JURY
Michael Bukhman
Passionate about collaboration and chamber music, award-winning pianist Michael Bukhman is active internationally as a chamber musician, adjudicator, and pedagogue. The 2024 season highlights include a recording project with the Painted Sky Ensemble (Corey Mackey and Jeremy Reynolds, clarinets) of numerous commissioned works for two clarinets and piano, including Paul Schoenfeld’s monumental Eretz Hefetz, premiered in Dublin, Ireland at the 2024 International Clarinet Association’s ClarinetFest; a summer recital with international violist Matthew Lipman; and chamber music recitals with principal members of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. In 2022 he participated in the inaugural concerts of the Van Cliburn Concert Hall at TCU, performing Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and the world premieres of Ascendant Grooves for two pianos and Reveries for cello and piano by TCU faculty composer Till MacIvor Meyn. Working with musicians from the Dallas and Fort Worth symphony orchestras, Bukhman has been featured in the newly established Metamorphosis Dallas ensemble, the Spectrum Chamber Music Series, and the Chamber Music Society of Fort Worth. In commemoration of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary in 2020, Bukhman performed the Triple Concerto with the TCU Symphony Orchestra under maestro Germán Gutiérrez, with cellist Jesús Castro-Balbi and violinist Elisabeth Adkins. In Fall 2020, Bukhman was invited to the Oberlin Conservatory for a virtual Beethoven celebration in a solo sonata performance as part of a marathon Beethoven piano sonata project. His 2013 performance with violinist Itzhak Perlman in Sarasota, Florida was lauded for its “brilliant playing” and having “pushed the audience to the edge of frenzy” (Herald-Tribune). In June of 2016 Bukhman performed a duo recital with Grammy award-winning violist Kim Kashkashian to great acclaim at the American Viola Society Festival in Oberlin, OH. He has previously collaborated with Nobuko Imai, Donald Weilerstein, Tessa Lark, Roger Tapping, Julia Bullock, Dawn Upshaw, the Attacca Quartet, Rebecca Ringle, Peter Frankl, and many others. Recent international tours include violin-piano performances in four Chinese cities with masterclasses taught across China and Taiwan, and previous performances across Japan.
Currently Associate Professor of Collaborative Piano and Chamber Music at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX, Bukhman is a co-founder and co-director of the Texas Chamber Music Institute (TCMI), a world-class chamber music summer program on the TCU campus. He is also Collaborative Arts Chair for the Texas Music Teachers Association (TMTA). Prior to his appointment to TCU, Bukhman served as Guest Artist-in-Residence at the Oberlin Conservatory (2017) and on the staff and pre-college faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston, MA, to which he returned in summer 2022 as a collaborative piano faculty member at Morningside Music Bridge International Festival. Other music festival appearances include PianoTexas, the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, the Heifetz Institute, Yellow Barn Music Festival, The Perlman Music Program, and the Ojai Music Festival. Bukhman previously also taught at Bard and Vassar Colleges. While at Bard, Bukhman founded Play/Chat@Bard, a concert series showcasing young musicians in performance with informal conversation.
Bukhman attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a student of Robert Shannon, where he became the first in that institution’s history to graduate with Honors in Piano Performance. As part of his Honors project, Bukhman recorded the complete 24 Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich, performing ten of them on one recital. He holds MM and DMA degrees from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Robert McDonald. An award-winning pianist, Bukhman’s accolades include: medalist in the 2009 Hilton Head International Piano Competition; top-ranked winner of the 2005 Jacob K. Javits Fellowship; first-prize winner at the 2006 Corpus Christi International Competition for Piano and Strings; and laureate of the 2006 Gina Bachauer Competition at the Juilliard School.
