Conductor Laureate, 

Michael Shapiro

  Pianist Cynthia Peterson draws from a broad solo, chamber, and contemporary repertoire. She has performed at the American Academy in Rome, throughout Canada, and in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Virginia and Minnesota. She has appeared at many venues in the New York area including the Metropolitan Museum, Yale University, Brooklyn Museum, Garden State Center for the Arts, Alice Tully Hall, The National Arts Club, and the Museum of the City of New York. As prize-winner of concerto competitions she performed with the Philharmonic Symphony of Westchester, the Virginia Beach Pops Orchestra, including radio broadcasts in Virginia and Washington, D.C., the Yonkers Civic Orchestra, and the Westchester Youth Symphony. Recently, Cynthia appeared with the Chappaqua Orchestra performing a Mozart and the Schumann piano concertos. She has collaborated with players from the Berlin Philharmonic, Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Chicago Symphony, and Orpheus. Cynthia has worked closely with, and performed music by John Corigliano, Vincent Persichetti, David Amram, among other contemporary composers.    Cynthia earned her doctorate at the University of Connecticut, where she was invited to be a guest lecturer on the Colloquium Series, presenting a lecture/recital on Debussy. She has received fellowships to Tanglewood, the Banff Centre, Festival at Sandpoint, and the Ravinia Festival. She also holds a Masters degree from Juilliard, where she was awarded the prestigious Irwin Freundlich Memorial Scholarship. As an under-graduate, she attended Binghamton University receiving both the Music Department Faculty Award and the SUNY Foundation Award.  Her primary teachers include Beveridge Webster, Walter Ponce, and German Diez; she has been coached by Leon Fleischer, Gunther Schuller, Menahem Pressler, and other luminaries.  A dedicated educator, Cynthia has served on the faculties of Lehman College/CUNY where she headed the piano faculty, SUNY/New Paltz, the Barry Tuckwell Institute at Gettysburg College, where she performed with renowned horn player and conductor Barry Tuckwell, Mercy College’s degree program at Ossining Correctional Facility, and Dutchess Community College where she performs frequently.   Cynthia is Artistic Director of the Chappaqua Orchestra Chamber Music Series, and has spearheaded the GraceNotes Outreach program, bringing chamber music groups to perform for inmates at prisons in New York. Cynthia was a recent guest performer at Skinner Recital Hall, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie.               

“Fine pianist” -- NY Times

“Ivories were ticked to perfection by Cynthia Peterson” – Inside Chappaqua/Bedford 

“electrically charged performance… natural exuberance…  Mendelssohn’s varied passages were handled superbly by the pianist” – The Journal News 

“played magnificently…  gorgeous… extraordinary” – John Corigliano 

“Wonderful performances… marvelous playing” – Gunther Schuller

“Her performance… can top those of any pianist”– Vincent Persichetti  

Michael Shapiro’s works, which in the aggregate address nearly every medium, have been performed widely throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe—with broadcasts of premieres on National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Sender Freies Berlin, WQXR, and WCBS-TV. His music has been characterized in a New York Times review as “possessing a rare melodic gift.” His oeuvre includes more than 100 works for solo voice, piano, chamber ensembles, chorus, orchestra, as well as for opera, film, and television, with recordings on Naxos and Paumanok Records.Michael Shapiro has collaborated with such artists as Teresa Stratas, José Ferrer, Janos Starker, Sir Malcolm Arnold, Marin Alsop, Sergiu Comissiona, Jerry Junkin, Eugene Drucker, Kim Cattrall, Tim Fain, Gottfried Wagner, Alexis Cole, Edward Arron, Jerome Rose, Mariko Anraku, Elliott Forrest, Steve Beck, John Fullam, Jose Ramos Santana, Clamma Dale, Anita Darian, Florence Levitt, Kikuei Ikeda, Ayako Yoshida, Harris Poor, John Edward Niles, David Leibowitz, Robert Tomaro, Kathryn Amyotte, James Allen Anderson, Glen Hemberger, Anthony LaGruth, and Emily Wong, and organizations such as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, West Point Band’s The Jazz Knights, Dallas Wind Symphony, Springfield Symphony Orchestra, Traverse Symphony Orchestra, New York Repertory Orchestra, Rock River Symphony, Garden State Philharmonic, Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia, Westchester Concert Singers, International Opera Center at the Zurich Opera, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, American Jewish Committee, Hawthorne String Quartet, Locrian Chamber Ensemble, Amernet String Quartet, Artemis, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and Dateline NBC, and universities in New York, Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, Delaware, Florida, Nebraska, and Tennessee.Michael Shapiro was the music director and conductor of The Chappaqua Orchestra in New York’s Westchester County from 2002 to 2018, which he conducted for the world premiere of his score for the classic 1931 film Frankenstein (directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff) (since its premiere the work has received over 20 productions nationally), as well as for the world premiere of his own orchestral work, Roller Coaster, which received its West Coast premiere under the baton of Marin Alsop at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music while Shapiro was a composer in residence. He served for two years as the music consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where he produced and performed music by a number of composers who were either murdered by the Germans and their collaborators or had survived as refugees from the Third Reich. He has also been the assistant conductor at the Zurich Opera Studio.The son of a Klezmer band clarinetist, Michael Shapiro was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent most of his high school years in Baldwin, a Long Island suburb, where he was a music student of Consuelo Elsa Clark, William Zurcher, and Rudolf Bosakowski. The winner of several piano competitions during his youth, he earned his B.A. at Columbia College, Columbia University, where he majored in English literature and concentrated in music, benefiting most—according to his own assessment—from some of the department’s stellar musicology faculty, which, at that time, included such international luminaries as Paul Henry Lang, Denis Stevens, Joel Newman, and others. He studied conducting independently with Carl Bamberger at the Mannes College of Music in New York and later with Harold Farberman at Bard College. At The Juilliard School, where he earned his master’s degree, he studied solfège and score reading with the renowned Mme. Renée Longy—known to generations of Juilliard students as “the infamous madame of dictation” for her rigorous demands and classic pedagogic methods—and composition with Vincent Persichetti. His most influential composition teacher, however, was Elie Siegmeister, with whom Shapiro studied privately.For more information visit www.michaelshapiro.com