Meet Nicole - our first collaborative pianist on the podcast! She is not your average pianist 💅 and has built a career at the intersection of artistry, innovation, and service. An active performer, educator, and arts administrator, she is deeply committed to expanding the reach of collaborative piano through performance, teaching, and community engagement. This convo is filled w incredible insights into the ups and downs of a collab career and the unique skill sets that collab pianists must cultivate on their road to success. Her passion for connecting with audiences and her focus on uplifting and encouraging each and every musician she plays with shines through as she shares her story. Currently based in Macon, Georgia, Nicole is on a mission to advocate for her collab community and cultivate meaningful relationships with her artistic partners. She shares what skills and values truly matter and how we can refocus on the beautiful opportunity we have to connect with the world around us as musicians.

You can follow Nicole @nicocoleying

www.nicoleying.com

✨ Stay connected with Pianists Not Practicing:

Instagram — @ChloeWestonPianist

YouTube — @ChloeWestonPianist

🎶 Intro/Outro Music: Ankur Mukhopadhyay — @ankurrmm

🎙️ Produced by: phMediaStudio, LLC

We’re back with Mark to recap the premiere of his piano concerto RUMINATIONS just hours after walking offstage! If you haven’t heard episode 5 yet go ahead and check that out to hear all about the creation of this project and how it came to be!

In this episode, we chat about the big premiere, the experience of performing music by living composers vs music of the established canon, performing a piano concerto with no conductor (👀) and the joy of playing music by your friends with your friends! 💕

You can watch the premiere of RUMINATIONS here!:

https://youtu.be/Fpd4wQXRJjU?si=FZ3Fay0tPriEfyZY

Thank you to Graham Lessard, audio engineer and Vicki Van Chau & Philip Bowen, videographers, for capturing the premiere so beautifully in our recording!

This is such a meaningful, dream-come-true project for us that would not be possible without support from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development and the City of Calgary and the collaboration with the incredible artists of Kensington Sinfonia and the Calgary Philharmonic listed here:

Violin

Genevieve Micheletti

Eric Auerbach

Isaac Willocks

Erin Burkholder

Diane Lane

Sora Kim

Viola

Liza Scriggins Lowry

Patricia Higgins

Ethan Mung

Cello

Andrea Case

Kathleen de Caen

Takumi Rodgers

Bass

Matthew Heller

Flute

Emily Pernambucq

Clarinet

Cedric Blary

Horn

Peter Clark

Trumpet

Adam Zinatelli

Percussion

Chris Sies

You can follow Mark @mark.limacher on instagram

✨ Stay connected with Pianists Not Practicing:

Instagram — @ChloeWestonPianist

YouTube — @ChloeWestonPianist

🎶 Intro/Outro Music: Ankur Mukhopadhyay — @ankurrmm

🎙️ Produced by: phMediaStudio, LLC

Meet Mark Limacher - Canadian composer, pianist, arranger/orchestrator extraordinaire - who just happens to be a bonafide genius and one of my favourite people. We caught up with Mark hours before we premiered his piano concerto that I commissioned - RUMINATIONS - in Calgary with the Kensington Sinfonia this June. Mark shares with us his compositional process, what it means to bring a concerto to life that reflects our time - we talk Puccini, Messiaen and Mompou and dive into how this incredible concerto came to be. In typical Mark fashion, we of course even stray into Marxist psychoanalytic philosophy and the state of the world and how us as artists making music fits into our society and how much we both love Gen Micheletti! 🎻 Mark is a one-of-a-kind human who I can’t wait for you to meet!

You can watch the premiere of RUMINATIONS here!:

https://youtu.be/Fpd4wQXRJjU?si=FZ3Fay0tPriEfyZY

Thank you to Graham Lessard, audio engineer and Vicki Van Chau & Philip Bowen, videographers, for capturing the premiere so beautifully in our recording!

This is such a meaningful, dream-come-true project for us that would not be possible without support from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development and the City of Calgary and the collaboration with the incredible artists of Kensington Sinfonia and the Calgary Philharmonic listed here:

Violin

Genevieve Micheletti

Eric Auerbach

Isaac Willocks

Erin Burkholder

Diane Lane

Sora Kim

Viola

Liza Scriggins Lowry

Patricia Higgins

Ethan Mung

Cello

Andrea Case

Kathleen de Caen

Takumi Rodgers

Bass

Matthew Heller

Flute

Emily Pernambucq

Clarinet

Cedric Blary

Horn

Peter Clark

Trumpet

Adam Zinatelli

Percussion

Chris Sies

You can follow Mark @mark.limacher on instagram

✨ Stay connected with Pianists Not Practicing:

Instagram — @ChloeWestonPianist

YouTube — @ChloeWestonPianist

🎶 Intro/Outro Music: Ankur Mukhopadhyay — @ankurrmm

🎙️ Produced by: phMediaStudio, LLC