Music for all: an interview with concert pianist, recording artist, and teacher Michael Mizrahi
The bar was packed when I walked in. People milled around holding a beer or a Wisconsin Old Fashioned. On the small stage where indie musicians usually perform, Decoda, an affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall, set up, tuned up, and then launched into a program of exquisitely-played contemporary classical chamber music that captured the attention and enthusiasm of the non-classical audience. Afterward, the keyboardist and festival director invited listeners to a reception and then stood behind a table set up in the middle of the room where he greeted people and served them slices of cake. I left that bar thinking, This. This is how to reach new audiences.
Meet Michael Mizrahi. He has performed on some of the world’s greatest stages—Carnegie Hall, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Chicago Cultural Center, and more. He has also presented chamber music in venues both humble and grand, collaborated with Americana singer-songwriters, and fostered partnerships between Lawrence Conservatory of Music where he’s a professor, and his community of Appleton, Wisconsin. From award-winning recordings to creating opportunities for young musicians, this pianist understands that the universal language of music is best shared by breaking down old-fashioned barriers and meeting people where they’re willing to listen. He knows that in the right hands, classical music played at the highest level can reach people of all backgrounds if performers are willing to connect with listeners human to human.
No Dead Guys exists, in part, to feature pianists with a passion to “unstuff" classical music and make it accessible to everyone. Michael Mizrahi’s career is an embodiment of this mission. Through the beauty of his playing, his commitment to outreach, and his approachable humility, he reminds us that music is our birthright and we’re all invited to the party. It’s an honor to feature him on No Dead Guys.
I understand you began piano training at the age of 4. What encouraged your parents to put you in lessons at such a young age?
My mom had a small piano studio when I was growing up, and she was my first teacher. She was also completing her DMA in Piano Performance at the University of Maryland, and some of my earliest and formative musical memories are of her practicing her DMA recital programs. Through these early exposures, I was naturally drawn to the piano.
Given that you concentrated on music, religion, and physics in your undergraduate studies, when did you choose to make music your career and who or what helped you decide?
I always loved music and playing the piano, but have so many other interests as well. I went to the Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology and for a while I thought I would become a scientist. I imagined music being a passionate avocation, and I was initially opposed to the thought of making music a career – it was important to me to do music on my own terms. I spent my undergraduate years at the University of Virginia exploring a variety of fields, including spending a semester abroad at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (hence the religious studies major). In the end, I realized that music had been with me from the beginning, and if I wanted any chance at a career in music, the window was rapidly closing. One simply does not begin a performance career later in life (the way one can go “back to school” in so many other fields at non-traditional ages). I didn’t want to have regrets about never having tried it, and so I used time after graduating college to audition at several graduate programs, eventually matriculating at the Yale School of Music. Yale was a perfect place for me, since I could continue pursuing multiple interests while working with some of the top classical musicians in the world in Yale’s prestigious music program.
You’ve been quoted as saying that you’ve “made it part of your mission to bring new music into the world.” When did you begin playing contemporary music and what compositions first drew you to it?
Believe it or not, I played virtually no contemporary music until I was OUT of graduate school. My time at Yale was marked by my first truly in-depth experiences with music by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Brahms – having not done a performance degree as an undergraduate or participated in any serious summer music festival, I had a lot of catching up to do in graduate school. It was in my final semester at Yale (I ended up staying for three years so I could complete coursework towards a doctorate as well) that I got together with some friends to premiere another friend’s new composition at a New Music New Haven concert. I enjoyed the (for me) novel process of working with a living composer on their music; one thing led to another and I found myself playing several other composers’ new works over the course of that semester. By the end of that final year at Yale, a few of us had formed an ensemble that would dedicate itself to writing, commissioning, and premiering new work. That group, NOW Ensemble, is still playing today, some 20 years later.
Critically acclaimed soloist, collaborative artist, professor, and community arts advocate, your work encompasses so many things. What underlying philosophy ties your many career paths together, and how do you find time for it all?
I follow paths that lead to meaningful work, both to me and to the communities of which I am a part. I try to be open to trying new collaborations, doing something I’ve never done before, or working with someone new. I tend to say “yes” to a new idea and figure out the details later. Finding time for all of the different strands of my career is its own challenge – someone once described it as keeping several plates spinning at once. I’ve become quite efficient in my practice time.
