Avery Gagliano & Magdalena Baczewska

Avery Gagliano, Piano

Avery Gagliano, First Prize winner of the 2020 10th National Chopin Piano Competition, is a young artist who captures audiences with her sensitivity, emotional depth, and musical expression. Her success has taken her to stages and concert venues such as the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Verbier Festival Academy, Ravinia Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Chicago’s Millennium Park, WQXR Greene Space, WRTI Performance Studio, and the GRAMMY Salute to Classical Music at Carnegie Hall. This coming season, she will make her recital debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.

As a soloist, Avery has collaborated with several symphonies in the United States including the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, Tuscarawas Philharmonic, MostArts Festival Orchestra, Capital City Symphony, and National Chamber Ensemble, and will perform with the Oregon Mozart Players this season. She is also an avid chamber musician and will return as a guest artist with the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players in 2021.

Avery received the Audience Prize at the 2019 Cliburn International Junior Piano Competition, was the first-prize winner of the Aspen Music Festival Concerto Competition and the MostArts Festival Piano Competition, and is a winner of 2019 National YoungArts Competition. She is an alumna of the 2019 Verbier Festival & Academy and the Lang Lang International Music Foundation, a four-year winner of the US Chopin Foundation Scholarship, a nominated recipient of the Inaugural Outstanding Young Artist Achievement Award by the National Chamber Ensemble, and has made several appearances on the National Public Radio’s (NPR) From The Top.

Avery is originally from Washington, D.C., where she studied with Marina Alekseyeva. Avery currently resides in Philadelphia and studies at the Curtis Institute of Music with Gary Graffman and Robert McDonald; she also studied with Jonathan Biss at Curtis.

Magdalena Baczewska, Lecturer

Polish-born pianist and harpsichordist Magdalena Baczewska [ba-CHEV-ska] enjoys a multifaceted career as a concert artist, educator, and speaker. Having made her solo debut with the Silesian Philharmonic Orchestra at age 12 in her native Katowice, Baczewska performed internationally with the world’s leading orchestras: Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, China National Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, among others. She has been praised for her “world-class playing” by the American Record Guide, and hailed as “eloquent and technically flawless” by The Washington Post. The first pianist to play J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations twice in one evening--first on the harpsichord, then on piano--since Rosalyn Tureck’s 1977 double-bill Carnegie Hall performance, Baczewska has toured Europe and the U.S with double performances of the Variations, having also recorded them along with Strauss’ Sonata Op. 5 for her critically-acclaimed album A Tribute to Glenn Gould.

Baczewska has enjoyed an extensive collaboration with the Oscar and Grammy Award-winning composer Tan Dun, performing his music internationally. Performance highlights include a debut at the Tanglewood Music Festival, soloist appearances with the San Francisco Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, China National Symphony, and a Canadian premiere of Tan Dun's Piano Concerto with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. At the invitation of the composer, Baczewska also recorded his chamber music and the Sonata for Piano Solo in Shanghai’s famous Water Heavens Hall.

Baczewska is Professor of Music and Director of the Music Performance Program at Columbia University. She also serves as Artistic Director of the Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Piano Competition in New York. She is a recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Bogdan Zdrojewski, for promoting Polish culture abroad.

The Palm Beach Arts Paper writes "Baczewska enlightens.” As an avid educator, she has given master classes and lectures around the world: Beijing Central Conservatory, New York University, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, to name a few. As a Yamaha Artist, Baczewska has used the technology pioneered by Yamaha Disklavier, to give remote master classes at the Microsoft School of the Future, Elon University, and Hartt School of Music. In her spare time she volunteers through Selfhelp, Inc., teaching music appreciation online at the Virtual Senior Center. Her musical mission, in addition to sharing the timeless beauty of the music itself, is to educate her audiences in each performance, by giving them tools to enjoy music more profoundly.

As the Creative Director of BlueSleep Music, Baczewska has collaborated with a medical team specialized in research and treatment of sleep disorders. Among her releases are three best-selling albums Music for Dreams, and music for MetroNaps’ EnergyPod®, popularized by Google. Together with composer/DJ Gene Pritsker, she recently released a remix of Music for Dreams - a crossover between classical style and chillhop.

Baczewska holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Mannes College The New School for Music, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Manhattan School of Music. Her doctoral dissertation, In Search of Bach’s Cantabile: The Role and Aspects of Oratory and Singing in Keyboard Interpretation was published by Lambert Academic Publishing.