*Sara Davis Buechner* has been celebrated as a pianist of noteworthy accomplishment, virtuosic mastery, artistic sensitivity and extraordinary versatility. A major prizewinner of many of the world’s most prestigious international piano competitions – Reine Elisabeth of Belgium, Leeds, Salzburg, Sydney and Vienna – she established her early career by winning the Gold Medal of the 1984 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition in Salt Lake City, Utah, and as a Bronze Medalist of the 1986 Tschaikowsky International Piano Competition in Moscow.
With an active repertoire of nearly 100 piano concertos ranging from Bach to Wuorinen, she has appeared as soloist with America’s most prominent orchestras: the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Saint Louis and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras; and abroad with the Japan Philharmonic, City of Birmingham (U.K.) Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Kuopio (Finland) Philharmonic, Slovak Philharmonic and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León (Spain). She was a featured artist at the “Piano 2000” Gala Concerts in the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony, and recently made her debut at Lincoln Center’s “Mostly Mozart” Festival.
In addition to her frequent North American concert appearances and radio broadcasts, she tours widely throughout the Far East on a yearly basis.
Ms. Buechner’s recording of piano music by George Gershwin was selected as a “Record of the Month” by Stereophile magazine; her 1997 world première recording of the Busoni version of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations was profiled in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times; and her recording of Hollywood piano concertos by Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman won Germany’s Deutsches Schauplatten Preis for best soundtrack. Pro Piano has just released her CD of the complete piano music of Stephen Foster, and her fourth recording for Koch International was recently released featuring piano music by Rudolf Friml. Ms. Buechner’s extensive discography also includes more than ten disks for the Yamaha Disklavier and Piano Soft systems.
Ms. Buechner has given premières of important new music and film scores by Larry Bell, Pierre Charvet, Richard Danielpour, Dick Hyman and Henry Martin. She appears regularly with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, as one of the few pianists to actively perform piano scores to silent movies, notably the 150-minute long restored version of Ben-Hur (1925), and the Danish classic Master of the House (1925). Ms. Buechner has also collaborated on dance projects with choreographer Neta Pulvermacher and toured extensively with the Mark Morris Dance Group.
Profiles of Ms. Buechner have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Paris Match, Noticias del Argentina, Out, Blade and Frontiers magazines; and she has been featured on the television programs Entertainment Tonight, Extra, In the Life, and Bynon. Her appearances on radio include profiles on NPR’s The Fishko Files and Performance Today, WFMT’s Dame Myra Hess Recital Series and WNYC’s New Sounds with John Schaefer.
In 2003 Ms. Buechner was appointed Assistant Professor of Piano at the University of British Columbia – Vancouver. She is a former faculty member of New York University, and has presented lectures and masterclasses worldwide, from the Royal Academy in London to Indiana University to the Kobe-Yamate Gakuen in Osaka, Japan.