Given that you record and perform standard concert repertoire in addition to your career as a new music advocate, in what ways does your immersion in contemporary music provide new insights on the music of the past?
That is a great question! All composed music was contemporary at some point. Playing music written in our time is an essential role that we must engage in as performing musicians. How else will our contemporary music be heard and documented? Connecting to a living tradition of bringing new music into the world helps older music feel less remote. How we play older music is as much a reflection of our time as how we play contemporary music. Engaging with new music keeps the older repertoire from feeling like a museum piece — it reinforces that this is a living tradition, and that how we play it reflects who we are today.
Tell me a bit about NOW Ensemble, the internationally recognized new music chamber ensemble of which you are a founding member. How did the group form and what have been some of its highlight performances and recordings?
I mentioned above a bit of the origin story of NOW Ensemble. We found our instrumentation – flute, clarinet, double bass, electric guitar, and piano – to have seemingly endless different sonic possibilities. We mainly got together as a group of friends, not thinking too deeply about the instrumentation per se. When we ended up with an album’s worth of repertoire written for the ensemble, we recorded our first album, which got a lot of positive attention, and led to new commissions and projects and concert tours and other album projects. After twenty years, we’ve recorded seven studio albums and premiered well over 200 new pieces written for us.
As the Frank C. Shattuck Professor of Music at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, you actively reach out to the community through your Music for All program which brings chamber music to people who rarely participate in it. How do you do this and what has the community response been to the program?
We’ve reached out to several organizations around the area to offer interactive musical events with the populations they serve – the response has been so positive that we don’t currently have the bandwidth to serve all the requests we’ve received. Music is a universal part of every culture, a truly central part of what it means to be human. If we are working so hard to play a certain kind of music at such a high level, we must share that music widely. From a pedagogical perspective, I want my students to deeply appreciate the ways that their music making can touch the lives of others in so many different ways. In a more practical sense, I am always looking for more performance opportunities for my students, and for them to practice presenting music to audiences with differing backgrounds.
Whether playing fiendishly difficult passages or ethereal phrases, integrity, imagination, rock-solid technical command, and a complete understanding of the score comes through everything I’ve heard you play. What steps do you take while learning a new piece in order to achieve such a thorough grounding in the music you perform?
Thank you for these incredibly kind words. I’ve always learned music “from the outside in” – trying to get a sense for the whole structure and then breaking things down into components, phrases and gestures, how each part of the music functions in the whole. When beginning work on a new piece, I spend a lot of time looking through the whole score, and doing rough run-throughs at tempo to get a sense for the big harmonic and rhythmic arrivals. All the detail work is then organized around highlighting crucial structural elements in the score.
Your three critically acclaimed solo albums, The Bright Motion (2012), Currents, (2016) and Dreamspace (2024) all feature pieces you commissioned. How do you choose which composers to approach and where do you find funding to pay them?
My process of choosing composers to work with is not terribly formal – I wanted to work with composers who I had worked with in the past but who had perhaps not written me a solo piano piece, or colleagues on the Lawrence faculty, or composers whose music I encountered through other projects. Funding comes from a variety of sources, including grants and fundraising. I have also toured behind new commissioning projects, using performer fees from those tours to fund new commissions.
Thank you for commissioning so many truly beautiful pieces that have a tune and a beat. Given that you’ve recorded much less tonal music for other projects, who or what shaped your choice to focus on less audibly daunting piece for your own albums?
I can’t say that there was a governing philosophy behind the solo albums in particular that led to “less audibly daunting” music! I will say that I asked composers to not include electronics or extended techniques in the pieces they wrote for me – mainly so that I could be sure to be able to play their music in any venue alongside older classical piano music. Part of my mission as a solo performer is to increase the reach of contemporary piano music through repeat performances by myself and my students – electronics or extended techniques can create logistical barriers to programming certain works, and I wanted there to be no such barriers to programming the works I was commissioning for these albums.
After listening to all three of your solo piano recordings, I have a list of favorite pieces I’d love to add to my own repertoire. Are all of the piece you’ve commissioned published? If so, where might you suggest we purchase copies?
I believe all the works are published. More information is usually available on the composers’ websites.
What current and future plans are you most excited about?
