UNC Music Welcomes Stefan Litwin

The UNC Department of Music is delighted to welcome Stefan Litwin as George Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Music. He is a renowned concert pianist, and is also highly active as a composer and as a musicologist. His 1998 recording of Jean Barraqué’s ferociously difficult Piano Sonata won the French Grand Prix du Disque, and he has been the recipient of prestigious fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and Christ College, Cambridge.

He performs widely across Europe and the U.S. as a solo artist, in chamber music, and with leading orchestras, in a repertory ranging from Beethoven through to the avant garde. In addition to championing new music, he has produced pioneering recordings of modernist European and American works of the first half of the twentieth century by Schoenberg, Berg, Debussy, and Janáček, as well as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell. He has obtained international success with his interpretations of the music of Bach, Beethoven and Schubert, and he is currently recording the complete Beethoven sonatas.

His compositions include Sonata y destrucciones (Neruda) (1998); Lyon 1943 (Pièce de résistance) (1999); Rein oder unrein? (Satire) (2001); Thoreau’s Nightmare (2003); Allende, 11 September 1973 (2004); and The Bells (Poe) (2006). He has also published important essays on Schoenberg (including the Ode to Napoleon) and Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata.

We are fortunate indeed to be joined by so versatile a performer, composer, and scholar with such boundless energy and artistic vision. Exciting things lie in store.