Piedmont Piano Company is pleased to present
Rachel Breen & Adam Balogh
Musical Stories: From Heaven to Hell
A Piano Recital
Juilliard graduate and Oakland native Rachel Breen and Hungary's Junior Prima Award-winner Ádám Balogh present a joint piano recital and talk. They will perform music by Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and Ravel. Light refreshments will follow the performance.
FREE ADMISSION
RSVP recommended
Donations welcome
Twenty-one-year-old Rachel Breen of Oakland, California is a recent graduate of the Juilliard School, where she was a student of Julian Martin and coached chamber music with Joseph Kalichstein and Roger Tapping. Previously, she studied with Dr. Sharon Mann at the San Francisco Conservatory; until age 10, she was self-taught. Breen has won prizes in a number of national and international competitions, including first prizes in the Mondavi National Competition and the MTAC competition. She received the award for best solo performance from Professor Sergei Babayan at the 2013 Arthur Fraser International Competition, and has received top prizes as the youngest competitor in three age divisions of the International Russian Music Piano Competition. She was also an invited competitor and concerto-round semi-finalist at the 2014 Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition and performed at the Hilton Head International Piano Competition in 2013. She was named a 2014 Finalist by the National YoungArts Association and performed at YoungArts week in Miami as a result. She was a featured artist in the 2013 Oberlin Artist Recital series, the 2016 Aspen Music Festival Overture Series, and Alice Tully Hall’s 2018 Wednesday at 1 series, where she gave the world premiere of Theo Chandler’s piano quartet, Variations Between the Creases. She has performed a number of times with orchestra; most recently, she performed at Lincoln Center with the Juilliard Chamber Orchestra.
Breen specializes in the music of Bach, and has performed many times for the Junior Bach Festival. Appearing frequently at openings for books about Glenn Gould, her musical idol, she has presented a series of recitals for the launching of author Katie Hafner’s book A Romance on Three Legs.
Aside from piano, she graduated from Miramonte High School at 16, where she received the first prize on the National Latin Exam and third prize on the National French Exam. She hopes to pursue a career as a performing and recording artist.
Ádám Balogh, twenty-year-old pianist, made his orchestral debut with the Budapest Festival Orchestra at the age of thirteen. Since then, he has received awards in national and international competitions, including the inagural Cliburn Junior Competition, and the New York Concert Artists’ Worldwide Debut Audition.
Born in 1997, Ádám started to play piano at age seven and shortly thereafter, began gaining national recognition as a winner of many national competitions in Hungary. In 2010, he made his orchestral debut with the Budapest Festival Orchestra under the baton of Ivan Fischer. Since, he performed with the Berlin Konzerthaus, Concerto Budapest, the Pannon Philharmonic, Budapest Danubia, the NYCA Philharmonic, and the Liszt Chamber Orchestra, among others. At the age of thirteen, he was accepted to the Exceptional Talents’ Class of the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, where he studied for six years with Attila Nemethy and Gabor Eckhardt.
He has taken lessons and masterclasses with teachers including Dimitry Bashkirov, Zoltán Kocsis, Arie Vardi, Roger Muraro, Yohaved Kaplinsky, Stanislav Loudenitch, Ching-Yun Hu, Emanuel Krasovsky, Jerome Lowenthal, Douglas Humpherys, Dina Yoffe, Alon Goldstein, Miklós Perényi, and Tamás Vásáry, among others.
In recent years, he has performed in the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, The United States, Malta, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Croatia, and Israel, as well as in the most popular venues in Hungary. He often appears in national media, where he has had interviews and live recitals broadcasted.