Karen Kushner, Adjunct Associate Professor of Piano
Karen Kushner (The Juilliard School, MM; Northwestern University, BM) is active as a soloist and chamber musician (Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Kosciuszko Foundation, Chopin Foundation, United Nations, National Gallery of Art, Phillips Collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series). She toured internationally, recorded and taught with the late Igor Kipnis as a member of the Kipnis-Kushner Duo, Piano: Four Hands. She participated in summer festivals (Aspen, Newport, Ravinia); and in Europe, festivals in Spain, France, and Poland.
Currently on faculty at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, Karen Kushner previously taught at the Mannes College of Music and Turtle Bay Music School in New York. She is sought after as a writer of articles and book reviews, program notes (Carnegie Hall) and liner notes. She has been featured nationally on radio and television. Her wide-ranging intellectual curiosity encompasses not only all things musical, but art and art history, poetry and literature, languages and dance. This interdisciplinary outlook informs and heightens her daily work in the studio.
Her solo recordings for Connoisseur Society, Epiphany, VAI and Albany Records, and two releases by the Kipnis-Kushner Duo (Parnassus, Palatine Recordings) have been highly recommended by Newsday, Fanfare, and Stereophile. Tim Page had this to say about her latest Brahms/Schumann CD in the Washington Post, “Kushner’s playing is exemplary throughout the album, but I am especially happy with her rendition of Schumann’s Kreisleriana, eight miniatures welling over with fantasy and invention that demand a pianist who will not only read the notes but give herself entirely to the composer’s opulent, idiosyncratic cosmos. This is a beautiful disc."
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