Robert Weirich returns to the UMKC faculty as Visiting Professor in 2025. He brings to the studio his experience as pianist, teacher, chamber musician, conductor, composer, and author.
As a pianist he has performed in musical centers throughout the country, including Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, Chicago's Orchestra Hall, and at such festivals as Tanglewood, Ravinia and Marlboro. A prize winner in several competitions, Weirich received a Solo Recitalist Companionship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 and was one of the first winners of the Pope Foundation Music Awards, a substantial cash prize to support innovative music projects. He has performed more than thirty concertos. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times called his recording of the major piano works of Aaron Copland for the Albany label “brilliant, probing, and austerely beautiful.”
In 1998 Weirich was the first recipient of the Jack Strandberg Missouri Endowed Chair in Piano at UMKC. He previously taught at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, Northwestern University, Tulane University, and Syracuse University. His students have won national and international competitions, including the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (Stanislav Ioudenitch) and the Naumburg Award (Awadagin Pratt). He has concertized and given master classes in American colleges and universities and performed internationally in Europe, Asia, and South America. In 2023 he was named to the Steinway Teachers’ Hall of Fame.
He was the artistic director of the Skaneateles Festival in New York's Finger Lakes District from 1991-1999, receiving three Adventuresome Programming Awards from ASCAP and Chamber Music America. Attendance more than doubled. His work with the Festival was also honored by the National Federation of Music Clubs, the Cultural Resources Council of Central New York, and with a SAMMY award from the Syracuse Area Music Awards program. He was President of the College Music Society from 2002 to 2004.
He is the author of Recollections: A Pianist’s Essays on Teaching, Performing, and Living, published in 2023 by the Piano Education Press of the Frances Clark Center. The author and critic Tim Page said this about the book: “Robert Weirich is a lyrical and keenly intelligent pianist, and his writing about music is very much like his playing. I recommend this book not only to pianists (for whom it should be compulsory) but also to anybody with a love for the art, illumined here by a master musician.”
