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The American pianist, Richard Masters, obtained his Bachelor of Music degree from University of Colorado at Boulder; his Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School of Music in New York; and his DMA degree from Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
Richard Masters is a soloist, opera coach, chamber musician and orchestral pianist based in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he is an assistant professor of piano and collaborative piano on the music faculty at Virginia Tech's School of Performing Arts.
Significant collaborations include concerts with baritone Donnie Ray Albert, flutist Valerie Coleman, mezzo-soprano Marta Senn, the late mezzo-soprano Barbara Conrad, and many others. Richard Masters has appeared with former Boston Symphony Orchestra principal trombonist Norman Bolter, former Juilliard String Quartet violinist Earl Carlyss, saxophonist Harvey Pittel, and under the baton of the late Lorin Maazel. He has performed solo, chamber and vocal recitals throughout the U.S. and in Europe.
As a solo pianist, Richard Masters plays a wide variety of standard and non-traditional repertoire, including contemporary pieces written for or commissioned by him. A strong proponent of contemporary American composers, he has performed world premieres of pieces by Kenneth Frazelle, Charles Nichols, Kent Holliday, and many others. He is an enthusiastic performer of British music from the early 20th century, focusing in particular on the solo piano music of John Ireland. The critic John France wrote on MusicWeb International "Richard Masters approaches [John Ireland's Piano Sonata] with great style and understanding: all the facets of Ireland’s art are present here: ‘…the lyrical, the dramatic, the extrovert and the melancholy – the intense self-questioning and the open, almost naïve, avowals.’"
Recent appearances include performances at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's "Music at the Gardner" series, the National Flute Convention in Washington D.C., the San Francisco Conservatory, the Schola Cantorum in Paris, and concerts in Toronto and Trinidad/Tobago. He has also performed at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California and the Percy Grainger Home and Museum in White Plains, New York. In the 2019-2020 season, he was planned to perform in Nevada, California, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New Hampshire, and in the UK. Richard Masters is a Yamaha Artist.
In addition to his performances as a pianist, Richard Masters is active in the world of opera and musical theatre as a coach and conductor. He recently conducted performances of Carousel, Fiorello!, Oh, Kay!, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, W.A. Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Babes in Arms, and in Summer 2018 served as associate head coach with the Pittsburgh Festival Opera, working on Wagner's Das Rheingold and Strauss's Arabella. In April of 2019, he and his Virginia Tech colleague Amanda Nelson revived The Sap of Life, a show written by the song writing duo Maltby and Shire that was last performed in 1964. Prior to joining the faculty at Virginia Tech, he was principal opera coach at the University of Texas at Austin. |
