Bruce Brubaker,
piano
Bruce
Brubaker joined
the New England Conservatory faculty as piano chair in 2005. In
live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s Avery
Fisher Hall, from Paris to Hong Kong, and in his continuing
series of recordings for Arabesque—Bruce Brubaker is a visionary
virtuoso. Named “Young Musician of the Year” by Musical America,
Bruce Brubaker performs Mozart with the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, and 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.
Pulitzer
Prize–winning Washington Post critic Tim Page has said: “I
wouldn't trade Pollini, Argerich, Richard Goode, Peter Serkin or
Bruce Brubaker (to mention a terrific younger artist) for any
handful of Horowitzes!” Brubaker was presented by Carnegie Hall
at Zankel Hall in New York, at Trifolion in Echternach, at
Michigan’s Gilmore Festival, and at Boston’s Institute of
Contemporary Art, as the opening-night performer in the museum’s
acclaimed new Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building. He is
a frequent performer at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge.
Bruce Brubaker’s
CDs for Arabesque include Time Curve (music by Philip
Glass and William Duckworth), Hope Street Tunnel Blues
(music by Glass and Alvin Curran, featuring Brubaker’s
transcription of a portion of Glass’s opera Einstein on the
Beach), Inner Cities (including a live recording
of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates and Brubaker’s
transcription of part of Adams’s opera Nixon in China),
and the first CD in the series, glass cage, named one
of the best releases of the year by The New Yorker
magazine.
Brubaker has
premiered works by Glass, Nico Muhly, Mark-Anthony Turnage, 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. Of Brubaker's playing at a later
recital at Harvard, The Boston Globe wrote: “A
big-toned, brainy, firebrand kind of music making that made you
think of—dare one say this?—Rudolf Serkin.”
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. 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 at Avery
Fisher Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, London’s Wigmore
Hall, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Antwerp’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and
Finland’s Kuhmo Festival.
Bruce Brubaker has
appeared on RAI in Italy and is featured in the documentary film
about the Juilliard School, made for the PBS “American Masters
Series.” As a member of Affiliate Artists Xerox Pianists
Program, he presented residencies and performed with orchestras
throughout the United States.
At NEC, in addition
to his teaching duties, Brubaker has coordinated schoolwide
celebrations of the music of
Chopin,
Haydn, Liszt, Messiaen, Mozart, Schuller, Scriabin, and
Shostakovich that have included performers outside the piano
department, as well as Preparatory students performing alongside
College piano majors. Under Brubaker's guidance, the weekly
Piano Seminar has exposed piano majors and curious members of
the public to a wide range of performers and thinkers.
Brubaker has given
masterclasses and forums at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki,
the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Columbia University,
Leipzig’s Hochschüle für Musik, the École Normale in Paris,
Ghent’s Orpheus Instituut, North Carolina’s Eastern Music
Festival, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Brubaker's articles
about music have appeared in The Wall Street Journal,
USA Today, Piano Quarterly, Dutch Journal
of Music Theory, and Chamber Music magazine. He
was co-editor and a contributor to Pianist, Scholar,
Connoisseur: Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner (Pendragon
Press, 2000), a collection paying homage to his former teacher.
His essay “Time Is Time” appears in Unfolding Time
(2009), available in the U.S. from Cornell University Press. He
presented the closing recital in Harvard University’s
Crosscurrents conference in 2008. He is the U.S. representative
for "Behind the Music: The Performer as Researcher," a research
initiative based in Australia.
Prior to coming to
NEC, Brubaker was the creator in 2000–2001 of “B-A-C-H,” a
six-concert series in New York examining the connections between
J. S. Bach and the composers who followed him. The previous
year, at the turn of the millennium, he organized “Piano
Century,” in which 100 pianists performed 101 twentieth-century
pieces in eleven concerts. In 2004, Brubaker created and
performed Pianomorphosis, a 70-minute multidisciplinary
performance piece for the Gilmore International Keyboard
Festival in Michigan. Brubaker's performance piece Haydnseek,
was created together with Nico Muhly. Brubaker is the founder
and artistic director of the chamber music festival SummerMusic
in his native Iowa.
Well known in the
music profession as an identifier and nurturer of musical
talent, Brubaker's students have won major international
competitions and prizes, and built recording and performing
careers throughout the world.
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 from 1995 to 2005, he has appeared in
public conversations with Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, and
Meredith Monk.
B.M., M.M., and
D.M.A. in piano, The Juilliard School. Principal piano studies
with Jacob Lateiner; chamber music with Felix Galimir and Louis
Krasner; analysis with Milton Babbitt. Former faculty of the
Juilliard School.
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