CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Master Class: Leon Fleisher

Weill Recital Hall
Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Adam Golka, Piano
Renana Gutman, Piano
Lura Johnson, Piano
Yury Shadrin, Piano

Programs of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall are generously supported by the City of New York: Office of the Mayor, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council; and by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Adam Golka, Piano
Winner of the 2008 Gilmore Young Artist Award and the 2003 China Shanghai International Piano Competition, 20-year-old pianist Adam Golka has nearly 200 concerts under his belt. He has performed as soloist with the Houston, Dallas, Milwaukee, San Diego, Fort Worth, Mobile, Missouri, Lubbock, York (PA), and Key West symphony orchestras in the US, and he has also played with the Shanghai Philharmonic, Orchestre Poitou-Charentes, Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco (Guadalajara), and Sinfonia Varsovia.

Golka’s solo and chamber music performances have taken him to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Nakanoshima Hall in Osaka, Merkin Hall in New York, the Hobby Center in Houston, and Bargemusic in Brooklyn as well as to the Music@Menlo, Newport, and Duszniki-Chopin music festivals. He has performed on the Ravinia Rising Stars Series, the Gilmore Rising Stars Series, and the Dame Myra Hess Memorial concerts in Chicago as well as concerts presented by Santa Fe Pro Musica. Throughout 2006, Adam gave his first performance of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas in Fort Worth, in nine concerts, which were also viewed by hundreds via live internet webcasts.

Highlights from Adam’s upcoming schedule include subscription performances with the Atlanta, Grand Rapids, and Albany symphony orchestras; return performances with the Milwaukee and Fort Worth symphony orchestras, and solo recitals at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and at the Kravis Center (West Palm Beach).

Born to Polish musicians and raised in Houston, Golka holds an Artist Diploma from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he studied with renowned pianist Josè Feghali, who Adam still considers his most important mentor. His other main teachers have included Dariusz Pawlas and Adam’s mother, Anna Golka.

Adam recently completed his participation in Ravinia’s Steans Institute for Young Artists (2007), where he studied solo and chamber music with Leon Fleisher, Claude Frank, Pamela Frank, Miriam Fried, Gary Hoffman, John O’Connor, Menahem Pressler, and Arie Vardi, among others. For more information on Adam Golka, visit adamgolka.com.

Renana Gutman, Piano
Renana Gutman’s career has taken her throughout United States, Europe, and Israel. Ms. Gutman has appeared as a soloist with the Belgian Fiamminghi Chamber Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and the Mannes Community Orchestra in New York, among others. She has recorded and broadcast solo and chamber music for ABC, BBC, NPR, and the Israeli Radio and Television. Ms.Gutman is a winner of the Los Angeles Liszt Competition, Dorothy MacKaenzie Recognition Award of the International Keyboard Institute in New York, Mannes Community Orchestra Solo Competition, and the Tel-Hai International Piano Master Classes Competition. From 1992–2004 she has received the America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship with distinction.

Her teachers include Richard Goode at Mannes College of Music, where she completed her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees, and pianists Natasha Tadson and Victor Derevianko in Israel. In New York, she has performed in such venues as Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall, and Bargemusic. She has been featured at the Marlboro Music Festival and Yellow Barn Chamber Music Festival, where she has collaborated with such artists as Richard Goode, Mitsuko Uchida, members of the Guarneri and Mendelssohn quartets, and others.

Lura Johnson, Piano
Lura Johnson enjoys a varied career as chamber musician, solo artist, and teacher, which has taken her across the US, England, and France. Praised for her “invention, originality, and marvelous sense of flow,” she has been presented as a solo artist and collaborator in venues including Weill Recital Hall, Washington’s Phillips Collection, the Kennedy Center, the Corcoran Gallery, the National Gallery, and the Strathmore Music Center.

One of Baltimore/Washington’s most active chamber musicians, Johnson collaborates regularly with members of the Baltimore Symphony. This season she presents the complete Brahms violin sonatas with BSO concertmaster Jonathan Carney, followed next season by the Brahms cello sonatas with principal cellist Ilya Finkelshteyn. In 2002 Johnson and award-winning flutist Christina Jennings founded the Jennings-Johnson Duo, whose magnetic performances challenge the traditional hierarchy of soloist and accompanist. The Duo released its first recording in January 2006 to critical acclaim.

Johnson is also a prominent member of the new music community, performing regularly with Verge, the ground-breaking ensemble in residence at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery. Johnson earned top honors for best performance of a contemporary work at both the Garrison Competition and the International Russian Music Competition. She was recently a featured performer in a contemporary music festival in Paris and will premiere a new work written by Steve Antosca and commissioned by the McKim Fund at the Library of Congress in a concert celebrating the 100th birthday of Elliott Carter in 2008.

Johnson holds degrees from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and went on to study with luminaries Leon Fleisher and Robert McDonald at the Peabody Institute. A native of Oberlin, Ohio, and daughter of musical parents, she served on the faculty of the Sequoia Chamber Music Workshop from 2003–05 and currently teaches at the Peabody Institute and Loyola College.

