Michael Gatonska
This promises to be a concert of premieres and debuts. The yet unknown winner of the Chopin Competition will perform Chopin, and there will also be a new composition by Connecticut composer Michael Gatonska. |
Mostly Chopin
Concert
Program: At
19 years of age, Igor Lovchinsky has already been the laureate of
numerous prestigious competitions on the national and international
levels. His primary awards have included first prizes at the 2002 Eastman Young Artists International Piano Competition and most
recently, the 2003 Kosciuszko
Chopin Competition held in New York City.
As winner, Mr. Lovchinsky was featured in an all-Chopin concert
at the Chopin Memorial in Lazienki Park in Warsaw, Poland and gave
Kosciuszko sponsored recitals in New York City, Chicago, Houston,
Boston, and other American cities.
In addition to the grand prize, he was awarded the Jan Gorbaty
Memorial Prize for the best performance of Chopin. In 1998, Mr.
Lovchinsky was featured in a gala concert at Carnegie Hall as a winner
of the International Festival “Young Virtuosos” and later that year,
performed Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E Minor with the Columbus
Symphony Orchestra as winner of the CSO Concerto Competition.
In 2001 and 2002, he was awarded a scholarship by the Chopin
Foundation of the United States. Lovchinsky has
performed in the masterclasses of Emanuel Ax, Robert MacDonald, Jon
Kimura Parker, Anton Kuerti, and Sergei Babayan and participated in
several summer music festivals including California Summer Music,
International School for Musical Arts, and ARIA International Summer
Academy. This summer, he
will attend the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. Michael Gatonska lives in East Hartford, CT. Studied at Manhattanville College, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland. He studied composition with K. Penderecki, Z. Bujarski, M. Stachowski, and Elias Tanenbaum. Awards received for his compositions have included two ASCAP Young Composer Awards, Chicago Symphony First Hearing Award, Minnesota Orchestra Reading/Composer Institute Award, the Dimitri Mitropoulis International Composition Competition. He has recently been commissioned by SONYC (String Orchestra New York City), and the CT Commission on the Arts to compose music for the electric cellist Jeffrey Krieger. |