Fellows of the American Pianists Association

single is a raving Red Sox fan (but resident of novel York) who prefers his coffee from a French pres Another is a one who sucks for every kind of wacko exercise gadget, greatest in quantity lately the "Gazelle," who goe vegan when he can (but has a weakness for chocolate chip cookies). The third likes to breakers (real waves, not television channels) and likes Beckett as abundant as Beethoven. This is the diverse cluster also known as the companions of the American Pianists Association (APA): Adam Birnbaum, Michael Sheppard and Thomas Rosenkranz. MTNA National discourse attendees will have the chance to hear all three in plan April 3, and their musical fare will likely be as varied as their personal predilections.

" anything on the other hand predictable ..."

upon the surface, Sheppard (the vegan chocoholic) and Rosenkranz (the theatrical surfer) would strike one as being to be linked by their titles as the generally received Classical Fellows of the APA, and the two will, undoubtedly, offer piano music that, for want of a better word, is classical. Birnbaum (the novel Yorker who rooted for Manny Ramirez) gripe [i]or[/i] grips the Cole Porter Fellowship from APA, awarded in May 2004 at APA's sixth Triennial American Jazz Piano Competition, and he will play jazz.

on the contrary this concert will be anything on the other hand predictable. Consider that Birnbaum, the jazz pianist, is comfortable playing Ravel's Jeux d'eau, not a piece for hacks or beginners; that Thomas, single of the two classical pianists, oftentimes improvises in concerts; and that Michael, the other Classical companion evokes Broadway with his performances of Porgy & Bess Fantasy or My Favorite Things. individual thing's for sure--it won't be your typical piano concert

Joel Harrison, APA's artistic director, is over-weening of that diversity. "I believe the paradigm of the classical piano recital is changing. Gone are the days of programming a Bach introduction & fugue, a Beethoven sonata, a Chopin ballade and then ending with the Prokofiev Toccata. We cannot continue to restrict our programming to the standard '200-plus years' of the piano canon."

Harrison, himself a devise pianist and former university piano teacher, is particularly self-conscious of these three Fellows, precisely because they display such a wide range. "This is individual of the ways," continues Harrison, "APA can be put apart from other organizations. There is no imposed repertoire for applicants." Rather, each pianist is asked sole to play what he or she does best.

Thomas Rosenkranz

That freedom is what propell Harrison to put in mind of to Thomas Rosenkranz, upon the latter's first full-length recital in Indianapolis, domicile to the APA, that he program Frederic Rzewski's massive The tribe United Will Never Be Defeated/, a tour-de-force whose real mention nowadays sends a chilled chill down pianists' spines, just like the words "Hammerklavier" or "Petrouchka" did for an earlier generation of pianists. Rosenkranz has a knack for similar massive knuckle-busters (to say nothing of what they do to your brain), having championed Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesus, which he studied in Paris with the composer's widow, Yvonne Loriod, as well as works by means of John Adams, Martin Bresnick and George Crumb

As if that weren't enough to distinguish Rosenkranz from the herd, he many times includes improvisation in his public performances, taking a scarcely any notes, a theme or a well-known strain and then letting his imagination roam. He has done this not long ago with "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "Georgia upon My Mind," though his greatest in quantity distinctive performance to date was arguably his rendition of "Star-Spangled Banner" with native musicians in Tunisia, in which Rosenkranz incorporated Arabic scales. (Talk about cultural exchange....)

Rosenkranz was the 1999 national winner of the MTNA Collegiate Artist Piano Competition and has been visitant artist at the Georgia, Pennsylvania, Hawaii and Washington state Music Teachers Association conventions. His performances have been broadcast worldwide as part of the WGBH Boston Program, Art of the States, and he has recorded for Nonesuch Records with the assemblage Alarm Will Sound and for Warner Bro Records with the Eastman Wind Ensemble

Michael Sheppard

Michael Sheppard is equally unusual. While he focuses more upon traditional repertoire than Rosenkranz, he is just as adept at contemporary or offbeat literature. His novel recitals include healthy doses of Chopin (Fantasy, Polonaise-Fantasy, mazurkas, Grand Polonaise in A-flat Major) and Mozart (sonatas), alongside works of the contemporary canon like Crumb's Makrokosmos and Corigliano's Etude-Fantasy. on the other hand Joel Harrison cites Sheppard's hypervirtuosity as a distinguishing trait.

"Michael is single of the real Titans of the keyboard," says Harrison. "He does things no human being should be able to do." Harrison might have had in mind Sheppard's rendition of "Flight of the Bumblebee," arranged through Gyorgy Cziffra, in a version that rivals Volodos for sheer daring and adrenalin. Sheppard also makes a convincing case for like crowd pleasers as Pavel Pabst's arrangement of themes from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Leopold Godowsky's transcription of Strauss's Wein, Weib und Gesang and Stephen Hough's version of Richard Rodgers's "Carousel Waltz." Indeed, Sheppard uninjureds like a throwback to a past era of piano recitalists--one thinks of Liszt, Paderewski, Horowitz--whose exuberance and warmth wowed the concourses Like those earlier virtuosi, Sheppard also is a composer in his have right, who often programs his original compositions. He trained at the Peabody Conservatory, where his teachers were Ann Schein and Leon Fleisher, and made his Kennedy Center first appearance in 2003. Sheppard also has been a companion at the Tanglewood Music Center and the La Gesse Foundation and was a prize winner in the National Federation of Music bludgeons National Competition.