NATCHITOCHES – Pianists Constance Carroll and Kevin Chance will perform at Northwestern State University Friday, Oct. 11 at 7:30 p.m. in Magale Recital Hall. The concert is part of the Louisiana Piano Series International. Tickets are $15. Students are admitted free. Dr. Francis Yang and Dr. Christine Burczyk Allen are the organizers of the Louisiana Piano Series International.
Carroll is a recitalist, chamber musician and orchestral soloist. As a Music Teachers National Association Foundation Fellow, she has received excellence in teaching awards by Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Music Teachers Association. She recently performed with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, the Shreveport Symphony Orchestra, the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra and the Louisiana Sinfonietta. Equally adept as a teacher, Carroll’s students have won local, regional and national competitions, and have presented recitals, master classes and lectures at universities and colleges throughout the country.
Carroll received her education at the University of Arizona and the Eastman School of Music. After study as a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna and Salzburg, she was appointed to the music faculty at Louisiana State University. Subsequently, she taught at Wisconsin State University, Lenoir-Rhyne College in North Carolina, and was artist-in-residence at Centenary College of Louisiana for 21 years. She was reappointed to the music faculty of LSU in 1995, and a year later she became the first recipient of the Barineau Professorship of Keyboard Studies.
In recent years Carroll has been on the faculties of Brevard Music Center, the University of Houston High School Piano Camp, the Indiana Summer Piano Academy, the Frank Mannheimer Piano Festival and the New Orleans Piano Institute. She also has been a juror for the New Orleans International Piano Competition, the Missouri Southern International Piano Competition, the American Pianists Association Competition and the national finals of the MTNA Student and Young Artists Competition.
Named Teacher of the Year by the Alabama Music Teachers Association, Chance has been hailed as “a superlative musician” playing “with musical conviction and muscularity.” He has performed throughout the United States and abroad as both soloist and collaborator. In 2003, he was invited to the Lake District Summer Music Festival in England where he was featured on both of the festival’s gala performances. Recent engagements include performances at Carnegie Hall as well as concerto appearances with Rachamninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” with the Huxford Symphony Orchestra, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with the University of Alabama Wind Ensemble, Saint-Saëns’s “Carnival of the Animals” with the Tuscaloosa Symphony, Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy” with the Athens Chorale in Georgia, and Gerald Finzi’s “Eclogue.”
Recital engagements have included the University of Oklahoma, the Louisiana Piano Series International, and the Albion College International Piano Festival. He has also been presented in performances by the Mobile Opera, the Mississippi Opera, Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre, the University of Texas at Brownsville, the University of South Carolina, Columbus State University, Auburn University, Millsaps College, the University of North Dakota, the Saratoga Arts Fest, Bucknell University and the University of Alabama. Chance has been a prizewinner of several regional and national competitions including the National Society of Arts and Letters Career Awards Competition, Music Teachers National Association Competitions (MTNA), and the Brevard Music Center Concerto Competition. broadcast live on WXXI radio in Rochester, New York, and in 2014, they made their European debut in Paris.
