Adjudicators

Pianist Raj Bhimani’s concerts are “virtuosic, heartfelt and eloquent,” writes New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman. Time Out NY noted him as being a “gifted and highly expressive pianist.” Performing regularly across North America and Europe, he also makes frequent appearances in India, where the nationally distributed newspaper The Hindu wrote, “Raj Bhimani is a very sensitive piano player, with a predilection for lyrical melody accompanied with rhythmic gracefulness.” In New York, where he resides, he appears often at Lincoln Center as well as at other venues.

Mr. Bhimani is a champion of new music and has developed a particular expertise in French piano literature. During his time studying in Paris he had the opportunity to meet composer Henri Dutilleux, who declared him “a great artist who plays with sensitivity and intelligence.” In 2016, to mark what would have been the composer’s 100th birthday, Mr. Bhimani gave several performances of his works, including the Preludes, which Mr. Bhimani learned from handwritten manuscripts given to him by the composer before these works were published.

Another prominent French composer, Thérèse Brenet, has written several works especially for Mr. Bhimani. Two of Ms. Brenet’s compositions for Mr. Bhimani can be heard on a CD entitled “To the West Wind,” on the Delatour label. A disc containing Schubert’s B-flat Sonata and Moments Musicaux was issued by Delatour in the same year. Two more works Ms. Brenet wrote for Mr. Bhimani were issued in 2014 on a disc entitled “Le Visionnaire,” released by Musik Fabrik, which has also released recordings of late solo works by Brahms as well as another disk dedicated to solo works by Ravel. All these recordings are available worldwide on numerous platforms. A recording dedicated to late sonatas of Schubert is in preparation, and Mr. Bhimani is honored to be the first pianist invited to record previously-unpublished works by composer Germaine Tailleferre. This will be a multi-disk project.

In addition to solo recitals, Mr. Bhimani also performs with Syrinx : XXII, a group formed with musicians from Portugal. The trio performs regularly in the US, Portugal, and India, and has premiered works written especially for them by composers in Portugal and Germany.

Frequently sought after as a teacher and pedagogue, Mr. Bhimani is known for guiding students from their first encounters with a piano up to concert level performances. His students have earned numerous prizes and have been heard in performance at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and other esteemed venues in New York and across the United States. He writes articles on teaching and performance for Serenade Magazine, is a frequent judge and lecturer on piano pedagogy, and has served on the board of The Leschetizky Association, an organization committed to upholding the great pedagogue’s ideals of beautiful tone production and musical integrity. Mr. Bhimani is grateful to his own teachers: John Steele Ritter, Peter Hewitt, Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer, Claude Frank, and Seymour Bernstein.

Follow Mr. Bhimani’s activities at his website, www.RajBhimani.com, like his page on Facebook, follow him on Instagram, or subscribe to his channel on YouTube

Praised for her "rich and resonant sound" (The New York Sun) and her ability to "make music speak" (The Colorado Springs Gazette), Ukrainian-American pianist Angelina Gadeliya leads a rich musical life as a soloist, chamber musician, new music expert, and educator. Her work with the NYC-based Decoda ensemble has frequently brought her to the stages of Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School, as well as to Germany, South Korea, Abu Dhabi, Princeton University, Vassar College, the Trinity Wall Street series, and various New York locales. Ms. Gadeliya’s recent performances also include solo and chamber music recitals in such venues as New York’s Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie’s Weill and Zankel Halls, the Beijing National Center for the Performing Arts, the Curtis Institute of Music, and in prestigious concert halls of Canada, Israel, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Poland, and Ukraine.

Her festival affiliations include the Amalfi Coast Music and Arts Festival, the Beijing International Music Festival and Academy, Music Fest Perugia, and she has also appeared at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Dakota Sky International Piano Festival, the Beethoven Master Course in Positano, Italy, the Bach Festival of Philadelphia, the Reynosa International Piano Festival in Mexico, the Metropolitan Museum of Art lecture series, and the 2007 Emerson String Quartet's Beethoven Project at Carnegie Hall. Ms. Gadeliya has appeared with orchestras across the US and has collaborated with such artists as Lucy Shelton, Anton Miller, Mihai Tetel, Jean-Michel Fonteneau, James Conlon, David Stern, Andrew Manze, Paul Nadler, David Bowlin, principal players of the New York Philharmonic, and the internationally acclaimed Mark Morris Dance Group. This season she will be featured as soloist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Gadeliya serves as President and Artistic Director of the Fryderyk Chopin Society of Connecticut and is the Assistant Professor in Residence of Piano and Director of Keyboard Studies at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

