Award-Winning Viennese Pianist To Perform At Baylor Nov. 8

October 20, 2004

by Richard Veit

German-born pianist Stefan Arnold, professor of piano at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts in Vienna, Austria, will present a guest recital at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Roxy Grove Hall.
Arnold has won numerous prizes, including First Prize at the Senigallia International Piano Competition in Italy in 1986 and First Prize at the Deutscher Musikwettbewerb in 1987. He was twice chosen to perform at the national Concerts by Young Musicians, and also was an award winner at the International Piano Competition in Dublin.
Since winning First Prize in the 1988 International Bösendorfer Competition in Austria, Arnold has established himself as one of the most gifted pianists of his generation. He has performed as soloist with the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Berlin, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, the Vienna Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra, the Camerata Orchestra of Salzburg, the National Symphony Orchestra of Belgium, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, the Stockholm Sinfonietta and the Eugene Symphony Orchestra.
His Baylor program will open with his own arrangement for solo piano of Argentinian tango composer Astor Piazzolla's Cuatro estaciones porteñas ("The Four Seasons"), followed by Claude Debussy's Images (Book I) and "Funérailles" from Franz Liszt's Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses.
The program will conclude with a performance of Franz Schubert's final piano sonata, the monumental Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960, which was completed just two months before the composer's untimely death at the age of 31.
The recital is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Baylor School of Music at (254) 710-3991.