Friday, February 8 at 7:30 pm
Great Hall
Free parking and admission

Reception with the artist follows immediately

Program:
J.S. Bach: Passacaglia in C minor, BWV 582
Gabriel Fauré:  Nocturnes Nos. 6, 7 and 13
Maurice Ravel:  Valses nobles et sentimentales
Lili Boulanger:  Thème et variations
Nadia Boulanger: Vers la vie nouvelle
Émile Naoumoff: Las Brisas

On Saturday, February 9 at 9:30 am, Mr. Naoumoff will return to St. Matthew’s to conduct a master class with select young pianists and a chamber music ensemble from Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts. Admission is free to the public. Donations are welcomed.

About the Artist:
Émile Naoumoff has been likened to both Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein as a pianist, displaying — as one critic remarked — the fire of the former and the poetry of the latter. Émile revealed himself as a musical prodigy at age five, taking up the piano and adding composition to his studies a year later. At the age of seven, after a fateful meeting in Paris, he became the last disciple of the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who referred to him as “The gift of my old age.” He studied with her until her death in late 1979. During this auspicious apprenticeship, Mlle. Boulanger gave him the opportunity to work with Clifford Curzon, Igor Markevitch, Robert and Gaby Casadesus, Nikita Magaloff, Jean Francaix, Leonard Bernstein, Soulima Stravinsky, Aram Khachaturian and Yehudi Menuhin. Lord Menuhin conducted the premiere of Émile’s first piano concerto, with the composer as a soloist, when he was ten years old. At the same time, he pursued music courses at the Paris Conservatory with Lelia Gousseau, Pierre Sancan and Genevieve Joy-Dutilleux, and studied conducting at the École Normale de Musique de Paris with Pierre Dervaux.

Émile regularly appears with the world’s premier orchestras: the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Berlin Symphony, the Vienna Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony in Washington, Moscow Symphony, NHK Symphony, the Residentie Orkest of the Hague, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France, Camerata Bern, and has worked closely with conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Igor Markevitch, Leonard Slatkin, Mstislav Rostropovich and Eliahu Inbal. His musical collaborations include Jean-Pierre Rampal, Gerard Souzay, Yo-Yo Ma, Gary Hoffman, Olivier Charlier, Patrice Fontanarosa, Regis Pasquier, Philippe Graffin, Philippe Bernold, Gerard Caussé, Jean Ferrandis, Dominique de Williencourt and the Fine Arts Quartet.

Highlights of his career include a performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, and his own piano concerto version of Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich. In recent years Émile has been invited to numerous music festivals, including the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music’s Menuhin Seminars, Santander Summer Masterclasses, Verbier Academy Festival, the Banff Center, and residencies at Conservatory of Barcelona (ESMUC). In 1996, he opened his own summer academy at the Château de Rangiport in Gargenville, France, in the spirit of Nadia Boulanger. Émile has been a professor at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music since 1998. He is an avid composer of French mélodies, and is known for his mastery in transcribing music for the piano. Émile maintains a video journal of daily improvisations on his YouTube channel.

Read more about the artist here.