A passionate advocate of new music, Ms. Gadeliya has given numerous premiers of new works and has worked closely with composers Frederic Rzewski, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Richard Danielpour, Richard Wilson, John Adams, Thomas Adès, Steve Reich, Steven Mackey, Daniel Bjarnason, and John Harbison, among others. She holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory, the Juilliard School, Mannes College, and has a Doctorate from Stony Brook University. Her principal mentors include Angela Cheng, Pavlina Dokovska, and Gilbert Kalish. Ms. Gadeliya currently resides in Glastonbury, CT with her husband Misha and their three children, Felix, Anastasia, and Luke. Her performances have been featured on New York’s WQXR as well as WWFM radio stations. For more information, please go to www.angelinagadeliya.com.

A Steinway Artist, Mayron Tsong has traveled the globe and performed in across the continental United States, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. After her solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, Harris Goldsmith of The New York Concert Review praised it as "an enlivening, truly outstanding recital.” Fanfare Magazine called her “a genius, pure and simple… perhaps, a wizard.”

Her first CD of Romantic Russian piano music was released by Centaur Records in 2008 and won a Global Music Award and rave reviews in American Record Guide and Fanfare Magazine compared her playing to Horowitz, Pollini, Andsnes and Laredo, saying “her technique is dazzling, yet subjugated to a controlling intellect and deeply felt sensitivity that removes her from the category 'virtuoso' by nature of her long-range artistic vision.” She recently completed her second CD of solo piano sonatas by Haydn, Mozart and Berg which will be released by Centaur Records in 2023.

Winner of numerous competitions and prizes, Tsong has performed and interviewed for many radio broadcasts, including CBC Radio in Canada, WDAV in North Carolina, WFMT Radio in Chicago, Radio 4 in Hong Kong and NPR's “The State of Things.” She has appeared as soloist with orchestras around the world, including the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic (Russia), Symphony North (Houston), Longview Symphony Orchestra (Texas), North Carolina Symphony, Red Deer Symphony Orchestra (Canada) and Lethbridge Symphony Orchestra (Canada). Equally active in chamber music collaborations, her summers have taken her to festivals across the United States, Prague, Germany and Italy, including The Rebecca Penneys Piano Festival, The Art of Piano at Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Eastern Music Festival, Prague International Piano Masterclasses, Texas Music Institute and the Amalfi Coast, Schlern and Orfeo Music Festivals in Italy. Her collaborations with some of the finest chamber groups and musicians in North America include Jeffrey Zeigler (of the Kronos Quartet), Brentano String Quartet, Philharmonic Quintet of New York, Miró String Quartet, Vega String Quartet, James Campbell, George Taylor and Antonio Lysy.

A native of Canada, Tsong is one of the youngest musicians to complete a Performer's Diploma in piano from the Royal Conservatory of Toronto at age 16. While still a student, she was awarded the Millennium Prize for Russian Performing Arts, and she is a three-time recipient of The Female Doctoral Students Grant, a competition that encompasses all disciplines nationwide, awarded by the Government of Canada. Holding graduate degrees in both piano performance and music theory from Rice University, her impressive pedigree boasts distinguished teachers like John Perry, György Sebök, Robert Levin, Anton Kuerti and Marilyn Engle.

A distinguished pedagogue herself, she has appeared around the world as a masterclass clinician, lecturer, judge and visiting professor. Her students have pursued studies at The Curtis Institute of Music, Indiana University, Northwestern University, Stony Brook University, University of South Carolina and the University of Houston and won teaching positions at the University of North Carolina. She was also Artistic Director of the first William Kapell Young Artist Piano Competition at the University of Maryland in 2012.

She is an honorary member of the Tingshuset Music Society in Sweden along with prominent Swedish Artists like Martin Fröst and Christian Lindberg. Tsong is currently Associate Professor of Piano at the University of Maryland School of Music where she serves as the Co-ordinator of the Piano Division. She previously served as Head of Keyboard Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Lethbridge.

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