Michael Stephen Brown has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.”
Winner of the 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Brown has recently performed as soloist with the Seattle Symphony, NFM Leopoldinum, and the National, Phoenix, Grand Rapids, North Carolina, Wichita, and Albany Symphonies; and recitals at Carnegie Hall, the Mostly Mozart Festival, and Beethoven-Haus Bonn. He recently toured his own Piano Concerto around the US and Poland with several orchestras. A frequent artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brown is featured on the Society’s 2023-24 season with a solo recital at Alice Tully Hall, tours the US and Scotland with his longtime duo partner cellist Nicholas Canellakis, performs with violinist Pinchas Zukerman at Wolf Trap and the Green Music Center, and embarks on a composing residency at the Yaddo artist colony.
Brown was the Composer and Artist-in-Residence at the New Haven Symphony for the 2017-19 seasons and a 2018 Copland House Residency Award recipient. His recently premiered symphonic work American Diaries draws inspiration from words by Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, his own grandfather’s World War II diary. He has received commissions from many organizations and some of today’s leading artists, including the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Bridgehampton and Gilmore festivals; the Maryland Symphony; Osmo Vänskä and Erin Keefe; and pianists Jerome Lowenthal, Ursula Oppens, Orion Weiss, Adam Golka, and Roman Rabinovich, soprano Susanna Phillips, and cellist Nicholas Canellakis.
He was selected by András Schiff to perform on an international recital tour with debuts including Zurich’s Tonhalle and New York’s 92nd Street Y and regularly appears at numerous festivals including Tanglewood, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Gilmore, Ravinia, Saratoga, Caramoor, Bard, Sedona, Moab, and Tippet Rise. A prolific recording artist, Connection, an album of his works featuring his Piano Concerto with the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, and Mendelssohn+ with premieres by Delphine von Schauroth are both slated for release in 2024.
Brown was a First Prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and was a winner of the Bowers Residency from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He earned dual degrees in piano and composition from the Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composer Samuel Adler. Additional mentors have included András Schiff and Richard Goode. Brown is an Artist Ambassador for Creatives Care, an organization helping artists access affordable mental healthcare.
A native New Yorker, Michael Stephen Brown lives in New York City with his two nineteenth century Steinway D pianos, Octavia and Daria. He will not reveal which is his favorite, so as not to incite jealousy.
[ May, 2024 ]
My musical life began at the age of two as I danced in front of the TV to the songs of Raffi. By age three, I had listened to Billy Joel’s Piano Man so many times that I wore out the cassette tape. At four, I realized I wanted to be the reincarnation of Mozart so I embarked upon a life of exploration, some isolation, but mostly pure and utter joy.
© Michael Stephen Brown, All Rights Reserved. Photo by Ettore Causa. Site by ycArt design studio
