UW Faculty Concert: Piano Power! Robin McCabe, Craig Sheppard, Cristina Valdés, & Rachelle McCabe

• Robin McCabe, piano
• Craig Sheppard, piano
• Cristina Valdés, piano
• Rachelle McCabe, piano

Fingers will fly, with air traffic control required at the two keyboards when faculty pianists Robin McCabe, Cristina Valdés, and Craig Sheppard join forces with guest artist Rachelle McCabe to present dynamic and festive arrangements for two pianos, eight hands.

About UW School of Music

http://music.washington.edu/

About Robin McCabe, piano

Robin McCabe has established herself as one of America's most communicative and persuasive artists, delighting audiences across the United States, Europe, Canada and in nine concert tours of the Far East. Winner of the International Concert Artists Guild Competition and recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Robin McCabe was the subject of a New Yorker magazine profile, "Pianist's Progress," later expanded into a book of the same title. A member of the Juilliard faculty from 1978 to 1987, she joined the piano faculty at the University of Washington in 1987 and was director of the School of Music from 1994 to 2009. McCabe holds a Michiko Morita Miyamoto Professorship in Piano at the UW.

About Craig Sheppard, piano

Craig Sheppard is a renowned pedagogue whose former students hold positions in major universities and conservatories in this country and around the world, including England, Germany, Argentina, Chile, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Known for his passion at the keyboard, allied to technical mastery and a deep commitment to both scholarly and historical perspectives, Sheppard celebrates more than fifty years on the international concert platform. He has performed his most recent projects, the 24 Préludes and Fugues of Shostakovich, Opus 87, and Bach's The Art of Fugue in New York, London, Shanghai, The Forbidden Concert Hall Beijing, Jerusalem, and Oslo, as well as numerous universities and conservatories in the U.S. His CDs of the Shostakovich met with critical acclaim in both national and international press. In the July, 2016 issue of Fanfare magazine, Peter Rabinowitz writes: "What's especially impressive is Sheppard’s sense of the music’s changing landscapes, his ability to shape its emotional trajectories. This is a set full of interpretive astuteness that repays repeated listening." Bryce Morrison writes in the February, 2016 issue of Gramophone: "…clearly at the zenith of his career, he achieves a brilliantly inclusive poise and brio that go to the very heart of Shostakovich. He ends the Fugue No. 24 in a blaze of maestoso glory and a storm of cheers. Finely recorded, this is a memorable issue."

In the April, 2011 issue of London's International Record Review of Sheppard’s Last Three Piano Sonatas by Franz Schubert, Robert Matthew-Walker noted: "It was Hans Keller who said that All great artists are, by virtue of what they do, also great teachers, and those who have heard Sheppard's recent recording on the Roméo label – particularly the complete Beethoven sonatas and Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, Books I and II – will know the truth of that statement. The City of Seattle and the students at its University are indeed fortunate to have him in their midst." Sheppard's recital début at the Berlin Philharmonic, featuring Chopin's 24 Préludes and Bach’s Goldberg Variations, caused one critic to enthuse: "The pianist revealed himself an intimate connoisseur of Bach’s soul." Following Sheppard's appearance at a recent Minnesota Beethoven Festival, the reviewer exclaimed: "With the recitals of Yo-Yo Ma and Craig Sheppard, the festival is off to a great start!"

Craig Sheppard was born in Philadelphia and graduated both the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, studying with Eleanor Sokoloff and Sasha Gorodnitzki respectively. He worked at the Marlboro Festival with Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals and in London with Ilona Kabos, Peter Feuchtwanger and Sir Clifford Curzon. He gave his New York début in January, 1972 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and six months later won the Silver Medal at the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition. Moving to London the following year, he played with all the major British orchestras on multiple occasions, as well as many on the European continent and many major orchestras in this country, working with conductors such as Erich Leinsdorf, Sir Georg Solti, Kurt Sanderling, James Levine, Michael Tilson Thomas, Aaron Copland, Yehudi Menuhin, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Zinman and Leonard Slatkin. Sheppard taught at Lancaster University, the Yehudi Menuhin School, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in addition to giving masterclasses at both Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Sheppard returned to this country in 1993 as Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington's School of Music, becoming a Full Professor in 2004. Sheppard's repertoire is eclectic, comprising forty-plus recital programs and over sixty concerti spanning all major eras of Western classical music. He has collaborated with Wynton Marsalis, José Carreras, Ida Handel, Sylvia Rosenberg, Victoria de los Angeles, Irina Arkhipova, the Cleveland, Bartók, and Emerson String Quartets, in addition to musicians of the younger generation, including Augustin Hadelich, James Ehnes, Stefan Jackiw, Richard O'Neill, Edward Arron and Johannes Moser. He travels frequently to Europe, the Far East, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and South America to give concerts and masterclasses.

