Master Class with Pianist Emile Naoumoff

Pianist Emile Naoumoff shares his talents with Levine piano students in a master class.

Emile Naoumoff has been likened to both Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein as a pianist, displaying, as one critic remarked, the fire of the former and the poetry of the latter. He revealed himself as a musical prodigy at age five, playing the piano and adding composition to his studies a year later. At the age of seven, after a fateful meeting in Paris, he became the last disciple of Nadia Boulanger, who referred to him as “The gift of my old age.”

Some highlights of his performing career include a performance of the Grieg Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl and his own piano concerto version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich.

Emile is a professor of music in piano at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he has been on faculty since 1998. He is an avid composer of French mélodies and is known for his mastery in transcribing music for the piano.

Presented in partnership with the French-American Piano Society.