Recognized by colleagues and critics worldwide as a leading chamber musician and collaborative pianist, Jonathan Feldman has performed on four continents with some of the world’s greatest instrumentalists, among them the legendary Nathan Milstein, Itzhak Perlman, Gil Shaham, James Galway, Sarah Chang, and Joshua Bell. He performed regularly with the New York Philharmonic as a keyboard player within the orchestra and as a chamber musician appeared in concert with the New York Philharmonic Chamber Ensembles and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. He was a featured performer in a Live From Lincoln Center with Gil Shaham, which was broadcast throughout the United States on PBS.

A graduate of The Juilliard School, Mr. Feldman joined the Juilliard faculty in 1989 and was chairman of the school’s collaborative piano department from 1991-2015. He joined the faculty of New England Conservatory in 2010. He has given masterclasses throughout the United States and the Far East, and has lectured at international festivals and competitions. He is the Director of Collaborative Piano at the Music Academy of the West, a post he has held since 2005. He has appeared in other summer festivals, such as Tanglewood, Bridgehampton, Music from Angel Fire, Bravo Festival in Vail, Colorado, Hidden Valley Music Seminars, and the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival.

Mr. Feldman's most recent recordings, with his wife, New York Philharmonic principal bassoonist Judith LeClair, and principal flutist Robert Langevin, are available on Avie Records. He has also recorded for Angel/EMI, Columbia Masterworks, DGG, RCA Red Seal, Naxos, Nonesuch, Summit, and Cala Records. He can be heard on soundtracks for many movies, including Music of the Heart with Meryl Streep and The Man Who Wasn't There by the Coen Brothers.

Natasha Kislenko has performed extensively as a soloist and a collaborative pianist across Russia, Europe, Asia and the United States. She has appeared in recital and chamber music performances with numerous distinguished soloists, including Torleif Tedeen, James Buswell, Zvi Zeitlin, Theodore Kuchar, Tadeu Coelho, and Leone Buyse.

As a soloist, Ms. Kislenko has received top prizes in international piano competitions in Germany, Portugal, France, the Slovak Republic, and the United States. She made her solo recital debut in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1996, and most recently has appeared with Orquesta del Congreso Nacional in Paraguay, the Varna Chamber Orchestra in Bulgaria, the Eskisehir Municipal symphony orchestra in Turkey, and the Santa Barbara Symphony.

Ms. Kislenko holds graduate degrees in piano from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX) and the Stony Brook University, NY, where she completed her doctorate with Gilbert Kalish in 2004.

In 2007 Ms. Kislenko moved to Santa Barbara to assume a teaching position at UC Santa Barbara. Previously, she served on the faculties of California State University Fresno and Meadowmount School of Music (New York).

An alumna of the Music Academy (2001), Ms. Kislenko has been a member of the faculty since 2004.

Pianist Margaret McDonald, a native of Minnesota, is an Associate Professor of Collaborative Piano at the University of Colorado Boulder.  She joined the College of Music keyboard faculty in the fall of 2004. She helped to develop the College’s graduate degree program in Collaborative Piano and the undergraduate collaborative curriculum. Praised for her poetic style and versatility, Dr. McDonald enjoys a very active performing career and has partnered many distinguished artists including the Takács Quartet, Kathleen Winkler, Zuill Bailey, Paula Robison, Carol Wincenc, Ben Kamins, David Shifrin, William VerMeulen, David Jolley, Ian Bousfield, Joseph Alessi, Steven Mead, and Velvet Brown.  She has performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Dr. McDonald received her Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees in Piano Performance from the University of Minnesota and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Collaborative Piano from the University of California – Santa Barbara.  Her principal teachers include Lydia Artymiw and Anne Epperson.  She received fellowships to study at both the Music Academy of the West and the Tanglewood Music Center where she worked closely with Dawn Upshaw, Robert Spano, and Osvaldo Golijov.

Dr. McDonald is active throughout the country giving master classes at institutions including The Juilliard School, Indiana University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, Arizona State University, University of California - Santa Barbara, and Louisiana State University.  She has released recordings with Velvet Brown, tuba, Aaron Tindall, tuba, and Erika Eckert, viola for Potenza Records and Meridian Records.

Dr. McDonald has been a staff accompanist at the Meadowmount School for Strings in New York and an official accompanist at the Music Teachers National Association competition and the National Flute Association annual convention. McDonald is an alumna of the Music Academy of the West and has been a member of the Music Academy faculty since 2005.

Composer and pianist Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

2023/24 highlights include a solo recital debut for Carnegie Hall, new commissions for the Moab Music Festival and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, a tour with the Calder Quartet including performances at San Francisco Performances and Chamber Music Albuquerque, and the world premiere of a piano concerto for Aaron Diehl at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by John Adams. Andres’s orchestrations and arrangements for Justin Peck’s new production of Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois, were premiered in a sold-out Summer 2023 run at The Fisher Center at Bard; the production has upcoming dates in Chicago, New York and elsewhere.

Notable works include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia premiered at the Barbican by Andres and David Kaplan; and The Blind Banister, a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

As a pianist, Timo Andres has appeared with the LA Phil, North Carolina Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the New World Symphony, the Metropolis Ensemble, among others. He has performed solo recitals for Lincoln Center, and Wigmore Hall.