In 2010, Sheppard co-founded the annual Seattle Piano Institute with colleague, Dr. Robin McCabe, a musical boot camp for gifted young pianists that includes frequent private lessons along with supervised practice in dedicated practice rooms, masterclasses and seminars. Sheppard's CDs can be found on the Roméo, AT-Berlin, Philips, Sony, and Chandos labels.

About Cristina Valdés, piano

https://music.washington.edu/people/cristina-valdes

About Rachelle McCabe, piano

Rachelle McCabe is Professor Emeritus of Music at Oregon State University and an internationally acclaimed concert pianist and artist teacher. She has concertized as soloist and chamber musician throughout North America and the United Kingdom, as well as in Europe, China, and Southeast Asia.

As concerto soloist Rachelle McCabe has appeared with many orchestras including the Seattle Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Victoria Symphony, and the Corvallis-OSU Symphony. Her solo recital performances include concerts at The National Gallery in Washington DC, the Goethe Institute in Singapore, and the Findhorn Institute in Scotland. Her many chamber music partnerships include tours with the Philadelphia String Quartet, clarinetist David Shifrin of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, Boston violinists Yuri and Dana Mazurkevich, and flutist Torkyl Bye of the Oslo Philharmonic. She performs in chamber music festivals such as the Chintimini Festival in Oregon, the Highlands Festival in North Carolina, Chamber Music Northwest in Oregon, and the Victoria International Music Festival in British Columbia. With her sister Robin McCabe, she performs duo piano concerts nationally and internationally.

Believing in the power of music to affect change, Rachelle McCabe has created innovative programs with acclaimed writer/philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore to address the crisis of global extinction and climate change. They have taken their programs across the USA and Canada. Their powerful program, Variations on a Theme of Extinction, weaves Rachelle’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli with Kathleen’s spoken narrative. An acclaimed film version entitled The Extinction Variations was created by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Nara Garber in 2019.

Rachelle McCabe is Artistic Director of Corvallis-OSU Piano International with its prestigious Steinway Piano Series, community concerts and festivals, and educational outreach programs. She also co-directs the annual OSU Chamber Music Workshop, a summer camp for young musicians.

A highly respected teacher, Professor McCabe taught hundreds of college piano students at Oregon State University until her retirement as a full professor from the university in 2020. She was named a Master Teacher at Oregon State. She now teaches an independent piano studio and appears frequently as an artist teacher and adjudicator, nationally and internationally. In the 2022-23 season she judged competitions and festivals in Seattle (Seattle Young Artists Music Festival), Hong Kong (The Hong Kong Schools Music Festival), Portland (Oregon Music Teachers Association), and Alaska (Alaska Piano Competition in Anchorage), and taught master classes in Atlanta (Emory University), Seattle (Seattle Pacific University) and at the University of Oregon in Eugene. In 2018, she taught master classes in Beijing at Renmin University, China Conservatory and Capital Normal University. Earlier in her career, Rachelle McCabe served as an Artist in Residence and was appointed as affiliate faculty member at La Salle College of the Arts in Singapore.

Rachelle McCabe holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from The University of Michigan where she studied with Gyorgy Sandor and Theodore Lettvin. She earned her Master’s degree from The Juilliard School where she studied with Ania Dorfmann, and her Bachelor’s from The University of Washington with Béla Siki. Additional teachers were Willard Schultz, Gary Graffman, and Leon Fleisher.