John Bell Young Piano   

Pianist John Bell Young is an expert on the works of Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, which until modern times had generally been overlooked, if not totally ignored. With the full approval of Scriabin's children, Yelena Scriabina Sofronifsky and Marina Scriabine, Young twice participated in Moscow's International Scriabin Festival, where he acted as head of a U.S. contingent. A prize was instituted in Young's name in 1995 at the International Scriabin Piano Competition.

Within the walls of the Scriabin Museum, Young has three times performed all-Scriabin recitals. The museum, in conjunction with Sovietskii Kompozitor, has printed his treatise on the Russian composer. Thanks to grants bestowed by the Pew Charitable Trust and the Rockefeller Trust for Mutual Understanding, Young has embarked on numerous Russian tours. Among the venues he has played are St. Petersburg's Composers Union and Latvia's Riga Philharmonic. After his 1976 U.S. debut in Washington, D.C., Young also played stages in Paris, London, Rome, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Tangiers, Amsterdam, and Rio de Janeiro.

Young's Sony Classical and Newport Classics albums of Friedrich Nietzsche's compositions have received worldwide attention. The pianist brought Nietzsche's musical works to Russia in 1992, breaking a ban on the philosopher's compositions that had lasted for three-quarters of a century. On one of these recordings, his collaborators included tenor John Aler, violinist Nicholas Eanet, and pianist Constance Keene. These works are included on the soundtrack of Zarathustra's Drinking Song, a documentary. Dutch television filmed Young in concert, and the resulting documentary was titled Sweet Summer Concert.

As he did with Scriabin and Nietzsche, Young has frequently concentrated on compositions by lesser known composers, among them television journalist Hugh Downs, Lionel Barrymore, and author Boris Pasternak. In 1999, Americus issued a CD of the pianist playing Scriabin, Downs, Leo Tolstoy, and others. Among Young's musical instructors were Constance Keene, Ernst Levy, Margarita Fyodorova, Benjamin Kaplan, Bruce Hungerford, and Olga Barabini.

© Linda Seida, Rovi

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JOHN BELL YOUNG, whose recordings of the music of Alexander Scriabin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others on the Newport Classics, Sony Classical, and Americus labels have earned international critical acclaim, is a leading authority on the music of Scriabin. In 2002 Americus Records released his recording of Richard Strauss's rarely performed Enoch Arden, a melodrama for narrator and piano, in which he collaborates with the celebrated British actor, Michael York, with whom he also toured internationally in performances of that work in the 2003 and 2004.

Mr Young has performed throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, South America, and often in Russia, including appearances at the Glinka Cappella in St Petersburg, the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, and at the Riga Philharmonic in Latvia. Volkswagen sponsored his 2001 tour of the Peoples Republic of China. Winner of the 1985 Chopin Foundation Council Prize, he has given master classes and lectures at Brown University, the Juilliard School, the University of South Florida, the Leningrad Conservatory, the Moscow Conservatory, and the Boston Conservatory of Music. In the US he has performed at such prestigious venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach; at both the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC; the Concert Hall of the Forbidden City in Beijing; Christchurch Spitalfields in London; the Musee Carnavalet in Paris; and at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. A recital he devoted to music of Liszt, Chopin, Godowsky, Gershwin, and Schumann, filmed for Dutch television and entitled John Bell Young: Sweet Summer Concert, Amsterdam, has been broadcast in Holland (TROS), England (ITV), Israel and throughout Eastern Europe.

A musical archaeologist, John Bell Young has recorded and performed the rarely heard and largely unknown musical compositions of such prominent literary figures as Nietzsche, Tolstoi, Ezra Pound, Garcia-Lorca, and Boris Pasternak. On his Americus CD, Prisms (2000) he also recorded a work by the celebrated broadcaster and newsman, Hugh Downs.

In 1990 the [Rockefeller] Trust for Mutual Understanding awarded Mr Young a grant to lead the American delegation to the International Scriabin Conference and Festival in Moscow, where he performed an all-Scriabin recital at the Scriabin Museum on the occassion of the composer's 120th anniversary, and presented his monograph Scriabin Defended Against His Devotees: A Critical Evaluation of the Composer and his Music in the Context of Russian History, Religion and Culture Mr. Young is one of only a few pianists endorsed by both Elena Scriabina Sofronitsky and Marina Scriabin, the composer's daughters.

Profiles and feature articles about Mr. Young have appeared in Time, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the US News and World Report, Lingua Franca, Hamburger Abendblatt, Bunte (Berlin), Pravda (Moscow), Le Monde de la Musique (Paris), Chaspik (St Petersburg, Russia), Musica Rivista Italiana (Rome) the Christian Science Monitor, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, the American Record Guide, Clavier, the St. Petersburg Times (Florida), Dagens Nyheter, (Stockholm), NPR's Performance Today, WNYC's New Sounds with John Schaefer, ABC-TVs 20/20, and David Dubal's nationally syndicated radio broadcast (WQXR in New York) Reflections from the Keyboard.

A widely published writer and music critic, he is a correspondent for the St. Petersburg Times, American Record Guide, Opera News, Clavier Companion, Music and Vision, Arts Fuse (Boston), and Classical DisCDigest. He is also an annotator for Sony Classical, Angelok Records, and other record labels. He is the author of five critically acclaimed books (on Brahms, Puccini, Beethoven, Liszt, and Schubert), which were published by Amadeus Press in 2008 and 2009.

Mr. Young served alongside Sviatoslav Richter on the advisory board of the 1995 Scriabin International Competition in Moscow, where a special prize for the best performance of an early Scriabin Sonata was established in his name. He is a frequent adjudicator at international piano competitions, including the European International Piano Competition (Sweden), the Greta Erikson Nordic at Kil (Sweden), the RAMA (Boston), the Young Prince (Russia), the Boston Outstanding Amateur (Boston); the International Russian Music Piano Competition (San Jose); and the Premio Jaen (Spain).

In 2009, in recognition of his books on music, John Bell Young was honored by a number of prestigious foundations, among them the Kittredge Fund (administered at Harvard University), the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Carnegie Fund, and Stephen King's Haven Foundation, each of which awarded him a generous grant for his work.

Making his home in the Boston area, John Bell Young is the devoted companion of an exceptionally handsome black Labrador Retriever as well as a dashing Irish Setter, Justice. (See their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/BENandJUSTICE?feature=mhum) A devotee of canine culture, Mr. Young is currently at work on a new book, a pictorial tome devoted to concert musicians and their dogs. His interviews with noted pianists and dog owners Leon Fleisher, Kathryn Jacobson-Fleisher, Helene Grimaud, and with the celebrated trainers and behaviorists, Victoria Stilwell, Dr. Ian Dunbar, and Dr. Sue Ann Lesser will be included there and also in his forthcoming article for Clavier Companion magazine.

More than 150 video and audio recordings of John Bell Young in concert are available on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/user/guirlandes3?feature=mhum