JEFFREY CHAPPELL
Pianist
JEFFREY CHAPPELL, pianist, has performed throughout the United States and abroad in recitals and in chamber music. He has been a soloist with the Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Houston, Denver, Indianapolis, Oakland, Baton Rouge, and Key West Symphony Orchestras, among others. His more than forty appearances with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra include concerts at Carnegie Hall and Wolf Trap Park, as well as a substitution for Claudio Arrau on four hours notice, playing the Brahms Second Concerto without rehearsal and to critical acclaim. Many of his recitals and concerto performances have been heard on nationwide radio broadcasts. A prizewinner in numerous competitions, Mr. Chappell was a recipient of the Solo Recitalist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Mr. Chappell has toured South America with recitals in Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, and Surinam, and has given concerts with orchestras in Mexico, El Salvador, and Ecuador. In Europe he has performed in France, Belgium, and the Czech Republic, and in Asia he has performed in Japan and Indonesia. He has participated in summer music festivals in the United States, including Marlboro, Chautauqua, and Spoleto, and in France at the Music at La Gesse Festival and the Musique d'Eté Festival.
Mr. Chappell is also an award-winning composer. His recent works integrate techniques of classical composition with elements of American popular music, and can be heard on three recordings recently released on the Centaur label. He has also been recorded on the Telarc, Albany, Petrichor, and MMC labels, including the world premiere recordings of the Piano Concerto by James Grant and "The Dream Wanderer" by Sotireos Vlahopoulos. His solo piano composition "American Sonata" won the Keyboard Magazine Soundpage Competition, and "Shadowdance" for piano and wind ensemble was commissioned by the Mid-Atlantic Chamber Orchestra with a grant from the Meet The Composer Foundation.
Mr. Chappell was a scholarship student of Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory and Eleanor Sokoloff at the Curtis Institute. Early studies were in St. Louis, Missouri, as the protégé of Jane Allen. Mr. Chappell is on the faculties of Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Levine School of Music in Washington, D.C. He has published numerous articles in Piano & Keyboard Magazine, Clavier Magazine, and Clavier Companion Magazine.
REVIEWS
"Some rise above their colleagues in how well and originally they communicate. One of the latter is Jeffrey Chappell. He ended his program with a reading of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit which was one of the finest this writer has heard."
-New York Times
Scriabin Prometheus: Poem of Fire
with Baltimore Symphony at Carnegie Hall
"Jeffrey Chappell in the prominent piano part was spectacular."
-New York Daily News
"On a few hours notice, he replaced an ailing Claudio Arrau and performed, without benefit of rehearsal, the mighty Brahms Second Concerto. Chappell came through with flying colors and won a standing ovation."
-Baltimore News-American
"Chappell is remarkable in intelligence and sensitivity. His technique is mastered to the point that one forgets it. The heart rules the fingers."
-Le Soir, Brussels
Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue with Sinfonica Filarmonica del Ecuador
"For close to 15 minutes the public fully enjoyed and witnessed the genius of the American musician's interpretation. The grandiose and eloquent finale brought the audience to their feet for a period of close to five minutes."
-El Diario del Hoy, Ecuador
"Chappell burst through the Barber Concerto with an unswerving grip on the quick-changing meters."
-Philadelphia Inquirer
"Chappell established an immediate bond between himself and the audience. His Debussy Images transported the listener into a forgotten world."
-Brazil Herald, Rio de Janeiro
Shostakovitch Second Piano Concerto with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra
"Chappell not only exhibited a very formidable piano technique but demonstrated a broad range of feeling for the music, from the impishly playful in the first movement to the delicately lyrical in the second. In the impulsive third movement he tossed off clusters of notes as effortlessly as though they were confetti: colorful, light and dazzling to the ear."
- Annapolis Capital
Mozart Concerto K. 503 with Albuquerque Chamber Orchestra
"He caught the essence of Mozart's classical style in fluid, transparent playing of tensile strength and radiant ease, always balanced, never a muscle showing. This freshness was particularly true in the bare, exposed lines of the second movement, which Chappell infused with wonder as if hearing them for the first time. In the third movement, he treated each return of the rondo theme as a delicious surprise."
- Albuquerque Journal
"Chappell's performance of powerful Beethoven's Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Opus 109, ended with incredible depth...In the final "Gesangvoll, mit innigster Empfindung" Chappell delivered the ultimate Beethoven power and beauty Here, Chappell kept the composer's explosiveness just barely under control while conveying the introspection with heartfelt depth."
-Montpelier (VT) Times-Argus
Khachaturian Concerto with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra
"Chappell tapped into the diverse elements of the score with tremendous sweep and passion, delivering a first-movement cadenza that was one of the most absorbing white- knuckle rides of recent memory. He is a marvelous pianist, and how lucky we all were that he was available to step in and save the day."
-Baltimore Sun
"Performances of Ravel's Jeux d'Eau and Toccata were fashioned with crispness, lightness and mesmerizing tonal balance, and if the powerful repeated-note figures at the opening of the Toccata were impressive, the final pages were simply breathtaking."
-Washington Post
"Jeffrey Chappell, soloist in Rhapsody in Blue, stylistically was one of the most persuasive pianists I've heard."
-Houston Chronicle
"An extremely talented pianist with power to spare."
-St. Louis Globe-Democrat
MacDowell Second Concerto
"Jeffrey Chappell showed us his clean, beautiful interpretation and his enormous resources as a pianist."
- El Salvador Today's News
"He continually defies the unwritten law that pianists can't excel at both classical music and jazz."
-Baltimore Magazine
'Variations on I Got Rhythm' with the Key West Pops Orchestra
"This piece is one of Gershwin's attempts to bridge the gap between classical music and jazz, and Jeffrey, who has jazz chops in addition to a formidable classical technique, made a complete success out of Gershwin's effort, even to the point of giving the faster passages a bebop articulation which the composer would surely have arrived at, had he lived long enough to hear it."
-Keywest Solares Hill
"With the world premiere of his piano sonata, On The Wing, Mr. Chappell weaves jazz and classical music ideas together in a composition that leaves a listener feeling airborne. The second movement is the most spellbinding."
-Baltimore Sun
"In American Sonata, composed by Mr. Chappell, he incorporated jazz, classical, and contemporary elements into a single work reminiscent of Erroll Garner and George Gershwin. One might call his style jazzical."
-Washington Times
"The masterpiece of the program was Barber's Sonata for Piano, Opus 26, which Chappell delivered with a bravura albeit sensitive performance. He had power, virtuosity, clarity and sensitivity, but more importantly, he was able to convey his understanding of the difficult work to the audience. Chappell's was a magnificent performance of a great work."
-Montpelier (VT) Times-Argus
Piano Sonata, Op. 26, by Samuel Barber
"...fiery, uncompromising performance...Chappell's virtuosity was always honestly applied and impassioned. This was a large-scale, volatile, sweepingly dramatic interpretation."
-Washington Post