Michael Stephen Brown

Michael Stephen Brown has been described as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers” (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 and an alum of CMS's Bowers Program. He makes regular appearances with orchestras such as the National Philharmonic and 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. This season he makes European recital debuts at the Beethoven Haus in Bonn and the Chopin Museum in Majorca. 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. A prolific composer, his Piano Concerto (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 Award winner. He is the First Prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild competition 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.