Collaborators include Becca Stevens, Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel Kahane, Brad Mehldau, Nadia Sirota, and Philip Glass, who selected Andres as the recipient of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize.  He was nominated for a Grammy award for his performances on 2021’s The Arching Path, an album of music by Christopher Cerrone.

Andres’s collaborations with Sufjan Stevens also include his May 2023 recording with Conor Hanick of Stevens’s latest album, Reflections; arrangements of ballets for New York City Ballet, and a solo piano album, The Decalogue.

A Nonesuch Records artist, Timo Andres has multiple solo albums on the label (with more set for upcoming release) and is featured as composer and pianist on the May 2020 release I Still Play, an album celebrating Robert Hurwitz. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is a Yamaha/Bösendorfer Artist and is on the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music at the New School.

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Denk returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and in recent seasons has appeared with the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and The Cleveland Orchestra, as well as on tour with Academy of St Martin in the Fields and at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.

In 2019-2020, until the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of all performances, Denk toured Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier Book 1 extensively, and was to have performances culminate with Lincoln Center in New York and the Barbican in London. He returned to Carnegie Hall to perform Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy with Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and made his solo debut at the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. He also made his solo recital debut at the Boulez Saal in Berlin performing works by Bach, Ligeti, Berg, and Schumann, and returned to the Piano aux Jacobins Festival in France, as well as London’s Wigmore Hall. Further performances abroad included his debut with the Bournemouth Symphony, his returns to the City of Birmingham Symphony and the Piano Espoo Festival in Finland, and recitals of the complete Ives Violin Sonatas with Stefan Jackiw.

Highlights of the previous season included a three-week recital tour, culminating in Denk’s return to Carnegie Hall; play-directing Mozart Concerti on an extensive tour with Academy of St Martin in the Fields; and a nationwide trio tour with Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis. He also performed and curated a series of Mozart Violin Sonatas (‘Denk & Friends’) at Carnegie Hall.

Denk is also known for his original and insightful writing on music, which Alex Ross praises for its “arresting sensitivity and wit.” He wrote the libretto for a comic opera presented by Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Aspen Festival, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New Republic, The Guardian, and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. One of his New Yorker contributions, “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” forms the basis of a book for future publication by Random House in the US, and Macmillan in the UK.

Denk’s recording of the Goldberg Variations for Nonesuch Records reached No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Charts. His recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111 paired with Ligeti’s Études was named one of the best discs of the year by the New Yorker, NPR, and the Washington Post, and his account of the Beethoven sonata was selected by BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library as the best available version recorded on modern piano. Denk has a long-standing attachment to the music of American visionary Charles Ives, and his recording of Ives’s two piano sonatas also featured in many “best of the year” lists. His recording c.1300-c.2000 was released in 2018 with music ranging from Guillaume de Machaut, Gilles Binchois and Carlo Gesualdo, to Stockhausen, Ligeti and Glass.

Jeremy Denk graduated from Oberlin College, Indiana University, and The Juilliard School. He lives in New York City, and his website and blog are at jeremydenk.net.

Mr. Denk has been a Music Academy of the West faculty artist since 2015.

Pianist Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old whose “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation benefit works by any master.” (New York Times) Hanick’s playing, “a revelation of clarity and bite,” reminds the Times’ Anthony Tommasini of a “young Peter Serkin.” His performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes was, according to the Times’ critic David Allan, “the best instrumental concert I have seen all year”; praise echoed by the Boston Globe, which named the performance “Best Solo Recital” of 2019.

Hanick has recently been presented by The Gilmore Festival, the New York Philharmonic, Caramoor, Cal Performances, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Park Avenue Armory, and performed with the Seattle Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Orchestra Iowa, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. A fierce advocate for the music of today, and “the soloist of choice for such thorny works” (NYT), Hanick has premiered over 200 pieces and collaborated with composers both emerging and iconic; among them, Hanick has worked with Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, Steve Reich, and Charles Wuorinen, in addition to the leading composers of his generation, including Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, Matthew Aucoin, and Christopher Cerrone.

In the 2022-23 season, Hanick premieres a new piano concerto by composer Samuel Carl Adams with the San Francisco Symphony and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen; appears with soprano Julia Bullock at the Aix en Provence Festival in Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi; and presented in recital by the Library of Congress, Hancher Auditorium, Ensemble Music Society of Indianapolis, the 92nd Street Y, and elsewhere. He is a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), a group of artists focused on developing discipline-colliding work. With that group, Hanick served as co-artistic director of the Ojai Festival in 2022 and present work the Spoleto Festival, Carolina Performing Arts, Saint John the Devine, and LaMaMa Theater.

Since 2014 Hanick has been a teaching artist at the Music Academy. He has given lectures and masterclasses in Asia, Europe, and throughout the US, including Northwestern University, the New England Conservatory, UCLA, The University of Washington, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Iowa. He is a member of the piano and chamber music faculty of The Juilliard School, Mannes College, and the Peabody Institute of Music. A Yamaha Artist, Hanick a graduate of Northwestern University and the Juilliard School, and lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, son, and Westies.