Kansas - American Liszt Society

B i o g r a p h i e sEdmund Battersby received hisbachelor’s and master’s of musicfrom the Juilliard School of Music.He made his concert debuts inWigmore Hall in London and AliceTully Hall in Lincoln Center. He hascollaborated with such celebratedensembles as the Tokyo Quartet,the Orion Quartet and the VermeerQuartet and has been a featured artist at festivals such asMostly Mozart in New York and the Santa Fe ChamberMusic Festival. At the Library of Congress in Washington,D.C., he has performed more than 30 works of chambermusic that were broadcast live nationally. Battersby’srecording of Granados’ Goyescas for Koch Internationalwas short-listed for a Grammy Award, and his landmarkdouble CD of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, releasedin 2005 (Naxos), which he presented on both period andmodern instruments, has received worldwide attention.Other recordings feature the complete Songs WithoutWords of Mendelssohn (MHS) as well as discs of Schubert,Schumann and Chopin works. Battersby was invited tothe Smithsonian Institution to give the U.S. premiere onQueen Victoria’s 1851 Erard piano, which Liszt had usedto perform for the Queen and Prince Albert at BalmoralCastle, Scotland. He has also played period pianos atthe Frick Collection in N.Y., the Bard Festival as well asPro Musica Rara in Baltimore. Edmund Battersby hastaught at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana Universitysince 1995. He is director of the Artur Balsam Ensembleand teaches classes for piano and strings through the IUFoundation and the Charley Creek Foundation.Corbin Beisner started playing pianoat age five and began studying jazz withRick DeBella. At 12, he began studyingclassical piano and also became interestedin composition. His principle earlyteachers were Roger Bushell and EkaterinaMelkamini. He has attended summermusic festivals at Interlochen, Mich., the Mannes Schoolof Music in New York City, the Forum Internacionalde Musica in Barcelona, Spain, and the Lake ComoSummer Piano Academy in Lake Como, Italy. He haswon numerous awards at competitions, including: MTNAstate competition, International Liszt Competition inAsuza, Calif., the Liberace play-alike competition, andthe Premier Prize in Forum Internacional de Musicacompetition. Mr. Beisner has also worked with teacherssuch as Mykola Suk, Daniel Pollack, Leslie Howard, FabioBidini, William Grant Nabore and Stanislav Ioudenitch.He is currently studying with Luiz de Moura Castro at theHartt School of Music in Hartford, Conn. He continuesto perform, compose and improvise and plans on being atouring composer-pianist in the near-future.Pianist Michael Boyd is active assoloist, collaborative artist, lecturerand teacher. He has performedas soloist with the RochesterPhilharmonic, the MilwaukeeSymphony, the Toledo Symphony,the Dearborn Symphony and theEastman Chamber Orchestra. In2007, he performed the rarely heardoriginal 1838 version of Liszt’s Paganini Etudes at theopening concert of the American Liszt Society Festivalat the San Francisco Conservatory. In Europe, Dr. Boydhas performed a series of recitals in Greece and presentedtwo lecture-recitals in Spain. The first program focusedon Andalusian influences in the keyboard sonatas ofDomenico Scarlatti and Padre Antonio Soler and was givenin the city where they both had royal appointments to theSpanish court, San Lorenzo de El Escorial. The secondprogram, presented at the concert hall of the Manuel deFalla Archive in Granada, focused on Manuel de Falla’sAndalusian keyboard compositions. Dr. Boyd has recordedon VAI and Fleur De Son Classics. He is professor of pianoat the University of Toledo, has been a visiting professor atthe Eastman School of Music, and has been on the facultyof Indiana University’s Summer Piano Academy and theChautauqua Summer Institution. Dr. Boyd is a SteinwayArtist.Soprano Julia Broxholm maintainsa versatile schedule of solo andchamber music performances. She isa founding member of SATB, a vocalquartet specializing in vocal chambermusic of the 19 th and 20 th centuries.Her particular area of interest asa recitalist is vocal literature byAmerican composers of the 20 thand 21 st centuries. Her SATB performances have taken herfrom the Cayman Islands International Music Festival,to Severance Hall, to Kilbourn Hall at Eastman School ofMusic. Recordings include two releases with SATB: Magic,and It’s a Grand Night…Four Singing. She has also recordedtwo CDs of soprano, clarinet repertoire with clarinetistFred Ormand and pianist Martin Katz. Of Shepherds,12