Masterclasses & Teachers
The Masterclasses of the PIANO ACADEMY EPPAN 2023 will be held by Janina Fialkowska, Michél Beroff and Andrea Bonatta. Participants will take one lesson of 60 minutes with each Professor. Different works are requested for the 3 lessons. The Masterclasses will take place at the Music School “Leonhard von Call” in Eppan.
Janina Fialkowska
For almost 50 years, concert pianist Janina Fialkowska has enchanted audiences and critics around the world. She has been praised for her musical integrity, her refreshing natural approach and her unique piano sound thus becoming “one of the Grandes Dames of piano playing” (Frankfurter Allgemeine).
Born in Canada, she began her piano studies with her mother at age 4 continuing on in her native Montreal with Yvonne Hubert. In Paris she studied with Yvonne Lefébure and in New York at the Juilliard School with Sascha Gorodnitzki, experiencing the best of both French and Russian piano traditions. Her career was launched in 1974, when the legendary Arthur Rubinstein became her mentor after her prize-winning performance at his inaugural Master Piano Competition, calling her a “born Chopin interpreter” laying the foundation for her lifelong identification with this composer.
Since then she has performed with the foremost orchestras worldwide under the baton of such conductors as Zubin Mehta, Bernard Haitink, Lorin Maazel, Sir Georg Solti, Sir Roger Norrington and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, to name one of the younger generation. She has won special recognition for a series of important premieres, notably Liszt’s newly discovered Third Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony and several contemporary piano concertos. Ms Fialkowska's discography includes many award-winning discs, e.g. the BBC Music Magazine’s 2013 “Instrumental CD of the Year" award as well as the Canadian "Juno Award" in 2018.
Michel Béroff
Michel Béroff was born in France in 1950. After graduating from the Paris conservatoire in 1966, he won the following year the first prize at the first international Olivier Messiaen piano competition. He has been since considered one of the most outstanding interpreter of Messiaen’s music. He then went on to play with the most prestigious orchestras around the world under the direction of such conductors as Abbado, Barenboim, Bernstein, Boulez, Dohnanyi, Dorati, Dutoit, Eschenbach, Gielen, Inbal, Jochum, Leinsdorf, Masur, Ozawa, Previn, Rostropovitch, Sinopoli, Solti, Tennsted, Tilson-Thomas, Zinman. As a chamber music partner, he has been very active playing with Martha Argerich, Barbara Hendricks Jean- Philippe Collard, Augustin Dumay, Pierre Amoyal, Lynn Harrell.
As a conductor, Michel Beroff has been conducting the chamber orchestra de la Scala de Milano, the Russian state Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Orchestre National de Lille, the Cannes chamber orchestra, the Berkeley symphony, the Montréal youth orchestra.
Professor Emeritus at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught for 25 years, Michel Béroff is giving regular master classes in many countries, including Japan, China, USA, Italy, Germany and France.
Andrea Bonatta
ANDREA BONATTA is one of the most prominent Italian pianist and a successful conductor. He has given concerts all around the world. He has recorded on CD Brahms’ complete works for piano as well as several other CD’s dedicated to Liszt and Schubert, getting top critical reviews: His book on Brahms’ piano work is considered a milestone in this field.
Andrea Bonatta has been the Artistic Director and jury Chairman of the International “F. Busoni” Piano Competition and the Vice President of the World Federation of International Music Competitions of Geneva. He is now Artistic Adviser of the “Franz Liszt” Competition in Utrecht. He is also Honorary Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory, founder and director of the Piano Academy-Eppan and teaches at the Talent Music Master Courses in Brescia. Bonatta is often invited as a member of the jury at the most important international competitions, such as Liszt-Utrecht, Scriabin-Moscow, Beethoven-Bonn, Géza Anda-Zurich, Van Cliburn-Texas, Rubinstein-Tel Aviv, Cleveland (Jury Chairman), Sendai and many others. He very much likes chamber music and has played as a duet with pianists such as Paul Badura-Skoda and Pavel Gililov or violinists like Domenico Nordio or Sergei Krylov. Andrea Bonatta gave masterclasses in Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Hannover, Cologne, Moscow, Salzburg, Vienna, New York, Boston and many others.
Since many years Bonatta performs Mozart Concertos conducting from the piano, which led him to conduct also the great symphonic repertoire. As a conductor he has worked among others with the Orchestra del Teatro Olimpico di Vicenza in Italy, the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra in China, the Suwon Philharmonic Orchestra and the KBS Symphony Orchestra in South Korea, the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra in Georgia, and the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra in Vilnius. In his symphonic repertoire the Symphonies of Johannes Brahms play a central role. Arie Vardi has said about him: indeed a natural born conductor with music flowing in the hands