Cornell assistant professor of music Kia-Hui Tan has invited Canadian pianist Allison Gagnon to campus to present an evening of works for violin and piano Saturday, Sept. 29, in Barnes Hall.
The two first met as graduate students at the Cleveland Institute of Music and have played together on many occasions.
For this program, which will be repeated at the North Carolina School for the Arts, where Gagnon is director of the school's collaborative piano program, the duo presents repertoire related to their doctoral dissertations, which happen to have overlapping connections. Gagnon's research is on Ernest Chausson's Poème, which was dedicated to and highly influenced by Eugène Ysaÿe, which is Tan's area of interest. Also included are virtuoso works by Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski, Kreisler and Sarasate.
Described in The Strad as a "violinist whose virtuosity was astonishing," Tan has performed on five continents, recorded for film and theater and has broadcast on the radio, television and the Internet. Originally from Singapore, she studied with David Takeno at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and David Updegraff at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she received the doctor of musical arts degree. Valedictorian of the graduating class for both her bachelor's and master's degrees, she has won many prizes in violin, chamber music, new music and academic scholarship. At Cornell she has served as violin and viola faculty, chamber music coach and music theory lecturer. She has been staff accompanist at various institutions and summer festivals in the United States and abroad.
Gagnon enjoys the busy life of a collaborative pianist in all its variety. Her appearances with both singers and instrumentalists throughout Canada and the United States have included concerts recorded for broadcast by CBC Radio and prize-winning competition performances. Gagnon has been a pianist for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada and has participated in festivals at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, Calif. Each summer since 1997, she has been a staff pianist at the Meadowmount School of Music in New York.
Gagnon is a graduate of McGill University in her native Montreal, the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, Austria, and of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario; she also was a member of the adjunct teaching faculty of the School of Music at Queen's for 14 years. A recipient of grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, she completed the doctor of musical arts degree in 1999 at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where her teacher was Anne Epperson. In the fall of 1998, Gagnon joined the School of Music at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where she is both staff accompanist and director of the school's growing collaborative piano program.
This week the Department of Music also presents a concert of the music of Karel Husa, Cornell's Kappa Alpha professor of composition emeritus, Sept. 28 at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall, in honor of Husa's 80th birthday (see the story in the Sept. 20 Cornell Chronicle) and a concert by tenor Gary Moulsdale and pianist David Kempe Oct. 1 at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall. Moulsdale and Kempe will perform Franz Schubert's song cycle, Die Winterreise, D. 911. Composed of 24 songs on texts by Wilhelm Müller, Winterreise was published in two books in 1827.
Moulsdale is a Ph.D. candidate in the musicology program at Cornell, and Kempe is a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell's computer science program.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |