The Music Department at Mary Baldwin University is pleased to announce the opening Broman Concert of the season, featuring the internationally acclaimed pianist Sean Chen, at 7:30 p.m. on October 14 in Francis Auditorium on the main MBU campus.
Chen will perform the beautiful Eight Piano Pieces, op. 76, by Johannes Brahms, along with Six Chants Polonais by Liszt/Chopin, Haydn’s delightful Fantasia in C Major, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s stunning Variations on a theme of Chopin.
“We are thrilled to bring an artist of this caliber to the stage at Mary Baldwin University,” said Lise Keiter, chair of the Music Department at MBU.
Hailed as a rising star with a “million-volt smile” and a “formidable set of fingers” by the Dallas Morning News, Chen is a performer of tremendous depth, a composer, and an arranger, who has already earned three high-profile awards and an impressive following. In 2013 Chen won the American Pianists Association’s (APA) DeHaan Classical Fellowship, one of the most significant prizes available to an American pianist. As the first American to reach the finals of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition since 1997, he went on to win the Bronze Medal at the Cliburn in 2014 and then became the 2015 recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship.
Now serving as the Millsap Artist in Residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, Chen received undergraduate and graduate degrees at Juilliard. At the Yale School of Music, he earned his artist diploma as a George W. Miles Fellowship recipient. He has been featured in a nationally syndicated radio series produced by WFMT-Chicago, as well as on From the Top, American Public Media’s Performance Today, WQXR (New York), WFMT (Chicago), WGBH (Boston), and WFYI (Indianapolis). Steinway & Sons released his solo album, La Valse, recorded as part of his APA prize, prompting Vivien Schweitzer of the New York Times to praise his “alluring and colorfully shaded renditions” of Scriabin and Ravel. International Piano Magazine has named him “One to Watch.”
Tickets for Chen’s concert may be purchased at the door and are $25 for the general public, $20 for senior citizens, and $5 for non-MBU students. (MBU students are free.) Season tickets are also available. Purchase tickets online or call 540-887-7294.