Juana Zayas
Juana Zayas has been acclaimed the world over as one of the greatest living Chopin interpreters. In his 1999 review of all the 20th century recordings of the Chopin Etudes, Op. 10 and Op. 25, Donald Manildi declared Juana Zayas’s recording to be the best of all. This aptly confirmed what New York Times’ chief critic Harold Schonberg, having heard her perform these virtuoso pieces at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, wrote: “It was altogether an imposing feat, and it may be that we have with us a Chopinist to the manner born . . .” Of her recording of the Chopin Preludes, Schonberg further stated: “She filters Chopin’s notes through a fertile mind, with a very personal but never overdone kind of romanticism that looks back to the great pianists of a previous age.”
In recent seasons she played all of Chopin’s Etudes at the 2000 World Piano Pedagogy Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Piano Festival Northwest 2003 in Portland, Oregon. She is regularly invited by the prestigious Serate Musicali to give recitals at Verdi Hall in Milan and has performed with various orchestras in America and Europe. Her performances have been broadcast by National Public Radio and New York’s WQXR.
Juana Zayas’s prodigious talent emerged early. At age seven, Juana Zayas gave her first recital in her native Havana. She left Cuba to attend the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris where she studied piano with Joseph Benvenuti and chamber music with René Le Roy, taking First Prize in both. Ms. Zayas, mother of three sons, lives in West Caldwell, NJ.
The artist will perform the following program:
- W. A. Mozart – Sonata in A major K. 331 (alla turca)
- Prokofiev – Visions fugitives
Intermission
- M. Ravel – Jeux d’eau
- Sonatine
- F. Chopin – Valse Brillante in A-flat major, Op. 34, No. 1
- Barcarolle in F-sharp major, Op. 60
- Berceuse in D-flat major, Op. 57
- Ballade No. 1 in g minor, Op. 23
Vladimir Ovchinnikov
Akiko Ebi
Antti Siirala
Nelson Freire