Adult Piano Seminar, Session 2

Hsing-ay Hsu

APS Faculty (Session 2 only)

Win a $250 Rocky Ridge Scholarship!

Since making her stage debut at age 4, Chinese pianist Hsing-ay Hsu (“Sing-I Shoo”) has performed at such notable venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and abroad in Asia and Europe. A Steinway Artist, Ms. Hsu is winner of the William Kapell International Piano Competition Silver Medal, the Ima Hogg National Competition Gold Medal, The Juilliard School’s highest honor for a pianist- the William Petschek Recital Award, a McCrane Foundation Artist Grant, a Paul & Daisy Soros Graduate Fellowship Award, and a Gilmore Young Artist Award, among others. She was also named a US Presidential Scholar of the Arts by President Clinton at the White House, and a “2011 Pathmaker” by the Denver Post.

A versatile concerto soloist performing Bach to Barber, she is described by the Washington Post as full of “power, authority, and self-assurance.” Concerto collaborations include the Houston Symphony Orchestra as first-prizewinner of the Ima Hogg National Competition, the Baltimore Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, Pacific Symphony (CA), Colorado Springs, Florida West Coast, Fort Collins, New Jersey, Waterbury(CT), China National, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Xiamen orchestras. Television and radio feature broadcasts include Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion Live from Tanglewood (for a 10,000+ live audience members and 3.9 million broadcast audience), NPR’s Performance Today with Martin Goldsmith, TCI cablevision’s Grand Piano Recital (CA), CPR’s Colorado Spotlight, China Central National TV, Hong Kong Phoenix TV, and Danish National Radio. She has recorded CD/DVD’s for Pacific Records, Albany Records, and Nutmeg Press labels.

An advocate of new music, she has given numerous world premieresincluding Ezra Laderman’s Piano Sonata No.3 and Beshert; Ned Rorem’s Aftermath (2002) for baritone and piano trio; Daniel Kellogg’s scarlet thread at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and his Momentum, which she commissioned for the 1998 Gilmore International Keyboard Festival; as well as Du MingXin’s Piano Concerto No.3 at the Gulangyu International Piano Festival and National Tour. Chamber music appearances include Carnegie Weill Hall, Bargemusic in New York, the Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Gardner Museum in Boston, the Detroit Art Museum, Denmark’s Viborg Hall, Taiwan’s Novel Hall, and a 2007 all-stars gala in Hong Kong for the 10th anniversary of the reunification. Recent projects include the ongoing multi-media recital China through the Lens of Piano Music, co-directing/performing in the George Crumb at 80 Music Festival, and producing/performing the Olivier Messiaen Centennial series.

Born in Beijing, Hsu studied piano with her parents and her uncle Fei-Ping Hsu, and later with Herbert Stessin at Juilliard and Claude Frank at Yale. She also trained in the fellowship programs at the Tanglewood Music Center, Ravinia Festival’s Steans Institute, the Aldeburgh Britten-Pears Programme (UK), the Aspen Music Festival, and abroad.

Until recently, Ms. Hsu was the Artistic Director for Pendulum New Music Series at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She has taught piano for numerous universities including the University of Colorado in Boulder and Ohio University, and has lectured for University of Denver Enrichment, the Denver Art Museum, the Friends of Chamber Music Denver salon series, the MTNA national conference, and the DAMTA Lecture Series. She created the Conscious Listening method to give audiences and pianists a broader perspective on the art of performance. An educator, adjudicator, teacher of prize-winning students, and CSMTA’s College Faculty Chair, her teaching honors include the NFMC Ouida Keck Award.

Ms. Hsu resides in New York City with her husband, composer and Young Concert Artists president Daniel Kellogg, and one daughter. Her favorite pastimes are dance and improv theater. Her concert and seminar schedule and recordings are available at hsingayhsu.com.

Check out Ms. Hsu’s most recent virtual seminar: Hear That?, a 6-week tonal analysis intensive for lifelong learners, music teachers, and performers of any instrument!

Also, see Ms. Hsu in action during a Rocky Ridge piano seminar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WCcY7D1UAg.

SoYoung Lee, APS 1 and 2

Executive Director, APS Faculty, RRMA Faculty

SoYoung Lee, Executive/Music Director at Rocky Ridge Music Center, received her Doctorate in Musical Arts in Piano Performance from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has held director positions at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory Adult Education & Preparatory Department, Millikin University Preparatory Division, and the Boulder Arts Academy & Boulder Ballet. A strong believer in the concept of artist as entrepreneur, she cofounded two organizations: Colorado-based AirTurn, a company dedicated to empowering musicians through technology; and Notes at 9,000 at Winter Park, a multi-genre music competition that launches emerging musicians by providing concert opportunities, funding, and mentoring. She is passionate about building community through the arts, and serves currently as a trustee on the board of Boulder County Arts Alliance and as a member of the Estes Arts Presents Task Force.

