Thursday, February 19, 2015

World Class Pianist Names To Know

By Olivia Cross


Playing the piano at a professional level can take years and years of practice and dedication. Even then, it is incredibly difficult to become a world class pianist. Very few pianists ever receive such worldwide recognition and as such, to be ranked as one is a huge honor indeed. The following individuals are a few examples of highly rated pianists.

Yuja Wang comes from Beijing, China and at twenty-eight, she has accomplished a lot. She comes from a background of music, as her mother used to dance and her father played percussion. She began learning the piano when she was 6 and learned to play at the Central Conservatory of Music in her birthplace. When she was 11, she was actually the youngest person to enter Calgary's Music Bridge International Festival.

By the time she had entered her twenties, Yuja Wang was already performing classical piano to audiences around the world. She is the winner of a number of prizes and awards. These include the concerto competition at the Aspen Music Festival in 2002 and the Gilmore Young Artist award in 2003. She is currently signed to Deutsche Grammophon with an exclusive five-disc contract.

Born to Russian and Jewish parents in Los Angeles in nineteen forty-six, Rebecca Penneys began her journey with piano from an early age. She started learning when she was just 3 years old. By the time she was 9, she had already performed in her first solo recital and became a soloist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the age of 11.

Rebecca Penneys was, in 1965, the youngest individual to ever have entered the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland. The competition eventually created the Special Critics' Prize in her honor. She both performs and teaches in summer festivals all over for many years now.

Rebecca Penneys has been teaching at the Eastman School of Music since 1980. She is recognized for the Motion and Emotion keyboard technique, which focuses on the individual performance of each pianist. She also teaches at the Rebecca Penneys Piano Festival, and many of her students have gone on to win prizes internationally and teach on an international level.

Hailing from Pennsylvania, Albert Frantz began his piano career very late in life at the age of seventeen years old. This is quite remarkable considering that a piano teacher of his in his childhood recommended that his mother throw her money away rather than give him piano lessons. He has achieved much in his short career, becoming the first pianist in over ten years to Fulbright scholarship for studies in Vienna.

Frantz thanks the teachers he had over the years for taking the time to hone his God-given talent and perfect his skill. He advises anyone wishing to learn the piano, or who would like their children to start taking lessons, to find the absolute best instructor possible from the very beginning. Albert Frantz is also a teacher and counts producers like Bosendorfer as clients for playing endorsements.




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