I’ve been involved in developing and bringing to life several new summer music programs at Lawrence University, where I teach. We currently have two programs, both of which I direct. One – the Lawrence Summer Music Institute – is designed for high school musicians. We’ve also developed a major new international chamber music festival – the Lawrence Chamber Music Festival – that brings together pre-professional and early-career musicians from all over the world. Creating these new and unique opportunities for the next generation of musicians has been incredibly rewarding.
Praised as "intrepid" (Philadelphia Inquirer), "engaging" (Houston Chronicle), and "endlessly fascinating" (WQXR New York), pianist Michael Mizrahi has won acclaim for his compelling performances of a wide-ranging repertoire and his ability to connect with audiences of all ages. He has appeared as concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician and teaching artist across the United States and abroad.
Mr. Mizrahi has performed in the world’s leading concert halls including Carnegie Hall, Toyko’s Suntory Hall, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Jordan Hall and the Gardner Museum in Boston, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, the Chicago Cultural Center and Houston’s Jones Hall. He has performed as soloist with the Houston Symphony, National Symphony, Haddonfield Symphony, Sioux City Symphony and Prince Georges Philharmonic, among others. He has given solo recitals at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and has made repeated appearances on the Dame Myra Hess Concert Series in Chicago. His chamber music festival appearances include Music@Menlo, Verbier, the Yellow Barn Music Festival and the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival. Mr. Mizrahi won First Prize and the Audience Choice Award in the Ima Hogg International Competition, as well as first prizes in the International Bartók-Kabalevsky Competition and the Iowa International Piano Competition. He won third prize in the San Antonio International Piano Competition. Mr. Mizrahi appeared for many years on the active roster of Astral Artists.
Recognized widely for his commitment to artistic excellence, Michael Mizrahi has won Lawrence University's Award for Excellence in Creative Activity, and was recently one of five international recipients of the S&R Foundation's Washington Award.
An enthusiastic promoter of music education, Mizrahi has presented lecture-recitals and master classes at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, the University of Redlands, the University of California – San Diego, the American School in Switzerland (TASIS), and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, among many others. As a member of Carnegie Hall’s prestigious Academy program (now Ensemble Connect) and Teaching Artists Collaborative, Mr. Mizrahi spent several years as a teaching artist in New York City public schools.
Dedicated to the music of our time, Mr. Mizrahi has commissioned and given world premieres of several new works by today’s leading composers, including Missy Mazzoli, Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Mark Dancigers, and John Luther Adams. He is a founding member of NOW Ensemble, a chamber group devoted to the commissioning and performing of new music by emerging composers. NOW Ensemble released its seventh album, Before and After, to critical acclaim in 2021. Mr. Mizrahi's celebrated albums The Bright Motion and Currents, both albums of newly commissioned works for solo piano, were released on the New Amsterdam Records label. His popular music videos have been lauded by National Public Radio and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross.
Mr. Mizrahi is also an alumni of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, and as such regularly performs with other alumni in chamber ensembles comprised of virtuoso musicians, entrepreneurs, and passionate advocates of the arts. Mizrahi has helped create innovative performances and engaging projects with partners around the world. Drawing from his work with Ensemble Connect, Mizrahi has worked to foster partnerships between Lawrence University’s Conservatory of Music and the surrounding community, and helped found Lawrence’s Music For All project that brings classical chamber music to children and populations who ordinarily do not participate. Mr. Mizrahi was a co-director for many years of the Decoda Chamber Music Festival, which in 2023 took place at Lawrence University, as well as the Lawrence Summer Music Institute, a program for advanced high school musicians launched in 2023. Mizrahi now serves as Director of Lawrence Summer Music Programs, including the prestigious Lawrence Chamber Music Festival.
Mr. Mizrahi has edited several new editions published by Hal Leonard, including new editions of piano music by Ginastera, Bernstein, and Chopin.
Michael Mizrahi received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, where his concentrations were in music, religion and physics. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the Yale School of Music, where he studied with Claude Frank. As a member of the Moët Trio, Mr. Mizrahi completed a two-year residency, the only one of its kind for piano trios, at the New England Conservatory.
After his Philadelphia debut recital, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that “…the performance had transparency, revealing a forward-moving logic and chord voices you didn’t previously realize were there…textures were sumptuous.”
He is currently the Frank C. Shattuck Professor of Piano at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music in Appleton, Wisconsin. He was interviewed for a Faculty Profile, available here.