Sunday, April 30, 2023
3:00 PM EST

In live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s David Geffen Hall, from Beijing to the Barbican in London, and in recordings for ECM, InFiné, Arabesque, and Bedroom Community — Bruce Brubaker is a visionary virtuoso and an artistic provocateur. Bruce Brubaker has performed Mozart with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and with Philip Glass on the BBC. Profiled on NBC’s Today show, Brubaker’s playing, writing, and collaborations continue to show a shining, and sometimes surprising future for pianists and piano playing. His blog “PianoMorphosis” appears at ArtsJournal.com.

Brubaker was presented by Carnegie Hall in New York, at France’s International Piano Festival at La Roque d’Anthéron, at Michigan’s Gilmore Festival, Barcelona’s Sonar festival, at the Philharmonie de Paris, and at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, as opening-night performer in the museum’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro building. He is a frequent performer at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge, and at Folle Journée in Nantes.

Bruce Brubaker is featured on Nico Muhly’s album Drones (Bedroom Community). Along with pianist Ursula Oppens, Brubaker made Piano Songs, a recording of Meredith Monk’s piano music, including four new transcriptions by Brubaker, released by ECM. His recording of solo piano music by Philip Glass (Glass Piano) for InFiné (Warp Records) was remixed by six artists on Glass Piano: Versions.

Brubaker’s albums for Arabesque include Time Curve, Hope Street Tunnel Blues, Inner Cities (including a live recording of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates and his transcription of part of Adams’s opera Nixon in China), and the first album in the series, glass cage.

Brubaker has premiered works by Glass, Meredith Monk, Nico Muhly, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Oliver Lake, Simon Hanes, and John Cage. He performed at Sanders Theater in collaboration with Cage during the composer’s tenure as Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University.

Following his New York debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Brubaker was awarded a solo artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named “Young Musician of the Year” by Musical America. His London debut at the Wigmore Hall led to his first broadcast concert on the BBC, an all-Brahms recital. Brubaker has appeared at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Tanglewood, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, London’s Barbican, BOZAR in Brussels, Antwerp’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Finland’s Kuhmo Festival, and the Sónar festival in Barcelona..

Brubaker has given masterclasses and forums at the Juilliard School, the Royal College of Music in London, Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Harvard University, Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Leipzig’s Hochschüle für Musik, the École Normale in Paris, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Brubaker’s articles about music have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Piano Quarterly, Perspectives of New Music, Dutch Journal of Music Theory, and Chamber Music magazine. Brubaker’s performance piece Haydnseek was created together with Nico Muhly.

Brubaker trained at the Juilliard School, where he received the school’s highest award, the Edward Steuermann Prize, upon graduation. At Juilliard, where he taught for nine years, he has appeared in public conversations with Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, and Meredith Monk. He is now a member of the faculty and Curator of Piano Programming at New England Conservatory.

Japanese-American conductor Ken Yanagisawa is the Assistant Conductor of the Boston Civic Symphony and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Orchestral Conducting at Boston University under the guidance of James Burton. He will be making his Japanese debut as a guest conductor for a production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte with Kansai Nikikai and the Japan Century Symphony Orchestra at the Hyogo Performing Arts Center Japan in February 2023, and most recently served as assistant conductor for the BU Opera Institute productions of Ned Rorem’s Our Town and Mozart’s Così fan tutte as well as for the BU Symphony Orchestra & Symphonic Chorus performance of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem at Boston Symphony Hall.

Previously, Ken completed a research residency at the Kyoto City University of Arts and received a Master of Music and Professional Studies Certificate in Orchestral Conducting from the Manhattan School of Music. While a student at MSM, he was selected to participate in the Manhattan School of Music / Leonard Slatkin Conductors Project and was subsequently invited to work with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as a Conducting Fellow in March 2020. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Yale University where he received the Joseph Lentilhon Selden Memorial Award and the Stanton Wheeler Award, and prior to Yale he attended the New England Conservatory as an Undergraduate Diploma candidate for Oboe Performance under the tutelage of John Ferrillo.