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| Piano
Competition and Festival Guest Faculty: Robert Weirich '72 < Back to Main Story
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 Robert
Weirich '72 has held the Jack Strandberg Missouri Endowed Chair in
Piano at the University of Missouri in Kansas City Conservatory of
Music since 1998. His solo performances have taken him to musical
centers throughout the country, including Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy
Center, Chicago's Orchestra Hall, and to such summer festivals as
Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Marlboro. International performances include
concerts in Canada, Europe, and the Far East. He is an avid chamber
musician and was the artistic director of the Skaneateles Festival
in New York's Finger Lakes District from 1991 to 1999; during that
time the Festival received three Adventuresome Programming Awards
from ASCAP and Chamber Music America and attendance more than doubled.
His work with the Festival was also honored by the National Federation
of Music Clubs, the Cultural Resources Council of Central New York,
and with a SAMMY award (voted by his peers) from the Syracuse Area
Music Awards program.He is currently president of the College Music Society, a 9,000-member national consortium of college and university music faculty. UMKC recently awarded him a Trustees' Faculty Fellowship, the N.T. Veatch Prize for distinguished research and creative activity, and in 2003 the first Muriel McBrien Kaufmann Artistry/Scholarship Award. His students have pursued a wide range of successful careers in music and have won top prizes in such important piano competitions as the 1992 Naumburg Competition (Awadagin Pratt) and the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (Stanislav Ioudenitch). As a pianist he has performed in musical centers throughout the country, including Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, Chicago's Orchestra Hall, and at such summer festivals as Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Marlboro. The winner of prizes in several important competitions, Weirich received a Solo Recitalist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 and was one of the first winners of the Pope Foundation Music Awards, a substantial cash prize to support innovative music projects, in 1992. In the fall of 1998 Weirich joined the faculty of the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where he holds the Jack Strandberg Missouri Endowed Chair in Piano. He has previously taught at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, Northwestern University, Tulane University, and Syracuse University. He has given numerous recitals and master classes across the United States, and appeared in 1995 as the convention artist for the Music Teachers National Association meeting in Albuquerque. His articles and reviews have been published by various music magazines, but readers of Clavier magazine are most aware of his columns, "The View from the Second Floor" from 1984 to 1993 and its successor, "Out of the Woods." He has twice received the Educational Press Achievement Award for his writing. Weirich has come only lately to composition, but already several of his works have received multiple performances. In 1996 his A Flurry of Fanfares was commissioned by the Syracuse Society for New Music and WCNY-FM in celebration of their joint 25th anniversaries. In 1998 three new works received their premieres: The Visitant (for solo viola); A Garden Softly Fading (for piano), and Steamboat Stomp (for horn and piano), commissioned by the Strings in the Mountain Festival. A collection of his pieces for student pianists, A Child's Piano Book, will be published by Carl Fischer, Inc. in 2004. A 1972 graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Emil Danenberg, Weirich received the DMA degree from Yale University in 1981, and was honored with its Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1989. |
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