POTSDAM, NY (02/09/2012)(readMedia)-- The Crane Symphony Orchestra will present a concert featuring a winner of this year's student concerto competition at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 17, in the Helen M. Hosmer Concert Hall at SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music.

The program will include a beloved piece, the first movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring pianist Christopher Hotson, who was the runner-up in this year's student concerto competition. The concerto will be followed by Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6.

This concert is free, and the public is invited to attend.

The Crane Symphony Orchestra is a premier, 90-member performing ensemble at the Crane School of Music. The ensemble performs great orchestral masterworks from the standard and contemporary orchestral literature.

About the performer:

Christopher Hotson is a piano performance master's student in the graduate program at Crane, and a student of François Germain and Paul Wyse. He particularly identifies with Rachmaninoff and Franz Liszt, and other composers of the high-Romantic tradition, although he is constantly expanding his horizons.

Growing up in London, Hotson attended Saturday schools at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music for a few years before taking up a full music scholarship at Oundle School in the East Midlands of England. He studied with William Fong, Robert Markham and Alec Hone. While at Oundle, he played the soloist part in a performance of "Rhapsody in Blue" at St. John's Smith Square, London, and performed in a promotional recital at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. In his final year, he won the top prize in the school music competition playing Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No.1.

Hotson completed his Bachelor of Music degree at Birmingham Conservatoire in England, where he studied with Malcolm Wilson and John Humphreys. During that time he won numerous prizes, including the Beryl Chempin Beethoven Prize for a performance of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata, and the Marjorie Hazlehurst Piano Award, for the performance and co-organization of an orchestral charity concert in which he played the solo part of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. The proceeds from that concert benefitted Cancer Research UK. Hotson has played in masterclasses for Peter Donohoe, Martin Jones, Daniel Hoexter and Mikhael Kazakevich, among others. In contemporary music, he has played Rzewski to Rzewski and Andriessen to Andriessen -- both in concerts organized in the composers' honor. He has had two pieces dedicated to him by British composer Stephen Mark Barchan.

Hotson first came to The Crane School of Music through the student exchange program, where he was selected to play in a masterclass with Victoria Mushkatkol from Juilliard. After finishing his degree in Birmingham, he accepted a scholarship and a graduate assistantship to return to Crane for his master's degree. He placed second in the Crane Concerto Competition with the piece that he will perform on Feb. 17.

For more information about the long history of excellence in musical performance at The Crane School of Music, visit www.potsdam.edu/academics/Crane/125years.

Founded in 1886, SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music has a long legacy of excellence in music education and performance. Life at Crane includes an incredible array of more than 300 recitals, lectures and concerts presented by faculty, students and guests each year. The Crane School of Music is the State University of New York's only All-Steinway institution, and is celebrating its 125th anniversary in 2011-12.

-www.potsdam.edu/crane-

Posted Thursday February 09, 2012 at 01:25 pm by SUNY Potsdam
Last Updated Friday February 10, 2012 at 02:00 pm