Local Music Teachers Sponsor Free Piano Recital
For the City Times
STEVENS POINT —The Stevens Point Area Music Teachers Association will host a free piano recital, featuring Dr. Nicholas Phillips, on Wednesday, Jan. 10 at 10:30 a.m. in Michelsen Concert Hall, UW-Stevens Point.
The solo piano recital will include works by Haydn, Schubert, Debussy and Vine. The concert is free and open to the public.
Pianist Nicholas Phillips is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he teaches applied piano, class piano, piano ensemble, piano literature, and piano pedagogy. He is active as a soloist and collaborative artist, having performed across the United States. He has also given solo recitals and performances in Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa.
Described by the New York Times as an “able and persuasive advocate” of new music, Phillips’ playing has been praised for its “bejeweled accuracy” (Fanfare) and as “razor-sharp yet wonderfully spirited” (American Records Guide). In 2011 he released two CDs on Albany Records: Portals and Passages, featuring piano music by American composer Ethan Wickman, and Boris Papandopulo: Piano Music, featuring solo piano music by the famous 20th-century Croatian composer. His CD project, American Vernacular: New Music for Solo Piano (New Focus Recordings), features commissioned works written for him by 10 American composers. Impressions was released on Blue Griffin records in 2016, and features 21st century character pieces by living American composers.
Phillips has given lecture-recitals and presentations at a number of international, national, and state conferences, including: a lecture-recital on the piano music of M.K. Ciurlinois in Helsinki, Finland, a performance of new piano works by living Korean women composers at the College Music Society 2011 International Conference in Seoul, presentations on teaching literature by Edward MacDowell and Felix Mendelssohn at the Minnesota (2010) and Wisconsin (2008, 2009) Music Teachers Association State Conferences, and two separate programs on Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words at the College Music Society 2009 International Conference in Croatia, and the Seventh Biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain in Bristol, UK (July, 2009). He authored and presented a paper titled “The Influence of Technology in the Nineteenth Century on Piano Instruments, Technique, and Repertoire” at the 2007 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, and is the author of “Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words Revisited: Culture, Gender, Literature, and the Role of Domestic Piano Music in Victorian England,” published by VDM Verlag in 2008.
A native of Indiana, Phillips began formal piano lessons in the preparatory program at Indiana University at the age of ten. He holds degrees in piano performance from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music (Doctor of Musical Arts), Indiana University (Master of Music), and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Bachelor of Music, summa cum laude). His teachers include internationally renowned pianists and pedagogues Karen Taylor, Paul Barnes, Karen Shaw, and Robert Weirich.
Phillips is a Yamaha Artist. For more information, please visit www.nicholasphillips.net