GFA Piano 2 Masterclass

Nicolas Bringuier

Born in Nice in 1980, French pianist Nicolas Bringuier is one of the most brilliant artists of his generation. Invited to perform as soloist at the Berlin Philharmonic and Konzerthaus, the Vienna Musikverein, the Salle Gaveau in Paris, the Madrid Auditorio and the Seoul Arts Center, his career as soloist and teacher has taken him to most European countries, the USA, China, South Korea and Japan.

He is also Co-Artistic Director of the Rencontres musicales du Negresco and of the Samson François International Competition with pianist Olga Monakh, with whom they form the Siloti Duo.

After studying with Christine Gastaud at the Nice Conservatory, he entered Bruno Rigutto’s class at the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 13, where he was awarded a 1st Prize in piano at 16 and completed the Cycle de Perfectionnement at 18.

He then continued his training at Berlin University of the Arts with Klaus Hellwig, graduating with top honors.

During master-classes, he also benefited from the advice of masters such as Dimitri Bashkirov, Oleg Maisenberg, Dominique Merlet, Jean-Claude Pennetier, John Perry, Charles Rosen, Kristina Steinegger and Vladimir Viardo.

A laureate of the Banque Populaire, Cziffra, Langart and Yvonne Lefébure foundations, Nicolas Bringuier has also distinguished himself in major international competitions: the youngest participant selected in 1998 for the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, he won the Grand Konzerteum in Greece in 2000 and was a finalist in the Pro Piano Competition in New York.

In 2004 he won 2nd Prize and the Silver Medal at the prestigious Robert Schumann International Competition in Zwickau. He was also a medalist at the Maria Canals Competition in Barcelona, a semi-finalist at the Monte-Carlo Piano Masters and at the Warsaw Chopin Competition in 2005.

N. Bringuier has a repertoire of over 30 Concertos, which he has performed with numerous European and Asian orchestras: the Berliner Symphoniker, the Wiener Concertverein, the Prague Philharmonic, the Toulouse Capitole, Zwickau-Plauen, Nice, Wuhan, the Cannes National Orchestra, the Avignon Symphony Orchestra of Castilla e Leon, the Balearic Symphony Orchestra and the Euro-Asian Orchester. ..

He is a guest at the most prestigious festivals, including Printemps des Arts in Monte-Carlo, Nuits du Suquet in Cannes, Festival de Colmar, Radio-France in Montpellier, Génération Virtuose in Antibes, Serres d’Auteuil, the Schwetzingen Festival in Germany, Mosel Festwochen and Klassik Festival Ruhr, Sonoro in Romania, Schermonnikoog in Holland, Alba in Italy and many others around the world.

His recordings of Schumann, Bartók and Fauré for the Audite and Klarthe labels have met with great critical success, winning the highest awards.

With pianist Olga Monakh and their Duo Siloti, they have performed at the invitation of the President of the Republic of Germany at his Schloss Bellevue residence, toured China 3 times and played together in most European countries.

A chamber music enthusiast, he has also performed with Andrej Bielow, Alexandra Conunova, Nicolas Dautricourt, Philippe Graffin, Julien Hervé, Gary Hoffman, Esther Hoppe, Alissa Margulis, Raphael Oleg, Régis Pasquier, Razvan Popovici, Estelle Revaz, François Salque, Istvan Vardai, Ukjin Yang, Alexander and Dana Zemtsov…

Lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts, Guest Professor at Inje University in South Korea, Nicolas Bringuier is now Professor at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris.

He is regularly invited to sit on the juries of prestigious international competitions.

Craig Sheppard

Craig Sheppard is Professor of Piano at the School of Music of the University of Washington in Seattle. He is also Professor of the Advanced Innovation Center at the China Conservatory in Beijing, and his former students hold positions in conservatories and universities throughout the world.

