2011 Faculty
2013 Faculty to be posted soon!
 Edward Auer, DirectorJacobs School of Music |
 Junghwa Moon Auer Associate Director |
 André Watts Special Guest Artist Jacobs School of Music |
 Jerome LowenthalSpecial Guest Artist |
 Halina Goldberg Special Guest Lecturer Jacobs School of Music |
 Edward Auer Faculty |
 Junghwa Moon Auer Faculty |
 Peter Bithell Faculty |
 Jung Won Moon Adjunct Faculty |
 Hee Sung Joo Faculty |
 Eugene Albulescu Visiting Artist |
 David Cartledge Jacobs School of Music |
 Nicholas Roth Visiting Artist |
A native of Korea, Junghwa Moon Auer began her piano study at the age of six. She attended the prestigious Yewon Middle School and Seoul Music and Art High School where she was recognized as one of their most gifted students. She studied with Hyung Bae Kim and Min Suk Kim, then went on to do her undergraduate work at Yeonsei University with Kyung Sook Lee.
Ms. Moon came to the United States in 1993 to study under Gabriel Chodos at the New England Conservatory, where she obtained her MM degree. She attended the Aspen Music Festival four years, as well as summer programs in Chautauqua, Luzern, and Prague, where she performed and received several prizes in the festival competitions. At the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati she pursued her DMA with Eugene and Elizabeth Pridonoff, and won CCM’s concerto competition, performing the Schumann Concerto with the CCM Philharmonia under Mark Gibson. While there she won the WGUC Radio audition, which led to a live radio broadcast, and was a prizewinner in the Ibla International Competition in Italy. During this time she was also invited back to Korea to play in the Kumho Recital Series.
In 2001 Ms. Moon returned home, where she performed frequently in Seoul, Busan and Gwangju and taught in several universities, including Seoul National. During this time she performed Beethoven’s Emperor concerto with the Janácek Orchestra in the Czech Republic, Chopin E minor with the Zilina Orchestra in Slovakia and Mozart K. 467 with the Cairo Symphony, the first Korean pianist ever to play in Egypt.
Last year she played the Mozart double concerto with her husband, Edward Auer, in Busan and Hong Kong as well as at Indiana University.
Junghwa Moon has been living in Bloomington, Indiana since 2006, where she and her husband host a house concert series, “Music in the Woods,” in their home.
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Jerome Lowenthal, born in 1932, continues to fascinate audiences, who find in his playing a youthful intensity and an eloquence born of life-experience. He is a virtuoso of the fingers and the emotions.
Mr. Lowenthal studied in his native Philadelphia with Olga Samaroff-Stokowski, in New York with William Kapell and Edward Steuermann, and in Paris with Alfred Cortot, while traveling annually to Los Angeles for coachings with Artur Rubinstein. After winning prizes in three international competitions (Bolzano, Darmstadt, and Brussels), he moved to Jerusalem where he played, taught and lectured for three years.
Returning to America, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic playing Béla Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1963. Since then, he has performed everywhere, from the Aleutians to Zagreb. Conductors with whom he has appeared as soloist include Barenboim, Ozawa, Tilson Thomas, Temirkanov, and Slatkin, as well as giants of the past such as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux and Leopold Stokowski. He has played sonatas with Itzhak Perlman, piano duos with Ronit Amir (his late wife), Carmel Lowenthal (his daughter), and Ursula Oppens, as well as quintets with the Lark, Avalon and Shanghai Quartets. He has recently recorded the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 with cadenzas by eleven different composers. His other recordings include concerti by Tchaikovsky and Liszt, solo works by Sinding and Bartók, and chamber music by Arensky and Taneyev.
Teaching is also an important part of Mr. Lowenthal's musical life. For twenty years at the Juilliard School and for forty-one summers at the Music Academy of the West, he has worked with an extraordinary number of gifted pianists, whom he encourages to understand the music they play in a wide aesthetic and cultural perspective and to project it with the freedom which that perspective allows.
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A native of Korea, Hee Sung Joo began piano study at the age of five. After receiving a bachelor degree at Seoul National University she came to the U.S. for a Master of Music degree and Artist Diploma at the New England Conservatory. After winning several major piano competitions in Korea, she went on to become the first prize winner of the 1995 Dudley International Piano Competition. Following this success, Ms. Joo concertized extensively in England including a London debut in 1996 at the Royal Festival Hall. She had two feature recitals in Connecticut as the first prize winner of the Simone Belsky Music Award Competition in 1999. After Ms. Joo took the first place in the 2002 New Orleans International Piano Competition, she made several appearances in the New Orleans area including a performance with Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Other U.S. appearances include recitals in Jordan Hall (Boston), the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum, Harvard Musical Association Hall, French Library in Boston, and Loyola University.
Ms. Joo has played several recitals in Seoul at the Hoam Art Hall, Kumho Art Hall, and Berlin Philharmonie Hall as well as making a number of appearances as soloist with major orchestras. She was recently invited to record works by Chopin, including his four Ballads, in a live recital by the Korean FM Radio Broadcasting System. She has been invited to many international music festivals in Korea, Busan, Berlin, and Beijing where she gave numerous chamber music concerts.
In 2003 Ms. Joo was hired as an associate professor at Seoul National University, where she continues to work today.
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Eugene Albulescu has worked as conductor and soloist with the New Zealand Symphony, The Romanian National George Enescu Philharmonic, the New York Chamber Orchestra, the Manukau City Symphony Orchestra, Christchurch Symphony, as well as the French Chamber Orchestra. His upcoming engagements include a recording with the New Zealand Symphony on the Naxos Label. Mr. Albulescu has performed with and conducted the French Chamber Orchestra in 2009 with concerts in Worcester MA, Charleston WV, and Gettysburg PA, and was later invited to be the soloist and conductor for the orchestra’s 20-concert US tour in 2010-2011.
An award-winning performer, Mr. Albulescu combines a blazing technique with artistic integrity and the originality to express musical emotions at their most personal level. In 1994 his debut recording (Albulescu Plays Liszt, MANU1446) earned him the Grand Prix du Disque Liszt. Noted New York Times critic Harold Schonberg praised Mr. Albulescu in the American Record Guide for his “infallible fingers of steel”, declaring that “nothing, anywhere, has any terrors for him”. Mr. Albulescu performed in New York at BargeMusic in 1996, and in 2001 made his Carnegie Hall debut, performing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Orchestra of St. Peter’s-by-the-Sea. He gained national recognition in the U.S. with broadcasts on several classical stations and on NPR’s Performance Today. His recordings have been released on Ode/Manu, Ode/BMG, Trust, as well as Downstage Recordings, a label he started in 2000. Other recordings include studio sessions for the South African Broadcasting Corporation as well as Radio New Zealand where he was named a “Radio New Zealand Recording Artist”.
Mr. Albulescu’s outreach in over one hundred U.S. high schools has been significant. His program “Inside the Piano” that links technology with creativity earned him coverage in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as the cover of Clavier magazine. Mr. Albulescu performed at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, and was invited to perform at the White House for the Millennium celebration. He was a founding member of the highly-acclaimed Turnovsky Trio of New Zealand.
Albulescu began his piano studies at age six at the Enescu Music School in Bucharest, Romania. His family moved to New Zealand in 1984 to escape the communist regime. He completed his musical studies at Indiana University where at age nineteen he was the youngest person ever to teach as an assistant instructor. Eugene Albulescu is a Steinway Artist who currently teaches on the music faculty at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. He has been the director of the LU Philharmonic since 2007.
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Pianist Nicholas Roth began his formal studies at age twelve and was receiving critical acclaim for his appearances by the age of eighteen. Hailed by the Indianapolis News as "a world of talent, displaying lyrical beauty, percussive driving power never out of control, and never without security and assurance," he has appeared as soloist with the St. Louis Symphony and the Indianapolis Symphony under Raymond Leppard, among many others. Roth has been featured in recitals and festivals in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Serbia, and Spain, including the prestigious Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts Series of Chicago, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the Kalamazoo Bach Festival, and Sunday Afternoons Live from the Elvehjem in Madison, Wisconsin. An avid collaborative pianist, he has performed with premier chamber ensembles such as the Cypress String Quartet, Euclid String Quartet, Felici Piano Trio, and vocalist Cheryl Studer.
In 2010 Yamaha Corporation of America selected Roth for its Artist in Education program, which recognizes excellence in performing and teaching and provides opportunities for concerts, recordings, and masterclasses throughout the nation. Roth was a 1993 Beethoven Fellow of the American Pianists Association, which provided him concert management for three years. He has won first prizes in several international competitions including the chamber music competitions of Tortona and Pietra Ligure, Italy. He was the recipient of a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) grant that enabled him to further his studies in Germany. He was honored by the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana for his "contribution to the performing arts, his accomplishments as a concert pianist, and his inspiration to young musicians."
Roth holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Michigan State University, an Artist Diploma from the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, and MM and BM degrees from Indiana University, where he was the recipient of the Jacobs School of Music's highest honors including the Performer's Certificate and the Joseph Battista Memorial Scholarship. His teachers include Ralph Votapek, Elisso Virsaladze, Helmut Deutsch, Edward Auer, Emilio del Rosario, and Michel Block.
Roth has taught masterclasses at the Isidor Bajić School of Music in Novi Sad, Serbia, the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, the University of Chicago, and the University of New Hampshire at the Music Hall in Portsmouth. He was a presenter for the European Piano Teachers Association - Second World Piano Conference in Serbia, and served on panel discussions at the World Piano Pedagogy Conference in Las Vegas, and Teaching Music History Day at Depauw University. As a Nationally Certified Teacher of Music (NCTM) of the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA), he is a frequent presenter and adjudicator for MTNA events. He has been guest artist faculty for summer music programs at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, Western Michigan University, Goshen College, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, and Centrum Music Festival in Port Townsend, WA.
Roth is currently Associate Professor of Piano at Drake University. He has also served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point and Alma College. His recordings with the Blue Griffin Recording label have garnered many favorable reviews from International Record Review, Gramophone, Fanfare, and American Record Guide.
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Peter Bithell studied with Gordon Green at the Royal Academy of Music and subsequently with Guido Agosti in Italy and with Maria Curcio in London.
He won many prizes and awards at International Piano Competitions, notably Busoni (Bolzano), Reina Sofia (Madrid), Paloma O’Shea (Santander), Dudley, Marguerite Long (Paris) and the Rachmaninoff Prize in Italy.
Bithell has played extensively in Europe and South America. He gives regular master classes, notably in Spain, and has served on the juries of several International Piano Competitions. He has been a professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama since 1987.
