Noted pianists to perform at NSU

NATCHITOCHES – Pianists Krassimira Jordan and Pamela Mia Paul will perform at Northwestern State University Friday, Sept 27 at 7:30 p.m. in Magale Recital Hall. The concert is part of the Louisiana Piano Series International. Tickets are $15. Season tickets are $50 for all four concerts in the 2013-14 series. Students are admitted free.

Dr. Francis Yang and Dr. Christine Burczyk Allen are the organizers of the Louisiana Piano Series International. Information on the Louisiana Piano Series International is available at music.nsula.edu/lpsi.

Jordan is a professor of piano and artist in residence at Baylor University.

She is the winner of Alfred Casella, Clara Haskil, Alessandro Casagrande and Rio de Janeiro international piano competitions. Jordan has been a recitalist and orchestral soloist in throughout Europe, Asia, North America and South America. Formerly a professor of piano at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1989.

Her compact disc releases, “Slavic Masterworks for Piano” and “The Legacy of Pantcho Vladigerov,” are both available on the Albany Records label. The most recent CD, which includes “Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor,” is available on cdbaby.com/cd/krassimira.

Her publications on the teaching of Anton Rubinstein, the music of Bulgarian composer Pantcho Vladigerov and the artistry of one of the most enigmatic — and certainly the most adventurous — pianists of recent times, Marc-André Hamelin, have attracted the attention of music scholars and magazines worldwide.

Many of Jordan’s former students hold prestigious positions at different schools in the U.S., Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Austria, Romania and Germany. She has made presentations, master classes, lecture-demonstrations and adjudications for piano teacher’s association throughout the U.S.

Paul is acclaimed as a performer and teacher. She has performed with many of the world’s great orchestras and has given concerts throughout the United States as well as in Europe and Asia as a soloist and chamber musician.

Paul’s European orchestral appearances include the Vienna ORF Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Berlin Stadskapelle and the Dutch Radio Symphony. Her U.S. orchestral appearances include those with the New York Philharmonic, Detroit, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Houston symphonies, American Composers Orchestra, Boston Pops, New York Pops, the Minnesota Orchestra and Caramoor Festival Orchestra. Paul has appeared in major concert halls including Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Musikverein and Konzerthaus in Vienna and the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam.

As a chamber musician, she has been an invited guest artist at the Salzburg and Bregenz festivals in Austria, Aspen Music Festival in Colorado and at Music Mountain in Connecticut. She has performed with the Cassatt, Penderecki, Borromeo, Chester, Orlando, Leontovich, Miro, DaPonte and St. Petersburg quartets.

Her students hold teaching positions throughout the United States and Asia and have participated in and won competitions including the Nina Widemann Competition and the Naumburg International Piano Competition.

Paul has commissioned and premiered works for the piano. Those works include Robert Beaser’s “Piano Concerto,” which was written for her and had its world premiere in the United States with the St. Louis Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin, and in Europe with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic under conductor Richard Dufallo.

She received the doctor of musical arts, master of music, and bachelor of music degrees from the Juilliard School. She is regents’ professor of piano at the University of North Texas and a Steinway artist.