Michael Stephen Brown

Michael Stephen Brown has been described as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers” (The New York Times). Winner of a 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, he is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He makes regular appearances with orchestras such as the National Philharmonic, the Seattle, Grand Rapids, North Carolina, and Albany symphonies, and was selected by pianist András Schiff to perform an international solo recital tour, making debuts in Zurich’s Tonhalle and New York’s 92nd Street Y. He has appeared at the Tanglewood, Mostly Mozart, Marlboro, Ravinia, Music@Menlo, Tippet Rise, Bridgehampton, and Bard music festivals and performs regularly with his longtime duo partner, cellist Nicholas Canellakis. As a composer, his Concerto for Piano and Strings (2020) was co-commissioned by the Gilmore Piano Festival and the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra in Poland, and was premiered by the Kalamazoo Symphony with Brown as soloist. He was the Composer and Artist-in-Residence at the New Haven Symphony for the 2017-19 seasons and a 2018 Copland House Residency Award recipient. He has received commissions from the Gilmore Piano Festival, the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra; the New Haven and Maryland Symphony Orchestras; Concert Artists Guild, Shriver Hall; Osmo Vänskä and Erin Keefe; pianists Jerome Lowenthal, Ursula Oppens, Orion Weiss, Adam Golka, and Roman Rabinovich; and a consortium of gardens. He is the First Prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild competition, an alum of The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two), and earned degrees in piano and composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. A native New Yorker, he lives there with his two 19th-century Steinway D’s, Octavia and Daria.