Rouge Symphony in the 2010-2011 season.
Amy Cheng
Pianist Amy I-Lin Cheng has been described by the New York Concert Review as a “pianist whose control of the keyboard is complete, technique easy and relaxed, with a wide range of touch.” Pianist Claude Frank describes her as “a brilliant, sensitive, imaginative and most beguiling pianist.” Amy enjoys a career as a soloist, chamber musician, and teacher. Amy has been given many awards including the 2000 Heida Hermanns International Young Artist Piano Competition, and the Rising Young Artist Series in Taipei. Amy has appeared in recitals at venues such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall, and National Concert Hall in Taipei. She has performed in music festivals both as soloist and chamber musician across the United States, in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Taiwan and Israel. Amy’s live performances have been heard on WGBH, KCSC, WHYY, La Radio Suisse Romande-Espace 2, and NPR in Houston.
As a concerto soloist, she made her Boston concerto debut at the age of 17 at Jordan Hall with Liszt Concerto No. 2 under the direction of Benjamin Zhander and has appeared with the ‘Musica Viva’ Moscow Chamber Orchestra. Recent concerto performances include Beethoven Triple Concerto with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Chopin Concerto No. 2 with Oklahoma Community Orchestral, Mozart Piano Concerto No. 22 with the Taichung Philharmonic in Taiwan, Rachmaninoff 2nd Piano Concerto with Orchestra of the Pines in Texas, Haydn Concerto Hob. 6 with Classic Orchestra in Taiwan, and Liszt Concerto No. 2 with Oklahoma Youth Symphony.
An avid chamber musician, she is the current co-Artistic Director of the Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble in Oklahoma City. A sought-after collaborator, Amy has performed with the Van Dingstee String Quartet from the Netherlands and the American Chamber Players on tours; and is a collaborative pianist for the International Double Reed Society (IDRS) 2010-2011. As a founding member of the former Goffriller Trio, she performed in The Third Jerusalem International Chamber Music Encounters in Israel directed by Isaac Stern, and the 1999 La Jolla SummerFest. Amy recently taught and performed at the 2009 Interharmony International Music Festival and 2010 Quartz Mountain Festival. Since 1999, Amy has been performing with husband/clarinetist Chad Burrow as Duo Clarion. In 2009, the duo was invited to appear in a festival celebrating the 100th birthday of America’s legendary clarinetist, Benny Goodman at Sprague Hall on the campus of Yale University, and Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall in New York City. Cheng and Burrow received rave reviews in the Yale Daily News and the New York Times for their performance of Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata. The duo made its debut CD recording appearance on “Chamber Music of Edward Knight” on Albany Record in 2005. The duo also forms Trio Solari with violinist Sean Yung-Hsiang Wang.
Amy is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music (BM), Yale University School of Music (MM and Artist Diploma), and the New England Conservatory (DMA). Her principal teachers are Claude Frank, Wha-Kyung Byun and Rolf-Peter Wille. Ms. Cheng was Assistant Professor of Piano at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma from 2002-2006. She also served as the Head of the Piano Area at Oklahoma City University Wanda L. Bass School of Music from 2006-2009. Amy is currently on faculty at the Ann Arbor School for the Performing Arts and serves as a collaborative pianist for the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
Michael Gurt
Michael Gurt is Paula Garvey Manship Distinguished Professor of Piano at Louisiana State University. Professor Gurt serves as Piano Mentor at the Hot Springs Music Festival, and is also the head of the piano department at the Sewanee Summer Music Center. He has served as Piano Chair of the Louisiana Music Teachers Association, and he has taught at two summer music seminars held at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan. Professor Gurt holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School. In 1982 he won First Prize in the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, and he was also a prize winner in international competitions held in Pretoria, South Africa, and Sydney, Australia.
Gurt has performed as soloist with the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Utah Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Memphis Symphony, the Capetown Symphony, the China National Symphony Orchestra, and the Natal Philharmonic Orchestra in Durban, South Africa. He has made solo appearances in Alice Tully Hall in New York, Ambassador Auditorium in Los Angeles, Orchestra Hall in Detroit, City Hall in Hong Kong, the Victorian Arts Center in Melbourne, Australia, Baxter Hall in Capetown, South Africa, and the Attaturk Cultural Center in Istanbul, Turkey. Gurt has collaborated with the Takacs String Quartet, and he recently performed at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, Queensland. He has served on the juries of both the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition and the New Orleans International Piano Competition, and he has recorded on the Naxos, Centaur, and Redwood labels.