Yashar Yaslowitz is the artistic director of the Carnegie Concert Series at The Nyack Library (‘One of the best concert series in New York’ - Vanity Fair) where he has produced more than five hundred concert events. His use of multi-media and storytelling has drawn praise for its twenty-first century view into the life and music of the great composers. A gifted speaker, Yashar has provided commentary for the complete piano works by Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff. As a pianist, he has performed and lectured extensively on these composers, offering unique insight from a historical and psychological perspective. Recent lecture-performances include “Life & Times of Chopin,” featuring the complete mazurkas, ballades, nocturnes & other works, as well as “Beethoven: The Great Sonatas,” which included performances of the Pathetique, Moonlight, Pastoral, Tempest, Waldstein, Appassionata, Les Adieux and Hammerklavier sonatas.
An innovative leader in the arts, Yashar established the Soirée Society of the Arts,
drawing upon the inspiration of grand soirées where artists and musicians seamlessly influenced and collaborated with one another. For several years, the Soirée Society hosted monthly home concerts and commissioned “Hexameron II, Six Variations on a Theme by Bellini,” conceived after the original Hexameron Variations of 1837 composed by Liszt, Chopin, Czerny, Pixis, Thalberg, and Herz. Alan Walker, the leading scholar and biographer of Franz Liszt, wrote that Hexameron II was visionary for “... bringing many of the 19th century’s Lisztian keyboard textures into the twenty-first century.”
Yashar began studying the piano at the age of eight with acclaimed composer John
Lampkin. As a teenager, he performed for the great-grandson of the Turkish Sultan who encouraged him to pursue a career as a concert pianist. He spent a year of intensive study at the Juilliard School with Julie Jordan and enrolled at the Hartt School of Music where he received a performing arts scholarship, graduating with numerous awards for musical excellence as a student of David Westfall and Luiz de Moura Castro. He went on to receive his master’s degree at Purchase College, where he was a pupil of renowned harpsichordist and composer, Anthony Newman, and Marc Silverman, chair of the Manhattan School of Music.
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