RICHLAND CONCERT ASSOCIATION
September 17, 2023 – Christopher Taylor, piano
September 17, 2023 – Christopher Taylor, piano
Hailed by
critics as “frighteningly talented” (The New York Times) and “a great pianist” (The
Los Angeles Times), Christopher Taylor has distinguished himself throughout his
career as an innovative musician with a diverse array of talents and
interests. He is known for a passionate
advocacy of music written in the past 100 years — Messiaen,
Ligeti, and Bolcom figure
prominently in his performances — but his repertoire spans four centuries and
includes the complete Beethoven sonatas, the Liszt Transcendental Etudes,
Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and a multitude of other familiar masterworks. Whatever
the genre or era of the composition, Mr. Taylor brings to it an active
imagination and intellect coupled with heartfelt intensity and grace.
Mr. Taylor
has concertized around the globe, with international tours taking him to
Russia, Western Europe, East Asia, and the Carribean.
At home in the U.S. he has appeared with such orchestras as the New York
Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, and the Milwaukee
Symphony. As a soloist he has performed
in New York’s Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls, in Washington’s Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts, the Ravinia and Aspen festivals, and dozens of other
venues. In chamber settings, he has collaborated with many eminent musicians,
including Robert McDuffie and the Borromeo, Shanghai, Pro Arte, and Ying
Quartets. His recordings have featured works by Liszt, Messiaen,
and present-day Americans William Bolcom and Derek Bermel. Throughout his career Mr. Taylor has become known
for undertaking memorable and unusual projects.
Examples include: an upcoming tour in which he will perform, from
memory, the complete transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies by Liszt; performances and
lectures on the complete etudes of György Ligeti; and a series of performances of the Goldberg
Variations on the unique double-manual Steinway piano in the collection of the
University of Wisconsin. He has actively
promoted the rediscovery and refurbishment of the latter instrument; in recent
years he has also been building a reinvented and modernized version of it, a
project that relies on his computer and engineering skills and was unveiled in
a demonstration recital in 2016.
Numerous
awards have confirmed Mr. Taylor’s high standing in the musical world. He was
named an American Pianists’ Association Fellow for 2000, before which he
received an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1996 and the Bronze Medal in the 1993
Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. In 1990 he took first prize in the
William Kapell International Piano Competition, and
also became one of the first recipients of the Irving Gilmore Young Artists’
Award.
Mr. Taylor
owes much of his success to several outstanding teachers, including Russell
Sherman, Maria Curcio-Diamand, Francisco Aybar, and Julie Bees. In addition to his busy concert
schedule, he currently serves as Paul Collins Associate Professor of Piano
Performance at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He pursues a variety of
other interests, including: mathematics (he received a summa cum laude degree
from Harvard University in this field in 1992); philosophy (an article he
coauthored with the leading scholar Daniel Dennett appears in the Oxford Free
Will Handbook); computing; linguistics; and biking, which is his primary means
of commuting. Mr. Taylor lives in Middleton, Wisconsin, with his wife and two
daughters. Christopher Taylor is a Steinway artist.
https://music.wisc.edu/faculty/christopher-taylor/
Copyright © 2023 Richland Concert Association
Last
update 0505/23