Janice Weber

World-class pianist Janice Weber returns to Ogunquit Performing Arts to launch our 19th annual Elizabeth Dunaway Burnham piano festival.

Weber has planned a dazzling program of works by Beethoven, Ornstein, and Templeton, as well as Schubert and Donizetti works transcribed by Franz Liszt. Weber, a Liszt specialist, is a vivacious performer who has a reputation for programming the most exciting and technically challenging selections – which certainly applies to this program!
 

“Ms. Weber is also a concert pianist of cliffhanging panache and daredevil brilliance.”  Ellen Pfeifer, The Wall Street Journal

Weber is a summa cum laude graduate of the Eastman School of Music. She has performed at the White House, Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, National Gallery of Art, and Boston’s Symphony Hall. She has appeared with the Boston Pops, Chautauqua Symphony, Hilton Head Orchestra, and Sarajevo Philharmonic, among others. Weber has also performed at the Bard, Newport, La Gesse, Husum, and Monadnock summer festivals and has twice toured China under the auspices of the American Liszt Society.

Her world premiere recording of Liszt’s 1838 Transcendental Etudes elicited acclaim from Time Magazine: “Liszt later simplified these pieces into the still ferociously difficult Transcendental Etudes (1852 version) for fear that no one else could play them. There may now be several fire-eating piano virtuosos who can execute the original notes, but few can liberate the prophetic music they contain as masterfully as Janice Weber does here.”

Ms. Weber recorded Liszt’s last Hungarian Rhapsody, one of only two living pianists to be included in a compendium of historic performances by nineteen legendary artists. This recording subsequently won the International Liszt Prize.

Her recordings also include Rachmaninoff’s complete transcriptions; with the Lydian Quartet, Leo Ornstein’s vast Piano Quintet; flute and piano works of Sigfrid Karg-Elert; and waltz transcriptions of Godowsky, Rosenthal, and Friedman.

Weber’s Naxos recording of Leo Ornstein’s radical works introduced the charismatic composer to a worldwide audience. She is heard in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time on Ongaku Records, and her newest recording, Cascade of Roses (Dorian Sono Luminus), features works by twenty-one composers from Adolf Jensen to Billy Mayerl.

Weber was a member of the piano faculty at Boston Conservatory for twenty-seven years and has taught at MIT and New England Conservatory. She also produced the tones for Ivory, the worldwide bestselling virtual piano software.