Bradford P. Gowen

Appointed Fall 1981

Bradford Gowen earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Eastman School of Music where he studied piano with Cécile Genhart and composition with Samuel Adler. He later studied piano with Leon Fleisher and Dorothy Taubman.

He was the winner of the first Kennedy Center/Rockefeller Foundation International Competition for Excellence in the Performance of American Music (1978). After winning that prize he made his New York recital debut at Alice Tully Hall playing music by American composers plus works by Beethoven and Chopin, and recorded an album of American music, Exultation, for New World Records. That album that was re-released as a CD with an expanded amount of music (#NW304). Following his second New York recital, at the 92nd Street Y, his playing of music by Mozart, Beethoven, and American composers was described in the New York Times as “just about ideal in all respects.”

On Memorial Day 1980, he performed Aaron Copland’s Piano Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the composer. The next year he played several more times with that orchestra under Mstislav Rostropovich and Maxim Shostakovich. In January 1985 he performed the world premiere of Samuel Adler’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in three concerts at the Kennedy Center. He performed and gave a masterclass in the 70th birthday celebration for Leon Fleisher at the University of Kansas, and in 2000 he gave the world premiere of the Piano Sonata of Judith Lang Zaimont.

Mr. Gowen’s numerous chamber music performances have included appearances at the Library of Congress Summer Chamber Festival. He has also appeared with the Kronos Quartet, the Guarneri Quartet, and cellist David Soyer, and has played many duo concerts with his wife, pianist Maribeth Gowen.

For over twenty years Mr. Gowen wrote for The Piano Quarterly and Piano & Keyboard. In 2002 he wrote a major series of three articles on twentieth-century piano music for the London-based International Piano. He was chosen to write the extensive booklet notes for the historic 2017 three-CD release of live performances by William Kapell never previously heard on recordings. (William Kapell Broadcasts and Concert Performances 1944-1952, Marston Records).

Mr. Gowen has served as a judge for many local, regional, and national competitions, as well as the Kapell, the Gina Bachauer, and the Sydney international piano competitions. He was a member of the Advisory Committee that created and ran the Seventeen Magazine/General Motors National Concerto Competition for high school students in the 1970s and 1980s.

Since 1981 he has been on the piano faculty at the University of Maryland School of Music. He is one of the forty-eight pianists featured in Benjamin Saver’s 1993 book The Most Wanted Piano Teachers in the USA.