American pianist *Adam Neiman* is hailed as one of the premiere pianists of his generation, praised for possessing a truly rare blend of power, bravura, imagination, sensitivity, and technical precision. With an established international career and an encyclopedic repertoire that spans over fifty concertos, Neiman has performed as soloist with the symphony orchestras of Belgrade, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Minnesota, Saint Louis, San Francisco, Umbria, and Utah, as well as with the New York Chamber Symphony and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington D.C. He has collaborated with many of the world’s celebrated conductors, including Jiri Belohlavek, Giancarlo Guerrero, Theodor Gushlbauer, Carlos Kalmer, Uros Lajovic, Yoël Levi, Andrew Litton, Rossen Milanov, Heichiro Ohyama, Peter Oundjian, Leonard Slatkin, and Emmanuel Villaume.
A highly-acclaimed recitalist, Neiman has performed in most of the major cities and concert halls throughout the United States and Canada. His European solo engagements have brought him to Italy, France, Germany, and Japan, where he made an eight-city tour culminating in his debut at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall.
Neiman’s ’10-’11 season highlights include a monumental solo recital tour celebrating the Franz Liszt bi-centennial by lecturing about and performing the complete cycle of Transcendental Etudes as well as his complete Piano Concerti. Reengagements as soloist with orchestra include performances with the Slovenian Philharmonic, Manchester Chamber Orchestra, and Orquesta Sinfonica de Chile. He will make his debut with the New Symphony Orchestra in Sofia, Bulgaria, debuts with the Sejong Soloists at the Great Mountains Music Festival in Korea, as well as his debut with the Orchestra of Saint Luke’s under the baton of Pinchas Zukerman. Other orchestral engagements include appearances with the Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra, Santa Cruz Symphony, and Symphony in C. In addition, he will play recitals in Chicago, New York, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Seattle, Vancouver, and Washington D.C., and he will take part in prestigious festivals in Great Barrington, Los Angeles, Manchester, Milwaukee, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Seattle, as well as at the Great Mountains Music Festival in Korea. A major exponent of contemporary music, Neiman performs works by Lera Auerbach, Kenji Bunch, Elliott Carter, Arturo Marquez, Sean Osborne, Gerard Schwarz, George Tsontakis, Pablo Ziegler, and Patrick Zimmerli, and he is to receive a concerto dedication by the renowned composer Benjamin Yusupov.
An avid chamber musician, Neiman became a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center II in 2004. He frequently participates in the major chamber music festivals of Belgrade, Caramoor, Croatia, Korea, Macedonia, Manchester, Montenegro, Moritzburg, Seattle, Tokyo, Vail, Vancouver, as well as New York’s Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players series. He is a founding member of the Corinthian Trio, with violinist Stefan Milenkovich and cellist Ani Aznavoorian, and he has made numerous guest appearances with famous string quartets, such as the Miro, the Parker, the Saint Petersburg, and the Ying. Additionally, he is a frequent guest of Camerata Pacifica in Los Angeles as well as with the New York-based string ensemble Concertante, and he has performed on the FleetBoston Celebrity Series and the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music Series.
Neiman’s latest CD is a recording of solo piano works by Anton Arensky for Naxos, released in July 2010. Naxos also recently released his world premiere performance of Jennifer Higdon’s Piano Trio, live from the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival.
His widely varied discography includes three major commercial releases for VAI: a 2-CD set of Mozart’s early keyboard concertos with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, an award-winning 2-CD solo recital set entitled “Adam Neiman Live in Recital,” proclaimed by the American Record Guide as its “Critic’s Choice” for 2007 and 2008, and a DVD entitled “Adam Neiman: Chopin Recital.” His debut recording on Lyric Records of a live, unedited solo recital at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall was re-issued on iTunes in 2010.
Future projects include an upcoming recording for Deutsche Grammaphon with acclaimed violist Richard O’Neill of the complete Sonatas for Viola and Piano by Brahms, due for release in 2011.
Neiman also has a major web presence, including his own YouTube channel featuring high-definition video footage from recent concert tours.
Radio and television broadcasts featuring Neiman regularly span international airwaves, and his live performance of the Brahms Rhapsodies, Op. 79, at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival on NPR’s “Performance Today” was nominated for a Grammy Award. He is a frequent guest lecturer and performer for “Performance Today,” often giving “Performance Chats” in which he talks in detail about the music he is currently working on and then proceeds to perform live on national radio.
Chosen as a featured artist by the Academy Award nominated director Josh Aronson, Adam Neiman appeared in the PBS documentary film “Playing for Real,” which aired worldwide and continues to air on the Bravo and Ovation networks. He was also featured in the PBS documentary by Peter Rosen entitled “In the Key of G,” a film about the Gilmore Festival.
His affiliation with PBS and the documentary film genre has merged with his passion for composition: he was engaged to write the score for a major documentary film by the Emmy Award-winning director/producer Helen Whitney, due to air over two nights on PBS. His output as a composer includes works for solo piano, voice, chamber ensemble, and symphony orchestra. He frequently performs his own music in recital, and his newest chamber work, Two Elegies for Clarinet and Piano, receives its premiere this season in New York at Poisson Rouge, in Seattle at Benaroya Hall, and in Mexico at the International Festival Cervantinos.
Born in 1978, Neiman has captured the attention of audiences and critics alike since his concerto debut at 11 in Los Angeles’s Royce Hall. Clavier Magazine wrote, “Adam Neiman gave a performance that rivaled those of many artists on the concert stage today…his playing left listeners shaking their heads in disbelief.” His formative years saw him at the helm of many competitions, with top prizes at the MTNA’s Junior Baldwin Competition, UCLA’s Samick International Competition, the Joanna Hodges International Competition, the Stravinsky Awards International Competition, the Young Keyboard Artists Association International Competition, the California Concerto Competition, and the California State Bartok Competition. At fourteen, he debuted in Germany at the Ivo Pogorelich Festival, and at fifteen, he won second prize at the Casagrande International Piano Competition in Italy, the youngest winner in the competition’s history. In 1995, Neiman also became the youngest-ever winner of the Gilmore Young Artist Award. The following year, he won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and went on to make his Washington D.C. and New York recital debuts at the Kennedy Center and the 92nd Street Y. The Washington Post remarked, “A collection of Chopin’s Waltzes and Nocturnes danced and stormed, and Prokofieff’s Second Sonata enthralled with a dazzling display of inner voices rather than a mere display of muscle. This was playing of wisdom and light befitting an artist in the autumn of his career.” Young Concert Artists additionally honored Neiman with the Michaels Award and presented him in a critically acclaimed solo recital at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center.
Two-time winner of Juilliard’s Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, Neiman received the coveted Rubinstein Award upon his graduation in 1999, the same year in which he received the Avery Fisher Career Grant. Neiman’s principal teachers have included Trula Whelan, Hans Boepple, Herbert Stessin, and Fanny Waterman, and he has participated in master classes with legendary pianists Emanuel Ax, Jacob Lateiner, and Gyorgy Sandor.
Neiman comes from a family of musicians and educators, and his various interests have always included a love for teaching. In addition to his rigorous performance schedule he has taught private lessons for more than eight years, presented acclaimed masterclasses throughout the U.S., Europe, and Korea, and adjudicated the Philadelphia Orchestra Concerto Competition. He served on the piano and chamber music faculty of the Manchester Music Festival in Vermont during the summer of 2009, and will return in 2011. He has additionally been invited onto the faculties of the Great Mountains Music Festival in Korea and the Moritzburg Festival in Germany for the summers of 2010 and 2011, respectively.
