“indisputable gifts [and] an extravagantly thorough and effortless technique...von Oeyen seems incapable of misarticulating a musical sentence."
– Los Angeles Times
Andrew von Oeyen
Japan Tour: June-July 2010
Andrew just completed a 12-concert tour in Japan with the Berliner Symphoniker which included concerts in Tokyo's Suntory Hall, Sapporo's Kitara Concert Hall and Osaka's Symphony Hall. He performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2.
Last Minute Replacement
On less than 24 hours notice, Andrew replaced pianist Horacio Gutierrez at the Florida Bach Festival Society on March 28. His program featured several works from his recent recording, including pieces by Berg, Beethoven, and Liszt.
Duo Tour
Andrew von Oeyen and Sarah Chang just completed a 30-city world tour which culminated in a recording for EMI Classics.
*NEW LISZT ALBUM * RELEASED IN DECEMBER, 2009
Andrew's new Liszt album is now available!
Click here for details and to order online
Summer Music Festivals
From crab cakes to vineyards to high-altitude summits, Andrew just completed this season's traversal of summer music festivals. Most recently, at the Aspen Music Festival, Andrew performed solo and chamber works of Brahms, Liszt, Mendelssohn and Stravinsky with esteemed colleagues and friends Sarah Chang, Robert McDuffie, Bing Wang and Andrew Shulman.
Click here for Festival del Sole review
Click here for Spoleto Festival USA review
Von Oeyen stars in "A Capitol Fourth" - America's Independence Day Celebration in Washington, D.C.
Click here to watch performance
Andrew von Oeyen appeared alongside Barry Manilow, Aretha Franklin, Natasha Bedingfield, Big Bird, Elmo, and Oscar the Grouch on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol on July 4th, 2009, in America's biggest Independence Day party, broadcast live to millions worldwide. He performed Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" with Michael Feinstein and the National Symphony Orchestra, led by Erich Kunzel. The multi-award winning A CAPITOL FOURTH, featuring the most spectacular fireworks display anywhere in the nation, was broadcast live in high definition and commercial free on PBS Saturday, July 4, 2009.
Interview with Andrew
Scintillating Mendelssohn
Herald Tribune
March 8, 2009
New Projects 2009
Andrew is preparing for an exciting year of "firsts." In addition to orchestral debuts on both sides of the Atlantic, he will make his New York recital debut and give his first concert in Mexico City.
He will also collaborate with violinist Sarah Chang in recital throughout Europe, the United States and Asia. Andrew's "firsts" extend beyond new cities and collaborative partners, however: in 2009 he will perform some of his own compositions! Please see his concert schedule for details.
Ravinia Festival Orchestra and Cincinnati Symphony Debuts
Andrew made two highly successful debuts with the Ravinia Festival Orchestra and the Cincinnati Symphony this summer. He performed the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Ravinia Festival and Riverbend Festival.
Detroit Symphony & Vladimir Ashkenazy
With less than 12 hours notice, Andrew flew to Detroit to perform Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto under the baton of Vladimir Ashkenazy. Read the rave review from The Detroit News:
DSO's SURPRISE PIANIST IS A GENUINE RACH STAR
Lawrence B. Johnson
May 23, 2008
You never know who -- or what -- is waiting in the wings. When pianist Lukas Vondracek canceled this weekend's appearances with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the young American Andrew von Oeyen agreed to sit in for him as soloist in the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto under the baton of Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Before you read another line, go to the phone or Internet and grab a ticket for one of von Oeyen's remaining performances. Friday morning, he delivered one of the most commanding accounts of Rach 2 that I can recall hearing live -- majestic and singing, lucid and dramatic, and technically effortless.
Add to that the supple, yet clearly structured conducting by Ashkenazy, a complete musician who long ago won fame as a virtuoso pianist, and you have a well nigh perfect turn through a formidable concerto.
Rachmaninoff, who was a great pianist, wrote his concertos to play himself. Von Oeyen reminds one of the composer. A lanky figure with large hands and an air of almost casual authority, von Oeyen managed the widest leaps and most complex passages as if he were playing simple scales. But more than that, he fit every phrase into a thoughtful interpretive scheme, seamlessly moving from intensity to lyrical expansiveness to lacy filigrees of purely decorative delight.
Ashkenazy moved with him, and drew from the DSO a performance of true symphonic weight and splendor.
Debut Japan Tour February 2008
Andrew just returned from a highly successful debut recital tour in Japan. His program of works by Chopin, Liszt, Bartok and Ligeti was performed in the major concert halls of Tokyo, Sapporo, Musashino, Yokohama, Kumamoto and Fukuoka was met with critical acclaim. Though the schedule was demanding, it was a highly satisfying experience. Andrew says, "Japan is a wonderful country to tour in because of its pianos, its concert halls, its fabulous food and the genuine hospitality of its people. I could not have wished for better audiences and I look forward to returning soon."
Another Last Minute Replacement
With just two days notice, Andrew von Oeyen stepped in to play Liszt's First Piano Concerto with the Alabama Symphony on September 28, 29 and 30. See PRESS for review.
von Oeyen replaces pianist Horacio Gutierrez
Andrew von Oeyen substituted for pianist Horacio Gutierrez at the Grand Teton Music Festival on August 24 and 25, performing Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. Carlos Kalmar led the Festival Orchestra.
von Oeyen Receives Rave review from the Washington Post
Andrew von Oeyen recently made a highly successful, sold-out recital debut at the Kennedy Center. Read what Tim Page had to say about it in the Washington Post:
Andrew von Oeyen, Keenly Attuned to Liszt's Grand Design
By Tim Page
May 7, 2007
The Washington Performing Arts Society's celebrated Hayes Piano Series has been curiously hit-or-miss this season, but it concluded triumphantly Saturday afternoon with a smart, varied and altogether engrossing recital by Andrew von Oeyen at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that von Oeyen played the finest all-around performance of Franz Liszt's Sonata in B Minor that I have heard in many years. The late critic Claudia Cassidy once observed that Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 is "cheap unless it is magnificent." Likewise, this sonata -- a full half-hour of it, give or take a couple of minutes -- can come over as gaseous and overwrought, a succession of murky phantasms constructed on top of pretty flimsy musical material.
But von Oeyen's performance was different. He played with energy and clarity, wasting no time mooning over passing lovelinesses, always keeping his focus on the grand design. The result was like clearing away accumulated grime on a 19th-century canvas: For once, the sonata seemed both organic and sensible, and I was even sorry to hear it come to an end. (That is a rarity with this score, which sometimes calls to mind Samuel Johnson's wonderful comment about "Paradise Lost": "No one ever wished it longer.")
Von Oeyen has studied with a wide variety of teachers, including Alfred Brendel, Leon Fleisher, Herbert Stessin and Jerome Lowenthal. Perhaps this is one reason he seems to be a different pianist in every piece he plays -- and I do not mean that as a cut. Rather, he adapts his talents to the music at hand: His playing was delightfully spare, lithe and airborne in Haydn's Sonata in E-flat (Hob. XVI: 49), and then took on a new and hitherto unsuspected gravity and majesty in Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat (Op. 55, No. 2).
And then he exploded into the opening movement, "With Drums and Pipes," of Bartok's "Out of Doors Suite" -- rude, noisy and exhilarating music that almost sounds as though the piano is being played with the "drums and pipes" enumerated in its title. But the real joy came with the wonderfully weird fourth movement, a nocturne as unlike Chopin as one could imagine, complete with spot-on pianistic imitations of birds, bugs and frogs, and a loamy and magical phosphorescent glow.