A veteran of over fifty years on the international stage, in the past few seasons he has performed both Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues and Bach’s The Art of Fugue in venues throughout the United States, as well as London, Manchester (UK), Jerusalem, Shanghai and Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, in addition to giving masterclasses at all of the above.

As recording artist, his LPs and CDs have appeared on the Sony, Chandos, Philips, EMI and AT-Berlin labels. He has published 26 CDs with Romeo Records (NY) since 2005, including the complete Beethoven sonatas (Beethoven: A Journey), the Six Bach Partitas, the Inventions and Sinfornias, both books of The Well Tempered Clavier, the last three Schubert sonatas, Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage I and II, Debussy’s 24 Preludes and 12 Études (including both books of Images and Estampes), the 24 Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich, Late Piano Works, Opus 116-19, of Johannes Brahms, and Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue).

Within the past two decades, he has traveled many times to the Far East for performances and masterclasses, including Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He has performed at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi, held a residency at the Melba Conservatory in Melbourne, Australia, and performed three times in New Zealand, including the first ever public performances of both books of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. Most recently, he performed the Complete Chopin Nocturnes at the Museu do Oriente in Lisbon.

Born in Philadelphia in November, 1947, Craig Sheppard graduated from both the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, studying with Eleanor Sokoloff and Sasha Gorodnitzki respectively. He also worked with Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals at the Marlboro Festival, and later with Ilona Kabos, Peter Feuchtwanger and Sir Clifford Curzon in London. During his early years, in addition to a successful début at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he won top prizes in the Busoni, Ciani, and Rubinstein competitions. However, it was his Silver Medal at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1972 that brought him to international attention.

Moving to London in 1973 and living there for the next twenty years, Sheppard taught at Lancaster University, the Yehudi Menuhin School, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He also performed on multiple occasions with all the major British orchestras and with many on the European continent, under such conductors as Sir George Solti, Erich Leinsdorf, Kurt Sanderling, James Levine, Michael Tilson Thomas, Aaron Copland, Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Andrew Davis, Sir John Pritchard, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Zinman, and Leonard Slatkin. In the United States, he has performed with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, Rochester and Seattle, and many others.

Craig Sheppard’s solo repertoire is eclectic, comprising nearly fifty solo recital programs and more than sixty concerti covering a wide spectrum within the Western canon. He also has a great love of chamber music and has collaborated with many great instrumentalists and singers, including Wynton Marsalis, José Carreras, Victoria de los Angeles, Irina Arkhipova, Ida Handel, Sylvia Rosenberg, Mayumi Fujikawa, the Cleveland, Emerson and Miró string quartets, and many musicians of the younger generation, including James Ehnes, Stefan Jackiw, Richard O’Neill, Edward Arron and Johannes Moser.

Sheppard is invited frequently to serve on the juries of distinguished international competitions, including most recently the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv in May of 2021 and the National Society of Arts and Letters in Chicago in 2022. He also returns regularly to the Jerusalem Music Center to perform and teach, as well as the Chetham’s Summer School in Manchester, UK. With colleague Dr. Robin McCabe, Sheppard is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Seattle Piano Institute, a boot camp for aspiring young pianists held every July at the University of Washington.

