Heather O'Donnell

Music

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General Info

Genre: Classical / Indie / Other
Location Berlin, Berlin, DE
Profile Views: 24477
Last Login: 8/4/2012
Member Since 8/31/2007
Website www.heatherodonnell.info
Record Label Mode/Wergo/Kairos
Type of Label Indie
Bio
.. .............. ........ .. .. .. .. .. .. .......................................... .... American pianist Heather O'Donnell has emerged as a distinctive and probing new voice on the music scene, presenting a repertoire that spans the 18th through the 21st-century with "masterful playing" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), "fine intelligence" (Philharmonic Magazine), and "fiery performances" (the Village Voice)..... She has performed throughout Europe, America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Recent Festivals include MaerzMusik (Berlin), Festival Agora (Paris), Peterhof Festival (St. Petersburg), Indaba Festival (Grahamstown, South Africa), the Chopin Festival (New York), Eclat Festival (Stuttgart), and Tanglewood Festival (Massachussets). She gave solo recitals all over the world, for example in Amman, Kraków, Abu Dhabi, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, New York, and Berlin; she was a soloist with the St. Petersburg State Symphony, the Romanian State Philharmonic in Ploiesti, the DalSegno Chamber Orchestra, and the Harvard Orchestra..... Heather O'Donnell plays a wide range of music, from Bach's Goldberg Variations through major works of the early 20th-century (e.g. Charles Ives's- Concord Sonata, Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit), continuing on to a passionate involvement with contemporary music. She gave over 30 world-premieres of solo piano works (including pieces by Luciano Berio, Walter Zimmermann and James Tenney) and is the dedicatee of works by several composers (including Michael Finnissy, Frederic Rzewski, and Oliver Schneller). She was featured on Deutschland Radio, Radio France, and Deutsche Welle Television and gave lectures and masterclasses at Columbia University (New York), New England Conservatory (Boston), Universität der Künste (Berlin) and Rhodes University (South Africa). Heather O'Donnell was the first prize winner and the recipient of the Gaudeamus Foundation Prize in the Fifth Krzysztof Penderecki International Competition in Kraków, Poland. CD projects for 2008 include new recordings on Mode Records, Kairos Records, and Wergo. She was the artistic director of many commissioning projects including "Responses to Ives" and "Piano optophonique"..... Heather O'Donnell began studying piano at the age of five and was most influented by her teachers and mentors Charles Milgrim, Stephen Drury and Peter Serkin. She also worked closely with Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, Emanuel Ax, and Claude Helffer. Aside from her musical life, she is an avid reader and amateur painter, and took several courses in Philosophy and Literature at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University. From 2000-2002 she was the assistant of philosopher Paul Edwards at the New School for Social Research..... Heather O'Donnell is a Steinway Artist. She lives in Berlin with her husband, composer Oliver Schneller.
Members
..Heather ODonnell, interview mit Alexander Kluge (deutsch)...... .. .. .. .. .. ...... ..Piano optophonique project...... .. .. .. .. .. .. ..Alexander Kluge's Film- Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike, beginning...... .. .. .. .. .. ..
Influences
Musicians: .... Charles Ives, Robert Schumann, Miles Davis, Maurice Ravel, John Coltrane, Charlemagne Palestine, John Cage, Morton Feldman, J.S. Bach, György Ligeti, Helmut Lachenmann, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Daniel Barenboim, Keith Jarrett, Michael Finnissy, Art Blakey, John Zorn, Frederic Chopin, Vladimir Horowitz, Beatles, Robert Casadesus, George Gershwin, Walter Zimmermann, Chick Corea, Steve Reich, Claude Vivier, Tom Waits, Dinu Lipatti, John Adams, Radiohead, Stephen Drury, Martha Argerich, Billy Joel, Arthur Rubinstein, Olivier Messiaen, U2, Claude Debussy, Wayne Shorter, Franz Liszt, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, Dinah Washington, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Peter Serkin, Glenn Gould, Brad Mehldau, Oscar Peterson, Paul Chambers, Tony Williams, Gil Evans........ Artists: .... Frank Lloyd Wright, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Guston, Frank Gehry, Nam June Paik, Christian Marclay, Anselm Kiefer, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Marcel Duchamp, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Georges Braque, Constantin Brancusi, Max Beckmann, Henri Matisse, Richard Serra, Yves Tanguy, Bill Viola, Vladimir Baranoff Rossiné, Rembrandt ........ Authors:.... Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Fyodor Dostoevsky, John Steinbeck, Eugene O'Neill, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, William Makepeace Thackary, Jane Austen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Homer, Hermann Hesse, Tennessee Williams, Philip Roth, Don Delillo, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Allen Ginsburg, Mikhail Bulgakov, Susan Sontag, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlotte Bronte, J.K. Rowling, Paul Auster, Samuel Pepys, Sam Shepard, Umberto Eco, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Jack Kerouac, R.B. White, James Joyce
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