Catherine Kautsky
Pianist Catherine Kautsky is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and chair of its piano department. She has concertized throughout the United States and abroad as a recitalist, soloist with orchestra, and chamber musician, appearing in venues such as Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, Jordan Hall and the Gardner Museum in Boston, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D. C., and the Chicago Cultural Center. She has soloed with the St. Louis Symphony, Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra, and Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, performed chamber music at the Aspen, Tanglewood, and Grand Teton summer music festivals, and appeared frequently on the radio in Chicago, New York, Washington, D. C., St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Madison. Ms. Kautsky is the winner of the Passamaneck Competition in Pittsburgh, the C. D. Jackson Master Award at Tanglewood, and the Association Amicale d'Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris Prize of the French Piano Institute in Paris. Last November, she was awarded the 2005 Arts Institute Creative Arts Award at UW-Madison for her work connecting music with other disciplines, particularly literature. Ms. Kautsky has traveled widely, performing frequently in France and England, and presenting concerts and classes most recently in China, Korea, and South Africa. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Clavier, American Music Teacher, and International Piano, and her CD of three pieces for piano and narrator, in which she both performs and speaks, was issued by Vox Classics. Very seriously committed to teaching, Ms. Kautsky has held a grant for the last two years to take her studio touring, performing community outreach concerts in collaboration with dancers, actors, and students from other disciplines.
Ms. Kautsky holds a bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory, a master's degree from the Juilliard School, and a doctoral degree in performance from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she studied under Gilbert Kalish. Following her New York debut, The New York Times called her "a pianist who can play Mozart and Schubert as though their sentiments and habits of speech coincided exactly with hers. . . . She gave these pieces nuances that made them meaningful on a human everyday level. The music spoke directly to the listener, with neither obfuscation nor pretense."
