Kathleen Supove

Kathleen Supové is one of America's most acclaimed and versatile contemporary music pianists, known for continually redefining what it means to be a pianist/keyboardist/performance artist in today's world. In addition to her compelling virtuosity, she is also known for her boundary-breaking ways of breaking the wall between performer and audience. After winning top prizes in the Gaudeamus International Competition for Interpretation of Contemporary Music, she began her career as a guest artist at the prestigious Darmstadt Festival in Germany. Since then, Ms. Supové has presented solo concerts entitled The Exploding Piano, in which she has championed the music of countless contemporary composers—minimalists, postminimalists, and experimentalists. The most notable are Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen, Terry Riley, Chinary Ung, Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis, John Adams, and Alvin Curran, as well as younger composers including Randall Woolf, David Lang, Nick Didkovsky, Eve Beglarian, Daniel Bernard Roumain, John Zorn, Carolyn Yarnell, Phil Kline, Lukas Ligeti, Kitty Brazelton, Aaron Jay Kernis, Mary Ellen Childs, Michael Daugherty, Marti Epstein, Patrick Grant, Eleanor Sandresky, Dan Becker, Elaine Kaplinsky, Dafna Naphtali, Jed Distler, Nicholas Brooke, Lois V Vierk, Marita Bolles, Gene Pritsker, Robert Carl, Rob Zuidam, Belinda Reynolds and many others. She is also involved in commissioning projects with even younger, emerging composers such as the iconoclastic Michael Gatonska, singer/performance artist Corey Dargel, composer/video v.j. Peter Kirn, and Gameboy composer Bubblyfish.

The Exploding Piano has become a multimedia experience by using electronics, theatrical elements, vocal rants, performance art, staging, and collaboration with artists from other disciplines. This has taken on several different dimensions. First, Ms. Supové has been commissioning and presenting a new repertory of works for piano and electronics. Secondly, she has been presenting a number of Concert Theater works, most notably the evening-length staged piece for singing/reciting/moving pianist called Jitters, (music by Randall Woolf and texts/directing by Valeria Vasilevski). Furthermore, her Exploding Piano concerts almost always have original monologues and theatrical sketches surrounding the pieces. Kathleen is a featured performer in the Summer 2000 issue of Yale Theater Journal, which is devoted to Concert Theater. In 2001, she was made a Yamaha Artist and is working on a long-term project of commissioning a body of works for Yamaha Disklavier. She has done dance collaborations with The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Susan Marshall and Co., Heidi Latsky, and Nami Yamamoto. Ms. Supové has received commissioning and production grants from Meet The Composer, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, The Greenwall Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and American Composers Forum, among others.

She has appeared with The Lincoln Center Festival, The Philip Glass Ensemble, Bang On a Can Marathon, Music at the Anthology, Composers' Collaborative, Inc., and at many other venues, ranging from concert halls such as Carnegie to theatrical spaces such as The Kitchen to clubs such as The Knitting Factory and The Cutting Room. She is currently an artist-in-residence at The Flea Theater in NYC, where she regularly presents her newest Exploding Piano concerts each season. Recently, she was a featured performer in two prestigious festivals: The Ussachevsky Memorial Festival (Pomona College, Claremont, CA) and the NIME Festival (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) in New York City.

In 2004, Ms. Supové released Infusion on the Koch International Classics label, featuring four contemporary solo works for piano and electronics. It is available through CDBaby, iTunes, and other digital sales outlets. Other recordings can be found on the Tzadik, CRI, Innova, New World, Neuma, Bridge, Centaur, OO, and XI labels.

Besides being a soloist, Kathleen is a member of the art-rock band Dr. Nerve. She also curates Music With A View, a free music + discussion series at The Flea Theater.

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"What Ms. Supové is really exploding is the piano recital as we have known it, a mission more radical and arguably more needed." —Anthony Tommasini, NY Times

"This was classical music played like the best rock'n'roll. It was passionate, earnest, loud and more complex than the gatekeepers of high culture would like to think. Brava." —Ben Sisario, NY Press

Philip K. Dick dropped into my dream to explain a mystery: "Yes, Kathy Supové is human, which is why her playing exhibits profound and genuine passion. But yes, she is also android-enhanced, which is why she can play impossibly difficult pieces at impossible speeds with impossible precision." "And is that also why...," I began. "Yes," he said, "it is the reason she gives spectacular hybrid shows in which she rants, and confesses, and interrogates the audience. And it is why," he said just before revaporizing into the void, "she will never fail to astonish." —Jane Ransom, writer

"What's it like to be at a Supové concert? The best thing about it is that you can never answer that question; she's taking you on a voyage with her and it's always to a new place. But you resonate with what's happening because she dares to explore those personal shadowy places that all of us have an inkling about, that we sense only fleetingly in flashes of intuition. In a time of endless talk about the blurring of boundaries of art, here is an artist who simply ignores the boundaries altogether. You go with her to unmarked territories of the spirit." —Wes York, composer/author/producer
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