Most of a student’s year is spent playing for one person: their own teacher, in the same room, on the same instrument. That is how repertoire gets built. It is not how nerve gets built.
The masterclass series exists for the other half of the job. Across the term, three visiting professors each take a day, and students play for someone who has never heard them before, in front of everyone else in the room.
Dr. O’Donohue is a member of the artist piano and chamber music faculty at NYU’s Steinhardt School, in the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions, and teaches on both the college and precollege faculties of the Manhattan School of Music. Her PhD in Piano Performance is from New York University.
She has given solo and chamber recitals in Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada and the United States, and has taught masterclasses and lecture-demonstrations at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Shanghai Conservatory, the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Poona Music Society in India. She received the Sparrendam Medal for performance in the Netherlands, and New York University’s Roger Phelps Award for her dissertation.
Albert Attenelle studied with Frank Marshall in Barcelona and Marcel Ciampi in Paris. He appeared as a soloist with the orchestras of Bilbao and Barcelona from 1957, and took prizes in Rio de Janeiro, at the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium and at the Vianna da Motta in Lisbon, a run that placed him among the leading Spanish pianists of his generation.
He teaches at the Conservatori del Liceu and directs L’Escola de Música de Barcelona. He works in Spanish, French, English and Catalan, which matters more than it sounds: a student who freezes in one language will often keep thinking in another.
Stanislav Pochekin holds a BMus from the Gnesin Institute in Moscow. In 1989 he moved to Cuba, where he taught at the Instituto Superior del Arte in Havana, and in 1993 he was appointed to the Conservatori del Liceu in Barcelona, where he still teaches.
Between them, the three carry the Russian, Catalan and American schools into the same week. Students who take more than one day notice how differently each of them listens.
There are two ways into the room, and the cheaper one is not the lesser one.
Active students of the school pay a reduced rate on both, and there is a package that covers the full run of days rather than one at a time. Rates are set each term, so ask the office for the current sheet rather than working from an old one.
You do not need a finished piece to take a performer place. You need a piece you are working on and one honest question about it.
Bring the score, not a photocopy, and bring it marked. Choose something you have lived with for at least a few weeks. A masterclass is not the place to unveil a piece you learned last Tuesday. And decide in advance what you want out of the twenty minutes, because the professor will almost certainly ask.
Places are limited and are usually filled by students already working with our faculty. Speak to your teacher first, then confirm with the office.
Other notes from the studios.
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