Speaker Biographies: 2011-2012
SCOTT MCBRIDE SMITH (Back to Meetings) is a recognized leader in music education. As the Cordelia Brown Murphy Professor of Piano Pedagogy at the University of Kansas, he focuses on national issues of teacher training and piano pedagogy. As President and CEO of the International Institute for Young Musicians, he leads a summer program offering specialized training for gifted young performers from around the world. And as co-author of the groundbreaking new series American Popular Piano, he has helped create a course of study for today’s student – providing tools that inspire the necessary hard work while playing music they love.
The growing interest in his philosophical and cognitive approach to music teaching has resulted in appearances across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America, including workshops and showcases at every Music Teachers National Association Conference since 1999. But he has never lost the ability to see humor in the profession and laugh.
A long-time teacher of prize-winning students in Irvine, California, Dr. Smith’s students were the California State Champions in the years 1988, 1990, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2009. Former students have been First Prize winners in the Naftsger Competition, Tchaikovsky Competition and in competitions of the Music Teachers National Association. His students Chaeyoung Park and Crystal Lam (who he co-teaches with his colleague, Dr. Jack Winerock) were the Kansas and West Central Division champions in the 2010-2011 MTNA Junior and Young Artist Competitions.
Dr. Smith is co-author of the college text The Well-Tempered Keyboard Teacher and associate editor of the magazine Clavier Companion. He is co-author of Christopher Norton’s Guide to Microjazz.
GAIL BERENSON (Back to Meetings)Professor of Piano at Ohio University, Athens, is a dedicated teacher, active performer, passionate chamber music collaborator, and noted expert on musician wellness issues. She performs as a member of the Ohio University Lyric Duo with her flute colleague, Alison Brown Sincoff. A Past President of Music Teachers National Association, she has performed and lectured in over thirty states and eight countries.
Ms. Berenson is one of the co-authors of A Symposium for Pianists and Teachers: Strategies to Develop Mind and Body for Optimal Performance and a contributor of three chapters to the fourth edition of James Lyke's Creative Piano Teaching. She represents the United States and the piano area as a member of the International Society of Music Education’s recently established Forum on Instrumental and Vocal Studio Performance Teaching. Her students are teaching in universities and independent studios around the world.
ELFRIEDA HIEBERT (Back to Meetings) From 1976-2005 Elfrieda Hiebert was Director of the Chamber Music Program at Mather House, Harvard University. She also taught piano to Harvard students and continued coaching chamber music until 2009. As a Fred Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison she was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Musicology with an additional concentration in chamber music performance mentored by Eva Badura-Skoda and Rudolf Kolisch. Her research focused on the piano trios of Beethoven. Prior to the Ph.D. she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Goettingen, Germany. The M.A. was earned at the University of Chicago.
Elfrieda has taught at Wheaton College, Tufts University, Radcliffe Seminars, and was an adjunct piano instructor at Brandeis University. She has lectured at national and local music teacher's associations and at colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including the Van Leer Foundation in Jerusalem, the National Korean University in Seoul, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science ( Berlin).
Elfrieda has published articles on piano performance in the Piano Quarterly, Southeastern Keyboard Journal, Journal of the American Liszt Society, International Musicological Proceedings ( Budapest) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science series ( Berlin) where she has held several visiting scholar residencies. An article on the application of the science of acoustics to strengthening musical ideals in piano performance in the late 19th century is forthcoming in Osiris (2013), the yearbook for the National History of Science Society. (Top of page)
JOHN MCDONALD (Back to Meetings) is Professor of Music at Tufts University, where he served as Director of Graduate Music Studies from 2000 to 2010 and Department Chair from 2000 to 2003. He is a composer who tries to play the piano and a pianist who tries to compose. McDonald was named the 2007 MTNA—Shepherd Distinguished Composer of the Year by the Music Teachers National Association, and received the 2009 Lillian and Joseph Leibner Award for Distinguished Teaching and Advising from Tufts University. In 2010, he received the Waring Prize from Western Reserve Academy, the highest award given to alumni of that school. His recordings appear on the Albany, Archetype, Boston, Bridge, Capstone, Neuma, New Ariel, and New World labels. New releases include pianist Andrew Rangell’s performance of McDonald’s Meditation Before A Sonata: Dew Cloth, Dream Drapery, on Bridge Records.