Gülsin Onay

Gülsin Onay began playing the piano at the age of three, and gave her first public recital on Turkish Radio when she was six. With the aid of a special state scholarship she studied with Ahmed Adnan Saygun and Mithat Fenmen, and then in Paris, where her teachers includes Pierre Sancan, Monique Haas and Nadia Boulanger.. She graduated from the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 16, winning the prestigious “Premier Prix du Piano”, and prizes in top international competitions, including the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud (in Paris) and the Ferruccio Busoni (in Bolzano), quickly followed. Gülsin Onay’s subsequent, truly international career has spanned 80 countries across all continents, from Venezuela to Japan. She has given concerts in the major musical centres of the world such as Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus, London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall, the Salle Gaveau in Paris, the Washington DC National Gallery of Art and the New York Miller Theater. She has performed as a soloist with such leading orchestras as Dresden Staatskapelle, Philharmonia Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic, Japan Philharmonic, Munich Radio Symphony, St Petersburg Philharmonic, Tokyo Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic and Vienna Symphony Orchestras. Conductors with which she has performed include Vladimir Ashkenazy, Erich Bergel, Michael Boder, Andrey Boreyko, Jorg Faerber, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Edward Gardner, Neeme Jarvi, Emmanuel Krivine, Ingo Metzmacher, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jose Serebrier, Vassily Sinaisky, Stanislaw Wislocki and Lothar Zagrosek. Gülsin Onay’s many festival appearances include Berlin, Warsaw, Granada, Mozartfest Würzburg, Newport, Schleswig-Holstein, Singapore, Ohrid, Azores and Istanbul. Chamber music artists she has played with include Antonio Meneses, Kirill Troussov, Maxim Vengerov, and the Endellion Quartet.

Gülsin Onay is acknowledged worldwide as the definitive interpreter of the music of Ahmed Adnan Saygun, the leading Turkish composer of the 20th century, whose works feature prominently in her concerts and recordings, and whose 2nd Piano Concerto (which she premiered in Turkey and abroad) was dedicated to her. Other contemporary composers who have dedicated works to Gülsin Onay are Hubert Stuppner, Denis Dufour, Jean-Louis Petit, Muhiddin Dürrüoğlu-Demiriz, Marc-André Hamelin and Bujor Hoinic.

Gülsin Onay’s over 20 recorded albums to date illustrate the breadth of her repertoire as well as her interpretive power, with solo works and concertos from Haydn and Mozart to the contemporary era. Her 2007 CD featuring live concert recordings of Tchaikovsky’s 1st and Rachmaninov’s 3rd Piano Concerto has been acclaimed by critics and virtuosi alike. In 2008 CPO released her recording of both Saygun concertos, to widespread critical acclaim. For the 250 anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Gülsin Onay has recorded 2 CDs of the composer’s works. Her latest release, of the piano concertos by Ulvi Cemal Erkin and Khachaturian, received wide critical praise. Many of her concerts have been broadcast on European radio and television, and in the USA on National Public Radio. During the 2020–2021 coronavirus pandemic, Gülsin Onay was a regular performer on social media, where her livestreamed concerts received several million views.

Gülsin Onay holds the title of State Artist in her native Turkey, where for many years she has been official soloist for the Presidential Symphony Orchestra in Ankara. She is “Artist in Residence” at Bilkent University in Ankara and holds honorary doctoral degrees from Bosphorus University in Istanbul, and from Hacettepe University in Ankara. In 2007 she was honoured with the award of a State Medal by the Polish nation for her interpretation of the music of Chopin. The same year, the “Sevda-Cenap And” Music Foundation awarded her its prestigious 2007 Honorary Award Gold Medal. Gülsin Onay was named “Pianist of the Year” in the 2011 Donizetti Classical Music Awards. In 2014 she was awarded the Honorary Medal of the 42nd Istanbul Music Festival, and later Honorary Medal from the Bodrum Music Festival in 2018. Starting in 2015, the Turkish city of Tekirdağ, one of whose streets has been named after Gülsin Onay, has organised a annual concert series “Gülsin Onay Piano Days” in her honour.

Outside of her professional performing career, Gülsin Onay has been a tireless promoter of classical music, through her charitable activities, event organisation, teaching and broadcasting. Since 2003 she has been a “Goodwill Ambassador” for UNICEF, and regularly gives charity concerts to support and publicise their activities. She has been the Artistic Advisor of the International Gümüşlük Classical Music Festival and Academy since its foundation in 2004. Gülsin Onay takes a particularly interest in nurturing the development of young musicians, and has taught over 400 pupils. Gülsin Onay is a regular contributor to radio and television arts programmes, and since 2017 she has hosted her own weekly programme “In the Studio with Gülsin Onay” on Turkish national radio.