Albert Cano Smit
Piano
A musician who has been praised as “a moving young poet” (Le Devoir of Montreal), Spanish/Dutch pianist Albert Cano Smit enjoys a growing international career on the orchestral, recital, and chamber music stages. Noted for his captivating performances, storytelling quality and nuanced musicality, the First Prize winner of the 2019 Young Concert Artists Susan Wadsworth International Auditions has appeared as a soloist with the Seattle Symphony, Las Vegas Philharmonic, the San Diego Symphony, Montréal Symphony, the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle, Orchestra of St Luke’s, Barcelona Symphony, Catalonia National Orchestra, Manchester Camerata.
Recital highlights have included his Carnegie Hall debut presented by The Naumburg Foundation, his Merkin Concert hall debut presented by Young Concert Artists, recitals at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, Paris’ Fondation Louis Vuitton (the performance was streamed live globally), the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater in Washington, DC, Germany’s Rheingau Music Festival, and return performances at the Steinway Society in San Jose and Auditori de Barcelona. He has been in residence at France’s Festival de Musique de Wissembourg for seven years, a piano fellow at Bravo! Vail Music Festival and Tippet Rise Art Center, and has had his recital debut in Asia at Xiamen’s Banlam Grand Theater.
Albert has been presented in recital by Festival Bach Montréal, University of Florida Performing Arts, the Krannert Center (Urbana, IL), and Matinée Musicale (Cincinnati, OH). He recently premiered Katherine Balch’s "Spolia" with flutist Anthony Trionfo taking them to the Morgan Library and Carnegie Hall. Recent recitals with Trionfo have included the Alys Stephens Center, Kravis Center, Evergreen Museum & Library, and others. Cano Smit is set to continue touring with violinist William Hagen, with whom he has recorded the CD “Danse Russe”.
During the 23-24 season Albert will appear in recital and chamber music performances returning to the Miami International Piano Festival, at the Cosmos Club (Washington, DC), Friends of Music Concerts (Sleepy Hollow, NY), Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota (Sarasota, FL), and Abbey Church Events (Lacey, WA), and will also participate in the inaugural chamber music ensemble of YCA on Tour. He will appear as soloist playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto N.23 with the Rochester Philharmonic and Colorado Springs Philharmonic, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Waterbury Symphony and Gulfport Symphony, and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major with the Greenwich Symphony and Albany Symphony, and Ravel Piano Concerto in G with the Gulf Coast Symphony Orchestra.
An advocate for new music, Albert has premiered numerous solo works on his recital programs, commissioned for him by Stephen Hough, Miquel Oliu, and Katherine Balch. He has given four hand performances with Jean-Yves Thibaudet at the Wallis Annenberg Center Hall and Zipper Hall, taken part in the Jupiter Chamber Players in New York and the Bridgehampton Chamber Festival, and performed with such artists as Gary Hoffman, Pinchas Zukerman, Lun Li, Zlatomir Fung, Kevin Zhu, Leonard Fu and Lev Sivkov. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with such ensembles as the Ebene, Szymanowski, Casals, Cosmos, Gerhard, and Verona Quartets, and has released an album of Austrian viola music for Champs Hills with Emma Wernig.
In 2017, Albert was First Prize winner at the Walter W. Naumburg Piano Competition, and a Finalist and CMIM Grant winner at the Concours Musical International de Montréal. Additional special prizes at the 2019 Young Concert Artists International Auditions include The Paul A. Fish Memorial Prize, the Alexander Kasza-Kasser Concert Prize for support of his Kennedy Center debut, the Friends of Music Concert Prize (NY), and the Sunday Musicale Prize (NJ).
A polyglot who speaks five languages, Albert was born in Geneva, the son of a Dutch mother and Spanish father. He left home at 9 to join the Escolania de Montserrat choir school, where hours of rehearsal every day strongly affected his musical development. Albert recently completed an Artist Diploma and Masters Degree with Robert McDonald at the Juilliard School, where he was awarded the 2020 Rubinstein Prize for Piano. He also holds a BA in Piano Performance from the Colburn School with Ory Shihor, and studied at Chetham’s School of Music with Marta Karbownicka and Graham Caskie. He is an alum of the Verbier Festival Academy and Ravinia Steans Institute. He currently resides in New York City.
Allen Anderson
Composer
Allen Anderson (Professor Emeritus) received a Bachelor of Music (1973) from the University of California at Berkeley, a Masters of Arts (1977) and Doctor of Philosophy (1984) in Theory and Composition from Brandeis University. A composer and former Head of the Composition Area, he taught courses in composition, theory, and analysis until his retirement in December 2022. Before joining the UNC faculty in 1996, he taught at Columbia University, Wellesley College, and Brandeis University. He received the Philip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement by Young Faculty at UNC in 1999, a Schwab Academic Excellence Award in 2017, and is a Fellow of the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC.
He has composed works for the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild, Speculum Musicae, Ascolta, the Empyrean Ensemble, the UNC Chamber Singers, The Master Singers of Lexington, Aleck Karis, Thomas Warburton, Daniel Stepner, as well as UNC graduates Grace Kennerly and Sara Soltau. His work has been acknowledged with awards or commissions from the Guggenheim, Fromm and Koussevitsky foundations, Chamber Music America, BMI, League of Composers/ISCM (both the National and Boston chapters) and the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC. In 2005 he received the Goddard Lieberson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music is published by C. F. Peters and APNM, and has been released on three recordings from CRI. Of An Opportunity for Mischief, his 2014 Albany Records release, Fanfare magazine wrote: “thoughtful, literate music that supplies its own logic; it makes an impact and is worth returning to for a point of view that suggests meaningful identities, relationships, and associations.”
Recent works include Speak, Then, written for Tonu Kalam and the UNC Symphony Orchestra; Intrada, a wind and brass dodecatet for Evan Feldman and the UNC Wind Ensemble; solo compositions for flute, viola, and violin; Graffito for computer manipulated sound and digital images with the photographer Tama Hochbaum; and Et ex oculis subito for chorus, viola and percussion. He has composed scores for silent films: Hans Richter’s 1926 Filmstudie and the full-length 1922 Breaking Home Ties. In 2005, he completed Arnold Schoenberg’s choral setting of the Appalachian folksong “My Horses Ain’t Hungry.” In 2008, he composed the music for Iceblink, a multi-media meditation on the Antarctic in collaboration with photographer and UNC flutist Brooks de Wetter-Smith that Centaur Records released as a DVD. He is currently completing Fire, a setting for two singers and string quartet of Gladys Cardiff’s poem “Where Fire Burns.” The piece is a companion composition to his Remove/–––––––, a multi-movement work for mixed ensemble and five singers on the subject of the 19th century Cherokee Removal from the southeast. In addition to writing fully notated acoustic scores, he has over the last two years participated in live, semi-improvised electro-acoustic sound creation.