F A C U L T Y - BIOGRAPHIES

email: mmm@musicstudiesabroad.com

Piano
MARILYN ENGLE is a Professor of Music at the University of Calgary and is also extensively involved in the Mount Royal College Academy program (for gifted youth). She has performed, taught, and lectured widely in North America, Europe, Japan, and Israel. She is also heard frequently in concert and on radio with the chamber ensemble, Aubade, of which she was a founding member.
Marilyn Engle was visiting professor at Oberlin College Conservatory and a faculty member and performer for several years in Oberlin's summer program in Italy as well as the Niagara Chamber Music Festival (ISMA). She has given classes and residencies at many centers internationally including, the Glenn Gould Professional School, the University of Toronto and New York University.

Marilyn Engle
Photo by Peter Schaaf

email: engle@musicstudiesabroad.com

Violin
JOHANNES LEERTOUWER, violinist and conductor
Johannes Leertouwer was born in the Dutch city of Groningen and began playing the violin at an early age. A graduate of the Sweelink Conservatory of Amsterdam as a student Bouw Lemkes, he took part in the Oscar Back Violin Competition of 1983 and was awarded the Elisabeth Back Prize as well as the Buma Award for the best performance of the obligatory contemporary work.  This enabled him to continue his studies with Josef Suk in Vienna and Prague.

After his studies he concentrated on performance practice with historic instruments. He has worked with some of the most important ensembles in this field as a leader/concertmaster or as a soloist: Il Seminario Musicale (Gerard Lesne, Paris), Al Ayre Espagnol (Lopes Banzo, Madrid), the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (Ton Koopman), the Orchestra of the Nederlandse Bach Vereniging (Jos van Veldhoven) and the Orchestra Anima Eterna (Jos van Immerseel, Antwerp).

Johannes Leertouwer

He has recorded a number of CD’s for the Dutch label Globe, including the complete sonatas of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. As a founding member of the Schönbrunn Ensemble, specializing in performing chamber music on period instruments, he performs both nationally and internationally a repertory ranging from Frescobaldi to Debussy. In the year 2000 to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the death of J.S. Bach, he performed the complete sonatas and partitas at historic venues in the Netherlands.  At the Holland Festival of Early Music 2002 he performed the complete works for violin and piano of Beethoven with his duo-partner Julian Reynolds. As a violin soloist he has appeared with The Osaka Symphoniker (Haydn and Mozart) and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra (Telemann and Vivaldi). In the “Mozart year” 2006, his recording of complete Mozart Violin concertos with his own ensemble La Borea, was released by Challenge Records.

 Johannes Leertouwer has been a professor of violin at the famous Sweelinck Conservatory of Amsterdam for the past 17 years. His former students are active members of a wide variety of orchestras and ensembles.  From 1998 until 2006 he was artistic director and conductor of the Netherlands Youth String Orchestra, where he worked with a selection of the most talented young string players of the Netherlands. Johannes Leertouwer has been a guest conductor and professor at the CNSM of Paris, the Felix Mendelssohn Hochschule in Leipzig and regularly gives master classes in France, Italy, Germany, Israel and the United States of America.

 Johannes Leertouwer plays an exceptional violin made by Antonius and Hieronymus Amati in Cremona 1619, and a fine instrument by the Dutch violin maker Willibrord Crijnen after Petrus Guarnerius in Marseille 1996.

email: jl@musicstudiesabroad.com

Richard Myron

Currently residing in Paris, Mr. Myron is professor of contrabass and chamber music in the early music department of the Conservatoire Supérieur-CNR de Paris and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Music de Paris, where he also teaches sight-reading to the modern bassists. Each year, he conducts a Bach cantata program with the baroque orchestra and choir of the CNSM, and is called upon to give master classes in regional conservatories throughout France(Toulouse, St Maur, Aubervilliers).

A founding member of the Freiburger Barockorchester and Consort, the Atlantis Ensemble,Il Seminario Musicale and les Basses Réunies, he is also a member of Al Ayre Espa–ol, the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges and the Schönbrunn Ensemble of Amsterdam. 

email: rm@musicstudiesabroad.com

Musicologist
WALTER FRISCH is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York, where he has taught since 1982.  He has also been a guest professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania.  He has lectured on music throughout the United States, and in England, France, Spain, and Germany.  His writings have been translated into French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian.

 Professor Frisch is a specialist in the music of composers from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Schubert to Schoenberg. 

Walter Frisch

He has written numerous articles and two books on Brahms, including Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (1984) and Brahms: the Four Symphonies (1996).  He served as editor of the volume Brahms and His World (1990) and was the founding president of the American Brahms Society in 1983.  He is the co-author, with George S. Bozarth, of the Brahms article in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary (2000).
  Professor Frisch’s publications on Schoenberg include the book The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908 (1993) and the edited volume Schoenberg and His World (1999).  He also edited and contributed to a volume on Schubert’s music, Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies (1986).  Professor Frisch has twice won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for his writings.  He has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
  His most recent book, which appeared in July 2005 from University of California Press, is German Modernism: Music and the Arts, which investigates the relationships between music and its cultural context in Austria and Germany during the period 1880-1915.  He is currently serving as general editor for a new series from Norton, Music in Western Culture, in which he will write a volume on nineteenth-century music.

email: wf@musicstudiesabroad.com

Flute
Daniel PFEIFFER studied musicology at the University in Strasbourg and the flute at the “Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris”.  He was awarded  the Concert Performer diploma as a student of Shigenori KUDO and Thomas PREVOST.
  Trained in specialized contemporary techniques by P. BOCQUILLON, he regularly takes part in the creation of works from composers R. PICAZOS, E. ROLIN, C. MORIN and A. CELLAC, among others.

Daniel Pfeiffer

  Since 1994, Daniel PFEIFFER has performed as soloist or in different musical settings, in Europe and abroad (United States, Asia). In 1996, he successfully founded the “Duo-Ambrosia” with harpist Claude BOULY. In 2000, they were invited to perform at the 2^nd French Flute Convention.
  An advocate of modern, active pedagogy he is, since 1992, professor of flute at the conservatory of Obernai (Alsace).
  After founding the “International Flute Festival of Obernai”, he served as it’s artistic director from 1999 to 2005. This festival created a climate of intense cross-cultural communication between international artists, teachers, instrument makers, students and amateurs.
  Since 2005, he has coordinated the logistics of the student Academy of the Festival P. CASALS of Prades.

email: dpfeiffer@musicstudiesabroad.com

Philip Hansen

email: phansen@musicstudiesabroad.com