FRIDAY • JULY 19 • 7:30 PM

Born in Vancouver, BC, 1996, Adam Boeker grew up in Fort McMurray, Alberta, where he started playing the piano at age 8.  At age 13, Adam was accepted to Chetham’s School of Music, Manchester, UK on a Yamaha scholarship where he studied under British concert pianist, Murray McLachlan.  During his time at “Chets”, Adam won second place in the European Piano Teachers Association UK competition, won Chetham’s Concerto Competition, playing Prokofiev Piano Concerto no. 3, and was a piano finalist in the BBC Young Musicians competition. In 2012, Adam performed Weinberg’s Piano Quintet in Canmore, AB with the celebrated Zemlinsky Quartet from Prague, winners of the Bordeaux 2012 String Quartet Competition.  
Since graduating, Adam attended Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock, Germany where he studied under Matthias Kirschnereit and later the Conservatorio di Musica, Salerno, Italy, under Giulio De Luca. As of October 2018, Adam studies under Professor Hubert Rutkowski in Hamburg. 

Scott Timberg has been writing about music, the arts and pop culture for a quarter century. A former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and Salon, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles magazine, GQ, and the LA Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor.

His 2015 book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, drew extensive press and radio attention all over the US and overseas: Timberg has spoken on the book — which looks at economic, technological, and sociological jolts to artists, writers, and musicians — at conferences and festivals across the United States, Canada, and Ireland. The book won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award and was hailed by The New Yorker as “a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life.” Some of the book’s concerns show up on the ArtsJournal blog CultureCrash.

Raised in Maryland and educated at Wesleyan University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Timberg lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. He is currently working on a book called Beeswing: Britain, Folk Rock, and the End of the ‘60s with the guitarist Richard Thompson.

Concert artist, and Alberta Pianofest founder and director, Jason Cutmore has performed piano recitals and collaborative concerts throughout North America, Europe and India. Mr. Cutmore made his Chicago recital debut in the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts with an all-Liszt programme heard live on WFMT radio and broadcast on television. Since then he has returned twice to the Hess series, and has performed in Canada’s Elora, Music Niagara, and Colours of Music festivals, Los Angeles’ Sundays Live series, Calgary’s Celebrity Series, as well as at venues in New York City, San Francisco, Toronto, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Edmonton, and elsewhere in North America. Concertizing has frequently taken him abroad Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, and India, including appearances at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay, and the Franz Liszt Museum in Budapest.

Mr. Cutmore’s debut commercial CD, an album of piano music by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla on Centaur Records, was released to critical acclaim. Gramophone magazine praised his “warm, generous sonority and natural feel for the idiom” and raved that “this pianist’s gorgeously variegated legato makes a sexy and inviting recital.”

Mr. Cutmore’s major piano teachers have included Stephanie Brown, Robert Shannon, and Michael Massey. Additionally, he has studied music theory with Allen Cadwallader and Edward Klorman, and Aesthetics with the esteemed philosopher Noël Carroll. Originally from Edmonton, he currently resides in Philadelphia, where he is completing a PhD in Philosophy at Temple University while also serving as the Director of Alberta Pianofest. (www.JasonCutmore.com)