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RAVINIA’S STEANS MUSIC INSTITUTE
Bretton Brown
A winner of music and literary prizes from Yale, Juilliard,
and Tanglewood, pianist Bretton Brown lives in London
and appears in recital in both the United States and Europe.
He has performed in such venues as Alice Tully Hall,
Shriver Hall, the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, and
the Dallas Museum of Art. After assisting in the American
premiere of George Benjamin’s opera
Written on Skin
at Tanglewood, Bretton was asked by the composer to
help prepare the Canadian premiere of that work with the
Toronto Symphony Orchestra. In the field of education, Bretton has served
as professor of collaborative piano at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music,
and, committed to fostering younger musical talent, he has participated in
a residency in Lander, Wyoming, bringing classical music to middle-school
students, in addition to his performances with the Baltimore Symphony
Orchestra’s OrchKids Program. Bretton has recorded for WQXR, Sirius XM,
and the Bayerischer Rundfunk. He earned a bachelor’s degree with distinction
from Yale, as well as a master’s with academic honors from New England
Conservatory and a doctorate from the Juilliard School, where his dissertation
on Gustav Holst was awarded the Richard F. French Prize. This is his second
summer at Ravinia.
Yu-Jhen Liu
, apprentice pianist
Collaborative pianist Yu-Jhen Liu is an Artistic Exllence
Award student and graduate assistant at the Jacobs School
of Music at Indaian University. She studies under the
tutelage of Kevin Murphy. Liu earned her Bachelor and
Master of Music with emphasis in piano performance
from the University of Taipei (UT) in Taiwan, where she
frequently collaborated with vocalists. Liu served as staff
pianist for the UT Opera Workshop and toured with the
group throughout Taiwan. After moving to Bloomington, Liu continues to work
with several IU opera singers. She was a coach accompanist and pit orchestra
pianist for the IU 2017 fall season production of Jake Haggie’s
It’s a Wonderful
Life.
Liu is a recipient of the 2018 Marc and Eva Stern Fellowship at SongFest.
Kyung-Eun Na
Pianist Kyung-Eun Na has cultivated a multi-faceted music
career not only as a performer, but also as an educator,
opera coach, and music director for numerous concerts and
radio program. Recently she joined the faculty as Visiting
Assistant Professor of Collaborative Piano in the newly
inaugurated Department of Chamber and Collaborative Music
at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Prior
to this appointment she had served as Assistant Professor
of Collaborative Artist at the University of Arkansas at
Little Rock and as adjunct faculty at Montclair State University in New Jersey,
Seoul Arts High School and Sungshin Women’s University in Korea. Before
entering academia, she worked at Virginia Opera as a Spectrum Resident Artist
Coach and Education Outreach Tour Manager for the 2008–09 season’s three
main stage productions, playing for staging rehearsals, conducting the off-stage
chorus, coaching the cover casts, and leading outreach tours to approximately one
hundred public schools in Virginia. As a winner of the Marilyn Horne Foundation
competition 2007, Ms. Na was featured in recital tour projects and master classes
with emerging vocalists under auspices of the foundation collaborating with
Nadine Sierra and Brenda Rae to name a few. She has served as a coach and pianist
in multiple opera productions at the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music,
the Music Academy of the West, Aspen Opera Theater Center, and International
Music Academy at Siena, Italy. Beyond performing and teaching she has served
as an assistant program director for
The Classical Collection
at TBS English FM
in Korea. Ms. Na received her doctorate in accompanying from Manhattan School
of Music, a master’s degree in collaborative piano from The Juilliard School,
an Artist Diploma from Oberlin Conservatory, and a bachelor’s degree in Piano
Performance from Yonsei University in Korea. As a Si-Yo Artist™, she has been
presented internationally by the foundation, performing multiple concerts and
giving presentations about classical music for schoolchildren.
Cameron Richardson-Eames
Born in the UK in 1992, Cameron Richardson-Eames is a
graduate of Cambridge University and the Royal Academy
of Music. He is currently a Fulbright Scholar at The Juilliard
School studying collaborative piano under Dr Brian Zeger,
Margo Garrett, Jonathan Feldman and JJ Penna, where he is
supported by the Arthur Gold, Robert Fizdale, and George
H Gangwere Scholarships. At Cambridge, Cameron was a
Choral Scholar and Senior Academic Scholar, and graduated
with high first-class honours before serving three years on the music faculty. At the
Royal Academy of Music, he was awarded the Major Von Someron GodfreyAward
for accompanists, Dame Ruth Railton Prize for chamber music, Katie Thomas
Memorial Award, and the coveted honorary Diploma of the Royal Academy
of Music. He has broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Classic FM, Südwestrundfunk
Deutschland and WQXR, including live at the launch night of the BBC Proms,
and has recently given performances performances in the UK, Germany, France,
Italy, Estonia and in New York at Alice Tully Hall and The Song Continues series
at Carnegie Hall. Forthcoming engagements include recitals in the UK (Wigmore
Hall), Qatar, Denmark, Malta, and a Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert.
Cameron is also a singer and has performed with the Grammy-nominated choirs,
Polyphony and The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, with whom he recorded
fifteen CDs for the Hyperion record label. His varied career includes playing for
the Brit Award-winning crossover band, BLAKE, whose recent album reached
number one in the UK Classical Charts. Cameron is a Park Lane Group Young
Artist and a Fellow of Trinity College London.
RSMI
SINGERS COLLABORATING PIANISTS
SINGERS FACULTY
RSMI
Susan Youens
, scholar
Susan Youens, who received her Ph.D. from Harvard
University in 1976, is the J.W. Van Gorkom Professor of
Music at the University of Notre Dame, where she has taught
since 1984. She is the author of eight books on German
song—
Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise
(Cornell UP, 1991),
Schubert’s poets and the making of
lieder
(Cambridge UP, 1996),
Franz Schubert: Die schöne
Müllerin
(Cambridge UP, 1992),
Hugo Wolf: The Vocal
Music
(Princeton UP, 1992),
Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs
(Cambridge UP,
2001),
Heinrich Heine and the Lied
(Cambridge UP, 2007), and
Schubert, Müller,
and Die schöne Müllerin
(Cambridge UP, 1997)—as well as over 50 scholarly
articles. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation, the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, and
has taught at the Aldeburgh and Bard Festivals, among others. She has delivered
lectures in Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, England, and
Ireland—most recently for the Oxford Lieder Festival in October 2014—and she
regularly writes program notes for song recitals at Carnegie Hall. She is currently
working on
A Social History of the Lied.