McDonald is a member of The Mockingbird Trio, directs the Tufts Composers Concert Series, and serves on the boards of several performance organizations in New England. He has recently fulfilled commissions from The Chamber Orchestra of Boston, pianist DavidHolzman, The Firebird Ensemble (for an Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music Residency, with support from a Meet the Composer MetLife Creative Connections Award), and the ANA Trio (Fredonia University; soprano, cello, and piano), among others. Recent and upcoming performances and projects include a three-concert series with the Mockingbird Trio in Jamaica Plain, a performance of Schubert’s Winterreise with saxophonist Philipp Staeudlin at Harvard Musical Association, the formation of a new trio with flutist Marco Granados and saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky, performing as keyboardist in Tod Machover’s new opera Death and the Powers, and recordings of Hovhaness’s Song of the Sea (with BMOP players on BMOP Sound), a retrospective of McDonald’s violin and piano music with soloist Joanna Kurkowicz, and several other recording endeavors. (Top of page)
NELITA TRUE (Back to Meetings) made her debut at age seventeen with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and her New York debut in Avery Fisher Hall with the Juilliard Orchestra. Her career has taken her to the major cities of Western and Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Mexico, Iceland, New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Singapore, India, and to Hong Kong, as well as to every state in America. She has been a visiting professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia, performing and conducting master classes, and has been in the People’s Republic of China more than twenty times for recitals, master classes, and as soloist with the Shanghai Philharmonic. She has judged numerous competitions, including the China International (Beijing), Queen Sonja (Oslo), Kapell and Bachauer (USA), Concours de Musique (Canada), PTNA (Tokyo), Horowitz (Kiev), and Lev Vlassenko (Australia). Many of her students have won top prizes at national and international competitions, including an unprecedented five First Prizes in the Music Teachers’ National Association Competitions (USA). Her former students are pursuing careers in performance and as teachers at major conservatories and universities in the United States and abroad. Ms. True is currently Professor of Piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. (Top of page)
KONSTANTINO PAPADAKIS (Back to Meetings)Born in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, KONSTANTINOS PAPADAKIS has been described by the press as “one of the ….greatest hopes of music” as well as a “spontaneous, honest artist”.
Konstantinos has performed in recitals and collaborated with chamber ensembles and orchestras in the world’s major concert halls and famous artistic centers from Russia and Southern Europe to the United States and Canada. He has recorded several works especially written for him by contemporary composers, many of which have been broadcast on radio and television.
He has won several prizes and distinctions at international piano competitions, including the prestigious Yannis Vardinoyannis Award, given for the first time to a pianist, as well as the Esther & Albert Kahn Award. Other major appearances include Wigmore Hall, Jordan Hall, the Athens Concert Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall and St. Petersburg’s Grand Concert Hall, where he performed in world premieres of works by Greek and Russian contemporary composers.
Noted both for his versatility and his artistic depth and maturity, he performs repertoire that stretches from Scarlatti through the Romantics, continuing through Bartok and Stravinsky to more contemporary composers such as Ligeti and Crumb. Equally at home performing Bach’s English Suites or Ligeti’s Etudes for Piano, he possesses an unusually broad repertoire, including some 70 concertos and over 300 works for solo piano, not to mention numerous chamber works.
In 2008-2009 Konstantinos finished recording Theodore Antoniou’s complete piano works for NAXOS, and selected sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. He also recorded 40 works by Greek composers at RIK, many of them world premieres, and subsequently appeared with the Symphonic Orchestra of Cyprus performing Solon Michaelide's Piano Concerto. In 2011, the bicentennial year of Franz Liszt's birth, Konstantinos is planning to record and produce 23 miniature masterpieces entitled, "The Short Liszt".
Konstantinos studied at the Hellenic Conservatory of Crete with Vilma Antonakaki; a year later, having already won the first prize at the Panhellenic Competition (including a Special Distinction for his own composition), he debuted as soloist in many performances showing his special musical and pianistic skills. He subsequently received a fellowship at the Hellenic Conservatory of Athens, where he studied with Costis Gaetanos, and he graduated with a First Prize Golden Medal for excellence (a superior distinction awarded for the first time to a pianist).
An alumnus of Boston University's College of Fine Arts, Konstantinos studied with Anthony diBonaventura and received an Artist Diploma in Piano Performance. At his graduation in May of 2000, he was honored with the Esther & Albert Kahn Award and was invited to join Boston University's piano faculty where he remained for several years. In addition to repeated solo appearances with Boston's Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, Konstantinos holds the prestigious Motoko and Gordon Deane Principal Chair as the Orchestra's pianist. In 2006 Konstantinos was named as the “Samuel Barber Artist-in-Residence” at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania. After a series of successful recitals of Samuel Barber's piano works for the centennial anniversary in 2010, Konstantinos has embarked this year on an ambitious cycle of recitals to celebrate the bicentennial of Franz Liszt's birth.