2024 PRELIMINARY ROUND

ROBERT WEIRICH
Jury Chair

Robert Weirich has balanced an extremely active career as pianist, teacher, chamber musician, conductor, composer, arts administrator, and has written about much of that in his recently published book Recollections: A Pianist’s Essays on Teaching, Performing, and Living. Other publications that regularly feature his essays are Clavier and International Piano.

As a pianist, Mr. Weirich has performed in musical centers throughout the country, including Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, and at such festivals as Tanglewood, Ravinia and Marlboro.

A prize winner in several competitions, Weirich received a Solo Recitalist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 and was one of the first winners of the Pope Foundation Music Awards, a substantial cash prize to support innovative music projects. He has performed more than thirty concertos. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times called his recording of the major piano works of Aaron Copland for the Albany label “brilliant, probing, and austerely beautiful.”

Mr. Weirich joined the faculty of the University of Missouri- Kansas City Conservatory in 1998 as the first recipient of the Jack Strandberg Missouri Endowed Chair in Piano. He previously taught at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, Northwestern University, Tulane University, and Syracuse University.His students have won national and international competitions, including the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (Stanislav Ioudenitch) and the Naumburg Award (Awadagin Pratt). He has
concertized and taught master classes in American colleges and universities and performed internationally in Europe, Asia, and South America.

He was the artistic director of the Skaneateles Festival in New York’s Finger Lakes District from 1991-1999, receiving three Adventuresome Programming Awards from ASCAP and Chamber Music America. Attendance more than doubled. His work with the Festival was also honored by the National Federation of Music Clubs, the Cultural Resources Council of Central New York, and with a SAMMY award from the Syracuse Area Music Awards program. He was President of the College Music Society from 2002 to 2004.

He received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale University in 1981 and was named a Distinguished Alumnus in 1989. He holds the Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

PALLAVI MAHIDHARA

Jury Member

Indian-American pianist Pallavi Mahidhara made her orchestral debut at age ten, performing at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago. She is the Second Prize winner and Young Audience Award winner of the 69th Geneva International Piano Competition, and of the VI International Prokofiev Competition in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Ms. Madhidhara first performed in Milwaukee in 2008 when she was a winner in the PianoArts North American Competition. Since then, she has performed frequently in Milwaukee. Her most recent concert was in 2023 with violinist Melissa White at the Charles Allis Art Museum.

Other recent performances include two European tours with Curtis on Tour, a solo recital at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival, a recital with renowned cellist Gary Hoffman, and chamber music performances at Lincoln Center with members of the New York Philharmonic. Orchestral performances included the Eugene and Tacoma Symphony Orchestras.

Ms. Madhihara was selected by Sir András Schiff for his concert series, Building Bridges, a platform to support and promote young pianists. Performances included solo recitals in Germany at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, the Beethoven Haus in Bonn, the Classeek Showroom in Aubonne, Switzerland, and the Centro Cultural de Belem in Lisbon, Portugal. The Klavier-Festival Ruhr in Essen released a live performance recording of her recital from October 2021.

As Executive Director, writer, and host the podcast, “The Conscious Artist,” Ms. Mahidhara seeks to promote Mental Health Awareness for performing artists. In addition to teaching in her private studio, she gives masterclasses and workshops at universities and summer music festivals in the United States and Europe, and as a professor for Curtis’s Mentor alumni Program.

Ms. Mahidhara holds degrees from The Curtis Institute of Music and Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler. She studied with Dimitri Bashkirov at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía. As the first female Indian pianist to attend these institutions and host a podcast on mental health in Western classical music, she fervently embraces her role as cultural ambassador, artist, and mentor.

MELINDA MASUR
Jury Member

Lauded for her “lustrous performances [and] extraordinary musicianship” [Incident Light] and “impeccable technique and artistic interpretation” [The Columbian], pianist Melinda Lee Masur has performed on all three stages of Carnegie Hall, at London’s Wigmore Hall and Purcell Room, the Berliner Philharmonie, the Ravinia Festival, the Festival Les Muséiques Basel and in cities throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. She has been featured on nationally broadcast radio, including Chicago’s Dame Myra Hess and Texas Public Radio, as well as on Hong Kong’s classical radio/television station, RTHK4, and has appeared as soloist with orchestras such as the Vancouver Symphony, Shanghai Philharmonic and Harvard-Radcliffe Bach Society.

An avid chamber musician, Ms. Masur has performed with such artists as Augustin Hadelich, Alban Gerhardt, Fanny Clamagirand and Adrian Brendel. Since founding The Lee Trio in 2002 with her sisters, violinist Lisa Lee and cellist Angela Lee, critics have raved about the Trio’s “gripping immediacy and freshness” and “rich palette of tone colours” [The Strad]. The Lee Trio regularly performs on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia and is devoted to working with and performing the music of living composers. Piano trios by composers including Nathaniel Stookey, Philip Lasser, Uljas Pulkkis, Laurence Rosenthal, Julian Yu and Sylvie Bodorova have been given their world, American and European premieres by The Lee Trio. The Trio’s recording of Jane Antonia Cornish’s Duende was released on the Delos label in 2014 to critical acclaim.

Melinda Lee Masur’s musical mentors include the pianists Erna Gulabyan, Maria Curcio, Claude Frank, Sergei Edelmann, Anna Kim, Jeffrey Swann and Michael Friedmann, and violist Susan Bates for chamber music. She graduated with honors from Harvard University, studying piano and chamber music with composer Leon Kirchner and pianist Robert Levin. In fulfillment of her Konzertexamen Diploma at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover in Germany, she studied with pianist Einar Steen-Nøkleberg, and in Berlin, studied Art Song with baritone Thomas Quasthoff and Lied-pianist Wolfram Rieger.

Ms.Masur is a member of the music faculty at Boston University as well as Director of Piano Chamber Music for the BU Tanglewood Institute. Together with her husband, Ken-David Masur, she serves as Artistic Director of the Chelsea Music Festival, an annual summer music festival in New York City lauded as a “gem of a series” by The New York Times. Melinda Lee Masur is a Steinway Artist.