Adult Piano Seminar: Understanding the Solo Repertoire

Sergio Gallo

APS Faculty

Instruments: Piano
Education: Diplôme d’Excellence at the Conservatoire Européen de Musique de Paris (1987)
Post-Graduate Certificate at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest (1992)
M.M. and Artist Diploma at the University of Cincinnati (1994 and 1995 respectively)
Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1998)

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 B-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.

David Korevaar

APS Full Session Faculty

Instruments: Piano
Education: D.M.A., The Juilliard School
M.M., The Juilliard School
B.M., The Juilliard School

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.

Alejandro Cremaschi

Adult Piano Seminar Faculty

Instruments: Piano (Session Two)
Education: MM and DMA degrees from the University of Minnesota

Alejandro Cremaschi received his MM and DMA degrees from the University of Minnesota. He earned undergraduate degrees from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina. He studied with Edith Peinado, Dora De Marinis, Nancy Roldan and Lydia Artymiw. He has been a soloist with the orchestras of the Universidad de Cuyo, Universidad de Tucumán, University of Minnesota and the National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina among others. He was a prize winner at the International Beethoven Sonata Piano Competition in Memphis, Tennessee in 2001.

Cremaschi is in demand as a specialist on Latin American piano music. He is the editor and recording artist for the new edition of Alberto Ginastera’s Doce Preludios Americanos, published by Carl Fischer Publishing in 2016. Between 1996 and 2002, he was a member of the Argentine Foundation “Ostinato,” founded and directed by his former teacher Dora De Marinis. As a member of this foundation, and in collaboration with other members, he recorded Argentine music for the labels IRCO, Ostinato and Marco Polo, and participated in concert tours in the US and Europe. Since 2004, he actively collaborated with the Argentine composer and CU professor emeritus Luis Jorge Gonzalez until his death in 2016. His recordings of solo and chamber music by Gonzalez have been released in the CDs Las Puertas del Tiempo (2009), Fervor (2012) and Tango: Body and Soul (2015) by the British label Meridian Records. Las Puertas del Tiempo was praised by Fanfare Magazine as “exemplary.”

Cremaschi’s current pedagogical research areas include concert repertoire and pedagogical music by Argentine and Latin American composers; the use of technology for remote teaching and as an aid the acquisition and training of music reading skills; the influence of self-efficacy beliefs in piano students’ achievement, motivation and practicing strategies; cultural and social aspects of piano study in Latin America; and the study and implementation of cooperative learning strategies in the piano classroom. He has been a presenter at national and international conferences including numerous Music Teachers National Association annual conferences, College Music Society national and international conferences, and the International Society for Music Education conference, as well as several webinars and online panels for the Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy and the Peabody Institute. He has published articles and reviews in the Research Studies in Music Education journal, Journal of Music, Technology and Education, European Piano Teachers Association magazine, the Journal for Technology in Music Teaching, the Piano Pedagogy Forum online journal, Clavier, The Instrumentalist, the Keyboard Companion and the Piano Magazine.