The Program

Program to be announced

The Artists

From State College, PA, soprano Sarah Shafer studies in the opera program at the Curtis Institute of Music with Joan Patenaude-Yarnell. She graduated from the voice program at Curtis with a Bachelor of Music degree in 2010. Shafer's engagements during the 2011-12 season included her professional operatic debut in the role of Barbarina and the cover role of Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro at the Glyndebourne Festival, and soprano soloist in Mahler's Fourth Symphony with Curtis On Tour in China and South Korea. She will make her debut with the Opera Company of Philadelphia singing Papagena in Die Zauberflöte in 2013. Shafer recently attended the Mozart and Handel residency as part of the Académie européenne de musique in Aix-en-Provence, France. She spent the past two summers as a resident artist at the Marlboro Music Festival, where she worked with Benita Valente, Martin Isepp and Richard Goode. She and Mr. Goode appear in recital with PCMS in December 2012. For more information on Sarah Shafer, visit sarahshafersoprano.com.

Richard Goode has been hailed for music-making of tremendous emotional power, depth and expressiveness, and has been acknowledged worldwide as one of today’s leading interpreters of Classical and Romantic music. In regular performances with the major orchestras, recitals in the world’s music capitals, and acclaimed Nonesuch recordings, he has won a large and devoted following. In an extensive profile in The New Yorker, David Blum wrote: “What one remembers most from Goode’s playing is not its beauty—exceptional as it is—but his way of coming to grips with the composer’s central thought, so that a work tends to make sense beyond one’s previous perception of it…. The spontaneous formulating process of the creator [becomes] tangible in the concert hall.” Mr. Goode's first recording of the five Beethoven Concertos with Ivan Fisher and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, released in 2009 by Nonesuch Records, was nominated for a Gramophone Magazine “Concerto of the Year” award joining his historic recording of the complete Beethoven Sonatas and equally acclaimed recent recordings of Mozart and Bach. His 2012-13 season included recitals in some of the world's leading music centers such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and engagements in London, Berlin, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles, in addition to performances and master classes at major universities and conservatories in the U.S. and abroad. Richard Goode was honored for his contributions to music with the first ever Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance, which culminated in a two-season residency at Northwestern University. In May 2010, he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship from Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Richard Goode is the first American-born pianist to have recorded the complete Beethoven Sonatas, which were nominated for a Grammy Award and are universally acclaimed. A native of New York, Mr. Goode studied with Elvira Szigeti and Claude Frank, with Nadia Reisenberg at the Mannes College of Music, and with Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute. He has won many prizes, including the Young Concert Artists Award, First Prize in the Clara Haskil Competition, the Avery Fisher Prize, and a Grammy Award.