The June week of the 2016 Southeastern Piano Festival featured wonderful concerts from Sergei Babayan, Ann Schein, Eric Lu, and great performances from our twenty rising stars, the participants of the festival. The rest of the summer was filled with travel, concerts, teaching and adjudicating. The Lomazov/Rackers piano duo was invited to perform a rarely heard work for duo piano by Anton Rubinstein at the American Liszt Society Festival in Los Angeles in late May. In June, Joe and I were privileged to be invited once again to join the faculty of the Texas State International Piano Festival, directed by Jason Kwak, and featuring guest faculty Washington Garcia, Boris Slutsky, Julian Martin, Enrico Elisi, Anton Nel, and Carol Leone. Two trips to Indiana, in June and July, took us to adjudicate for the Carmel Klavier international competition for pianists ages 5-18 and to perform and teach at the Indiana University Summer Piano Academy, directed by Karen Taylor and David Cartledge.
Music Fest Perugia is a summer destination we always look forward to each year. Directed by Ilana Vered and Sasha Starcevich, and featuring outstanding faculty that includes Jerome Lowenthal, Ursula Oppens, John Perry, John O’Conor and many others, this festival offers a unique opportunity for all participants of the festival to perform with orchestra. Filled with music from morning to night, it is a glorious way to spend several weeks in one of the most beautiful locales in Europe. There, I performed Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto no. 2 with the Alicante Symphony Orchestra followed by three performances of this work in the U.S. with the Brevard Philharmonic, Aiken Philharmonic, and University of South Carolina Symphony Orchestra.
