Winner of first prize in the 1993 Neale-Silva Young Artists Competition, pianist Kathryn Ananda-Owens enjoys an active career as performer and teacher. A laureate of the American Pianists Association Biennial Fellowship Competition, she made her Asian debut in 1997 under the auspices of the government of Macao. She has performed as a soloist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, toured internationally as piano soloist with the St. Olaf Orchestra and has appeared at Lincoln Center. A founding member of the New Horizons Chamber Ensemble, Ms. Ananda-Owens also performs with the Melius Trio and recently collaborated with members of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in the inaugural concerts of the North American Bridge Festival. She received degrees from Oberlin College, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with Julian Martin. Her concerts have been broadcast on radio and television on three continents and recorded on the Westmark label. |
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Laura Caviani, Instructor in Music: Jazz Piano. B.M. Composition, Lawrence University, where she studied with Fred Sturm and Rodney Rogers. M.M. in Improvisation, The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she co-taught and studied with Ed Sarath and bass legend Reggie Workman. She has extensive teaching experience, including St. John's University, the Universities of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and Stevens Point, The University of St. Thomas, and many middle schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul through the "Harman How to Listen Program", an outreach program co-founded by Wynton Marsalis. The Minneapolis Star Tribune hailed her debut recording, Dreamlife, as: “...in a word, outstanding”. Marian McPartland found it “...sparkling and inventive”. Her second release, As One, nominated for a 1999 Minnesota Music Award, was touted as “stunningly fresh” by Jazz Times. Her holiday album, Angels We Haven't Heard, was considered “this season's finest new jazz CD of holiday music” by the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Caviani has performed and recorded with Concord recording artist and vocalist Karrin Allyson, and has toured with the Concord Jazz Festival featuring Oleta Adams, Diane Schuur and Sara Gazarek. Locally, she has performed with many fine artists in the Twin Cities, including: Lucia Newell, Pete Whitman's Xtet, Prudence Johnson, Debbie Duncan, among others. Her compositions include numerous works for jazz ensembles, the Sax Quartet JazzAx, as well as orchestral works for both the Central Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra and the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra. |
With a Diploma of Distinction in Piano Performance, Julia Elkina came to the United States in 1993 and studied under Professor Alexander Braginsky at the University of Minnesota where she earned her doctoral degree in Piano Performance. Ms. Elkina is particularly famed for her duo-piano work with her twin sister Irina. The Elkinas won first prize in the 1992 International Duo Piano Competition, Citta di Marsala in Italy. This triumph was soon followed by their success in the Murray Dranoff competition, the largest duo-piano competition in the world, where they shared the top prize and received the special award for best performance of the commissioned work — Taschyag by Paul Schoenfield. Ms. Elkina has performed throughout the United States, playing in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans, and at the Oregon Bach Festival and multiple orchestral appearances by the Elkinas with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Recent major engage-ments included sixteen performances at Lincoln Center in New York, playing Stravinsky's Petrushka with her sister in a live theater and music collaboration with performance artist Basil Twist and nine puppeteers. A frequent guest with her sister on National Public Radio, she has performed on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor several times, as well as on the nationally syndicated Saint Paul Sunday music program. |
Andrew Hisey holds degrees in piano from Wilfrid Laurier University and from The University of Michigan. A native of Canada, he was a member of the piano faculty at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music in Ohio from 1994 to 2005. Dr. Hisey was the 1988 Ontario Young Artist Competition winner (Canada) and has performed throughout that province and in many locations across the midwestern United States. He won the University of Michigan's graduate concerto competition in 1992 and recently soloed with the Oberlin Wind Ensemble in Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. He has performed the complete cycle of Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Hisey is in frequent demand as adjudicator, lecturer and performer, and his workshops have been enthusiastically received by local piano teacher groups, and at state and national conventions. He is one of the founding directors of the National Group Piano and Piano Pedagogy Forum, is a member of Canada's Royal Conservatory of Music College of Examiners, and serves as series editor for the Composer Editions series from the Frederick Harris Music Company. |
John Jensen, BA, Occidental College (Calif.) and MA piano performance, University of Southern California. Principal teachers were Gwendolyn Koldofsky and John Crown (piano), and Halsey Stevens and Ingolf Dahl (composition and 20th century techniques.) He works regularly with the Minnesota Orchestra and the SPCO, and is sought after as a collaborative pianist, playing with fine artists in concerts and music festivals across the country. He often appears on St. Paul Sunday Morning and A Prairie Home companion and has performed with artists such as Doc Severinson, Andy Williams, and Nancy Wilson. He is co-founder of Helios, a classical-jazz quartet, and is the pianist in a jazz-only quartet of musicians from the Twin Cities. His discography includes solo recordings of classical piano, jazz, ragtime music, and chamber music with various artists. He received a Grammy nomination, a Stereo Review “Record of Special Merit” award, and a “Record of the Year” citation from the Village voice. |
McWilliams holds a B.M. and a M.M. in Piano Performance, from the University of Toronto and a D.M.A. from the University of Montreal. He lived in Poland for a year, where he studied with Andrzej Jasinski and researched the Polish folk elements in Chopin's mazurkas and polonaises. He also studied in Germany, where he earned an Artist Diploma with highest distinction under pianist Oleg Maisenberg at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule. McWilliams has enjoyed a successful performing career, having performed in over a dozen countries, and has been an award winner at competitions of Porto (Portugal), the Regina Symphony, the Canadian Music Competitions and the Canadian National Competitive Festival of Music. He performs and records chamber music as a member of the Meridian Trio. McWilliams joined the faculty at St. Olaf after having previously held teaching positions at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada and at the Glenn Gould Professional School in Toronto. Also active as a clinician, he has presented performance and pedagogy workshops across North America. |
Nancy Paddleford, Professor of Music. B.M. and M.M., Indiana University; D.M.A. University of Minnesota. Her teachers have included Gyorgy Sebok, Alfonso Montecino and Bernhard Weiser, and she has studied chamber music with Janos Starker, Joseph Gingold, William Primrose and Franco Gulli. Active as chamber and solo recitalist as well as adjudicator at piano competitions in the United States and Central America, Paddleford's teaching areas include piano performance, chamber music, music appreciation, theory skills and piano pedagogy. Her research emphases have been Hispanic music, performance practice, and memorization techniques. Paddleford has served as artist-in-residence at the University of Costa Rica, has performed twice at the International Festival of Music in Costa Rica as well as three times at that country's Monteverde Music Festival. She is the recipient of the Pro Lingua Award for promoting cross-cultural understanding between the U.S. and Latin America, and was asked to give a St. Olaf Mellby Lecture about her scholarly work. A number of her performances and interviews have been broadcast on radio here and abroad. |
Lori Ronning Folland is a staff pianist at St. Olaf College. Prior to her appointment in 1991, she served as a collaborative pianist at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a chamber musician, Lori has been extensively involved with the collaborative art of music making. She has appeared on the “Y” Concert Series in Pittsburgh, on the Twin Cities Schubert Club Artist Series, on numerous recitals with friends and colleagues, and has soloed with the St. Olaf Philharmonia. Her live performances have been recorded for broadcast on WQED, Pittsburgh. She recently collaborated with JoAnn Polley, clarinet, to record works by Litaize, Bozza, Devienne, and Rameau. Their CD is entitled “French Music for Clarinet and Piano”. Lori is also active as a piano teacher. |
Piano Faculty