An award-winning pianist and a Regents scholar, SoYoung is a recipient of the Ernő Dohnányi Piano Prize and the Gwendolyn Koldofsky Accompanying Fellowship at University of Southern California. She recently released a CD, In This World, with flutist Claudia Anderson. Equally at home as a teacher, she served on the music faculty at Millikin University and State University of New York, Fredonia, and was a visiting Piano Pedagogy faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder. SoYoung enjoys her multi-faceted career as a performing artist, administrator, teacher, producer, and arts advocate.

David Korevaar, APS 1 and 2

JAS and APS Faculty

David Korevaar, whose playing has been called a “musical epiphany” by Gramophone Magazine, performs an extensive repertoire as a soloist and chamber musician around the US and internationally. In addition to his teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he holds the Peter and Helen Weil fellowship in piano and where he has been named Distinguished Research Lecturer (2016), he is an active performer and recording artist. In the spring of 2016, Korevaar spent two weeks teaching in Kabul at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM). The 2016-2017 season also included two tours to Brazil and a recital and master classes in Mexico City. In Fall 2017, he conducted and performed two of Mozart’s piano concertos in Boulder, bringing home a skill picked up in Japan and Brazil over the last several years. Korevaar’s extensive discography includes numerous solo and chamber music recordings, most recently a recording of Lowell Liebermann’s Piano Music since 2000 and a world premiere recording of piano music by the early twentieth-century Italian composer Luigi Perrachio. Other recent releases include a disc of chamber works by Tibor Harsányi with Charles Wetherbee (Naxos), and a Chopin recital on MSR, Hindemith’s three Piano Sonatas and Suite “1922” (MSR) and two Schubert Sonatas (MSR). In addition, his collaboration with members of the Takacs Quartet has resulted in a number of releases, including a disc of Brahms with violist Geraldine Walther and cellist Andras Fejer (MSR), two Beethoven Violin Sonatas with violinist Edward Dusinberre (Decca), and Hindemith’s music for Viola and Piano with Geraldine Walther (MSR). Korevaar also writes on various musical topics, with a focus on French music.

Sergio Gallo, APS 1 and 2

Piano Faculty Member

A Steinway artist, Sergio Gallo specializes in the repertoire of the Romantic period, especially Liszt and his contemporaries, including Schumann, Henselt, Brahms, and Chopin. He has also championed the work of composers in Brazil, the nation of his birth. Gallo has recorded several acclaimed CD’s for Eroica, with forthcoming projects committed Naxos Grand Piano, and Quartz labels. Sergio Gallo’s recent release of Liszt’s transcriptions of operas by Meyerbeer received a four star rating from the BBC Magazine: His recordings have received high praise from Gramophone Magazine (of his most recent Villa-Lobos recording: “splendid playing of a lively programme… [a] nuanced performance… played with exceptional artistry”) and American Record Guide (“it is hard to imagine a pianist leaving me with a more intense feeling of nobility”). In 2011, Gallo won the Global Music Awards “Award of Excellence” for his album, Mostly Villa-Lobos: 20th Century Piano Music from the Americas.

Gallo has performed with orchestras throughout the Americas and worldwide. In the last decade, he has performed in Turkey, Brazil, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Serbia, Portugal, Korea, Taiwan, Canada, and China, as well as in recitals given across the United States. Since his Brazilian national radio debut in 1986 (Radio Cultura, São Paulo) and his European radio debut in 1988 (Radio France, Paris), Gallo’s work has been regularly played on classical music radio outlets around the world. His performances of Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy L.123, Schumann’s Concerto in A minor, Op.54, and Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No.1 in D-flat Minor, Op.23 were highlighted in 2011 Atlanta symphonic performances.

Sergio Gallo is the winner of concerto competitions of the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra and of the University Symphony in Santa Barbara. He has received a grant from the Henry Cowell Incentive Funds at the American Music Center in New York, New York, to record works by the composer, and this recording has been featured in the program Piano Matters with David Dubal. Gallo twice toured North Dakota with a Challenge America Fast-Track Grant award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gallo earned the Diplôme d’Excellence at the Conservatoire Européen de Musique de Paris (1987), a Post-Graduate Certificate at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest (1992), an M.M. and Artist Diploma at the University of Cincinnati (1994 and 1995 respectively), and the Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1998). Among his further training and involvement in professional workshops, Gallo participated in the Daniel Berenboim Workshop for Pianists and Conductors at Carnegie Hall (2000), the Orchestra Stabile Summer Festival (Bergamo, Italy, 1991), the Sergei Rachmaninoff International Courses in Piano Performance (Tambov, Russia, 1988), and the Seminaire Jean Fassina (Paris, 1986). He lives in the United States where he is Professor of Piano Performance at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and is appointed to the affiliated artist staff of the Rocky Ridge Music Academy in Estes Park, Colorado.