Jeremy Denk

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists, hailed by the New York Times as “a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs”, and celebrated for performances of vast imagination, beauty, profundity, and wit. A New York Times bestselling author, Denk is the recipient of both the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the 2026/27 season, Denk marks the bicentennial of Beethoven’s death with a series of recitals across the United States, including appearances at Boston’s Vivo Performing Arts, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and New York’s 92nd Street Y. The programs center on a selection of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas alongside works by Hélène de Montgeroult and Unsuk Chin. He also performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at Carnegie Hall with the New York String Orchestra, led by Michael Stern; Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Vancouver Symphony; and Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 2, including performances with the St. Louis Symphony and Dinis Sousa. Denk continues his longstanding relationship with Scotland’s Lammermuir Festival, where he performs a cycle of six Mozart Piano Concertos, Schubert’s Winterreise, and Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared. He also continues his collaboration with the Takács Quartet, with performances including at Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and Santa Monica’s BroadStage. Denk performs frequently at Carnegie Hall, and has worked with such orchestras as Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony, and appeared in such halls as the Köln Philharmonie, Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall, and Boulez Saal. Denk has also performed extensively across the UK, appearing with the City of Birmingham Symphony, London Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Britten Sinfonia, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Northern Sinfonia. Denk is also celebrated for his original and insightful writings on music, which New Yorker critic Alex Ross praised for its “arresting sensitivity and wit.” His New York Times bestselling memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine was published to universal acclaim by Random House in 2022, with features on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR’s Fresh Air, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He also wrote the libretto for a comic opera presented by Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Aspen Festival, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Denk is known for his interpretations of the music of American visionary Charles Ives, and in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, Nonesuch Records released a collection of his Ives recordings in 2024. His album of Mozart piano concertos, released in 2021 on Nonesuch Records, was deemed “urgent and essential” by BBC Radio 3. His recording of the Goldberg Variations for Nonesuch Records reached No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Charts, and his recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 111 paired with Ligeti’s Études was named one of the best discs of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, and The Washington Post, while his account of the Beethoven sonata was selected by BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library as the best available version recorded on modern piano.

Janie Cole

Dr. Janie Cole is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Connecticut, Director of UConn Kubatana vocal ensemble, and a Research Affiliate of the Council on African Studies at Yale University. She was a Research Scholar at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Visiting Professor in Yale’s Department of Music (2023-24), and is a Research Associate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (2022-). Prior to this, she was a Senior Lecturer (adjunct) at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music for nine years (2015-23) and Research Officer for East Africa on the University of Cape Town’s multidisciplinary Mellon Foundation-funded project “Re-Centring AfroAsia” (2018-23). Author of two monographs and numerous book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals, Cole’s specialty research areas are three-fold, focusing on musical practices, instruments and thought in early modern African kingdoms (Ethiopia and the Kongo) and Afro-Eurasian encounters; music, poetry and spectacle in late Renaissance Italy and France; and music, social change and prisons in 20^th-century apartheid South Africa. Notable fellowships and awards include from The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2005-06), the Getty Foundation (2007-9), the Janet Levy Prize from the American Musicological Society (2010), the Author Grant Award from the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors Association of South Africa (2015), and the Claude V. Palisca Fellowship Award in Musicology from the Renaissance Society of America (2020). She curated the digital collection, The Malibongwe Women’s Archive, of testimonies and music from apartheid women’s prisons (2026) and co-directed with award-winning filmmaker, Shameela Seedat, the forthcoming documentary film, We Are Not Afraid: Music and Resistance in Apartheid Prisons. She is the founder of the Afro-Asian Kukutana Ensemble and co-directed the award-winning 16th-century African slave narrative, Gabriel’s Odyssey (Yale 2025, REMA Early Music 2026 Award). She is co-founder/co-chair of the International Musicological Society Study Group, Early African Sound Worlds (2023-), and is the founder/executive director of Music Beyond Borders.

Vadim Neselovskyi

Chelsea Thaler