Yury Shadrin, Piano
Yury Shadrin was born in Perm, Russia. He began his piano studies at the age of eight. One year later he made his debut with the Perm Opera Orchestra. In 1992 he was accepted into the Special School for Gifted Children in Novosibirsk, where he studied with Dina Schevchuk. In 1994 Yury Shadrin won both the Siberian Piano Competition and the International Piano Competition in Rome, Italy. In 1999 he entered Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers were Lev Naumov and Elisso Virssaladze. Mr. Shadrin has performed with Novosibirsk Philharmonic Orchestra and has played numerous recitals in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In 2003 Yury moved to the United States and enrolled in the Oberlin Conservatory Artist Diploma program, as a student of Monique Duphil. In April 2004 he was the winner of the prestigious Arthur Dann Piano Competition, resulting in recitals and concerts with orchestras in the US, including a debut at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in February 2005. That same year he won the Oberlin Concerto Competition and performed Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with the Oberlin Symphony Orchestra under the direction of James Gaffigan. He has also performed with the Caracas Municipal Symphony on their 25th anniversary season festival, the Salta Symphony conducted by Felipe Izcarai, and the new Sony-sponsored orchestras directed by Yushikazu Fukumura in Hanoi, Vietnam. In July 2006 he played Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar Symphony conducted by Pablo Castellanos.

More recent competition prizes include first prize and the award for best performance of a 20th-century piece at the Maracaibo First International Piano Competition; second prize at the Corpus Christi International Piano Competition; first prize at the Sorantin Concerto Competition; and a Bronze Medal at the World Piano Competition in Cincinnati in July 2007.

Currently, Yury is pursuing his master’s degree at the Yale School of Music, studying with Peter Frankl.

Workshop Leader

LEON FLEISHER

Renowned pianist, conductor, and teacher Leon Fleisher, now in his sixth decade before the public, started piano lessons in his native San Francisco at age four, and gave his first recital at eight. A year later he began studying with the great German pianist Artur Schnabel, and by 16, in 1944, made his debut with the New York Philharmonic. He was the first American to win the prestigious Queen Elisabeth of Belgium competition, in 1952. Fleisher’s career was on a smooth upward trajectory for the next dozen years: he concertized all over the world with every major orchestra and conductor, gave recitals everywhere, and made numerous touchstone recordings with George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra of the piano concertos of Beethoven and Brahms as well as works by Grieg, Schumann, and Rachmaninov (all available on CD).

Fleisher was suddenly struck silent when two fingers of his right hand became immobile in 1965. Undergoing many treatments that gave only temporary relief, he was forced to “retire” when only 37 years old. This was the defining moment in his career until recently, when he began treatments that finally helped relieve the neurological affliction known as focal dystonia that had been plaguing him for more than half his life. For several years, Fleisher has been playing with both hands again, and he has won enormous critical acclaim for Two Hands, his first two-hand recording in 40 years.

In the nearly 40 years since Leon Fleisher’s keyboard career was so suddenly curtailed, he has followed two parallel careers—as conductor and teacher—while learning to play the extensive but limiting repertoire of compositions for piano left-hand. He began conducting in 1967, but never gave up the idea of playing with both hands again.

Mr. Fleisher’s reputation as a conductor was quickly established when he founded the Theatre Chamber Players at the Kennedy Center in 1967 and became Music Director of the Annapolis Symphony in 1970. He made his New York conducting debut at the 1970 Mostly Mozart Festival and in 1973 became Associate Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony. He has appeared as guest conductor with The Cleveland Orchestra and the symphony orchestras of Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, and Detroit, among others. He also had a regular association with the New Japan Philharmonic as its Principal Guest Conductor, leading the orchestra in a series of concerts each season, as well as with the Chamber Music Orchestra of Europe and the Gustav Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

Teaching has been a crucially important element in Leon Fleisher’s life. As a revered pedagogue, he has held the Andrew W. Mellon Chair at the Peabody Conservatory of Music since 1959, and also serves on the faculties of The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. From 1986–97 he was Artistic Director of the Tanglewood Music Center. His teaching activities at the Aspen, Lucerne, Ravinia, and Verbier festivals, among others, have brought him in contact with students from all over the world. He has also given master classes at the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Paris Conservatory, the Ravel Academy at St. Jean de Luz, the Reina Sofía School in Madrid, the Mishkenot in Jerusalem, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In May 2007, his recording of the Brahms Piano Quintet with the Emerson Quartet was released to rave reviews, and his recital and concerto appearances in recent years have re-affirmed his place among the legendary pianists and musicians of our time. Forthcoming engagements include his annual appearances at Carnegie Hall; the Beethoven “Emperor” Concerto with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood and on subscription; and a recital in the Lucerne Festival piano series.

In 2005, Fleisher was honored by the French government and was named to the rank of Commander in the French Order of Arts and Letters, the highest rank of its kind. In December, Mr. Fleisher will receive the Kennedy Center Honors Award for 2007. He and his wife—Katherine Jacobson-Fleisher—have opened their private life by regularly playing duos together for audiences around the world.