10/14/2011

MUSIC FOR A GREAT SPACE PRESENTS:

JAMES GILES, PIANO

Friday, October 14, 2011
7:30 PM
Christ United Methodist Church

 

James Giles regularly performs to acclaim in musical centers across America, Europe, and Asia. Recent tours have included concerts in China, England, Russia, and Bosnia. This season takes him to the Nancy Music Festival in France, the Accademia Cristofori in Florence, and the Beijing International Music Festival. He will also teach master classes at the Chautauqua Music Festival in New York, the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and the Royal College of Music in London.

With an eclectic repertoire encompassing the solo and chamber music literatures, Giles is equally at home in the standard repertoire as in the music of our time. He has commissioned and premiered works by William Bolcom, C. Curtis-Smith, Stephen Hough, Lowell Liebermann, Ned Rorem, Augusta Read Thomas, Earl Wild, and James Wintle. Most of these new works are featured on Giles's Albany Records release entitled "American Virtuoso." His recording of works by Schumann and Prokofiev is available on England's Master Musicians label and a new Schubert CD is due for release in 2011.

He has performed with orchestras worldwide, including those in Russia, the Ukraine, London, and at Alice Tully Hall. After his Tully Hall solo recital debut, critic Harris Goldsmith wrote: "Giles has a truly distinctive interpretive persona. This was beautiful pianism - direct and unmannered." Other tours have included solo concerts in Shanghai, Warsaw, Chicago, Hamburg, the Kennedy Center, and in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. A London critic called his 2003 Wigmore Hall recital "one of the most sheerly inspired piano recitals I can remember hearing for some time" and added that "with a riveting intelligence given to everything he played, it was the kind of recital you never really forget." He has also given live recitals over the public radio stations of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Indianapolis. Giles is also in demand as a chamber musician, having collaborated with members of the National and Chicago Symphonies, many string quartets, as well as singers Aprile Millo and Anthony Dean Griffey.

A native of High Point, North Carolina, Dr. Giles studied with Byron Janis at the Manhattan School of Music, Jerome Lowenthal at the Juilliard School, Nelita True at the Eastman School of Music, and Robert Shannon at Oberlin College. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Italy with the legendary pianist Lazar Berman. He won first prizes at the New Orleans International Piano Competition, the Joanna Hodges International Piano Competition, and the Music Teachers National Association Competition.

Dr. Giles is coordinator of the piano program at Northwestern University and chair of the piano department at the Eastern Music Festival during the summers. He gives master classes and lectures at universities nationwide and has also taught during the summers at Brevard, ARIA, and the Schlern Festival in Italy. He has been a guest professor at the Sibelius Academy, the Shanghai Conservatory, and at Indiana University.

 

Please thank the sponsor of this concert: