Christopher Harding, 2013 Core Faculty
Christopher Harding, Assistant Professor of Piano at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, maintains a flourishing international performance career, presenting frequent solo, concerto, and chamber music performances in venues as far flung as the Kennedy Center and Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Suntory Hall in Tokyo and the National Theater Concert Hall in Taipei, as well as various locales in Canada, mainland China, Israel and Romania.. His concerto performances have included concerts with the National Symphony and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestras, the San Angelo and Santa Barbara Symphonies and the Tokyo City Philharmonic. As a duo partner and chamber musician, he has collaborated with internationally renowned artists such as clarinetist Karl Leister, flautist Andras Adorjan, and members of the St. Lawrence and Ying String Quartets, in addition to frequent projects with his distinguished faculty colleagues at the University of Michigan.
Harding has presented master classes and lecture recitals across the United States and Asia, as well as in Israel and Canada. His most recent tours of Asia included presentations and master classes at Hong Kong Baptist University, National Taiwan Normal University, SooChow University, the National Taiwan University, and conservatories and universities in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Hefei, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Dalien, and Chongqing. He has appeared many times in Seoul, Korea, presenting recitals, lecture recitals and master classes at Seoul National, Ewha Women's and Dong Duk universities. He expanded his international activities in 2007 to include performances in Romania for the American-Romanian Music Festival and a tour of China under the auspices of the U.S. State Dept. In 2008, he completed a one-month guest residency as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music in Chengdu, China. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate piano performance and chamber music at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, he also serves on the faculty of the Indiana University Summer Piano Academy and is a frequent guest artist and teacher at the MasterWorks Festival in Winona Lake, IN.
Christopher Harding was born of American parents in Munich, Germany and raised in Northern Virginia. His principal teachers were Menahem Pressler and Nelita True. Prior to college, he worked extensively with Milton Kidd at the American University (Washington, DC), where he was trained in the Matthay tradition. He has taken twenty-five first prizes in national and international competitions, and in 1999 was awarded the special "Mozart Prize" at the Cleveland International Piano Competition. He has recorded two solo CDs and one chamber music CD for the Brevard Classics label, and has created a performing edition with CD of Debussy's Children's' Corner Suite, recently issued by Hal Leonard. His current recording projects include the Brahms sonatas for piano and violin, several other chamber music discs (including the complete piano chamber music of Franz Xaver Mozart), and solo piano music by Beethoven, Barber, Schumann and Copland.
