Praised for his bold interpretive skills and communicative sensitivity, pianist Aaron Wunsch appears regularly on concert stages throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He has performed in Avery Fisher and Alice Tully Halls at Lincoln Center, Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland, and as soloist with the Yale and Colonial symphonies, among others. A ten-city solo recital tour of China garnered critical acclaim and enthusiastic audience responses.
Lauded for his “masterful” chamber music performances (Hartford Courant), he has appeared at the Norfolk, Bowdoin, Sarasota, Great Lakes, and Yellow Barn chamber music festivals, collaborating in performance with great artists including cellist Lynn Harrell, clarinetist Charles Neidich, violinist Rolf Schulte, and the New York Woodwind Quintet. Also a vigorous proponent of contemporary music, he has worked closely with many renowned composers, including Charles Wuorinen, Fred Lerdahl, and Kaija Saariaho, and has performed recent works by Saariaho and John Adams during Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music. These performances and others, including many world premieres, can be heard on major radio stations, including WGBH in Boston and WQXR in New York. In January, 2004, he performed Charles Ives’ monumental Concord Sonata during the Lincoln Center Focus! Festival and was subsequently invited to perform it at the Salle Cortot in Paris, France. While in London he performed and recorded for commercial CD six exciting new works by young composers inspired by Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments, op. 24.
A native of Wisconsin, Mr. Wunsch began his studies at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, which awarded him the school’s First Prize for five consecutive years. Afterwards he studied with many renowned pianists, including Peter Frankl, Andras Schiff, Claude Frank, Emmanuel Ax, Steven Kovacevich, Seymour Lipkin, Jerome Lowenthal, and Joseph Kalichstein. Mr. Wunsch received his Bachelor’s degree cum laude from Yale University, which granted him the Henry Hart Rice Prize for the best essay in International Studies, entitled “The Impact of Ideologies upon the Formation of Music.” He then received a Fulbright Grant for further studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, where he studied piano under renowned pedagogue Karlheinz Kämmerling, and he later completed his Master’s and Doctoral degrees at The Juilliard School under pianist Robert McDonald. He also performs on the harpsichord, having studied it under Lionel Party at Juilliard.
An accomplished teacher, Mr. Wunsch is currently an adjunct faculty member at Juilliard and an Assistant Professor in Piano at William Paterson University. He also frequently lectures about American music, most recently at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. In the summer of 2004 he gave six weeks of master classes at conservatories and universities throughout China, including those in Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanning, and Guilin, and in the summer of 2007 he was a guest artist and faculty member at the Jakarta International Summer Music Festival in Jakarta, Indonesia.
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