Pianist Inon Barnatan has been awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant, one of the most prestigious honors a young classical instrumentalist can receive.  Previous recipients of the $25,000 prize include Joshua Bell, Gil Shaham, Matt Haimovitz, and Jeffrey Kahane. Barnatan received the award in April, the same month he returned to his native Israel to perform with the Jerusalem Symphony (he has been based in the U.S. since 2006). 

The 30-year-old pianist is no stranger to Lincoln Center.  With two concerts in May he completed his third season as a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's CMS Two.  He will be back in November curating his own three-concert series, "Schubert Ascending," which he recently presented to sold-out houses at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw.  The programs feature treasured works from the remarkably productive last year of Schubert's life.  A recording of Barnatan playing Schubert's Impromptus, D. 935 and Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960 is available on a Bridge Records release from 2006.

This summer, Barnatan appears at several major music festivals across the U.S.  After Fourth of July weekend performances of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony, he will spend July and August playing solo recitals and chamber music at the festivals in Aspen, Vail, Blossom (Cleveland Orchestra), Santa Fe, Rockport and Bridgehampton. 

For more information, visit InonBarnatan.com or the Opus 3 Artists web site.

After hearing Pablo Heras-Casado conduct Mahler's Fourth Symphony with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in March, critic Alan Rich lamented missing the 31-year-old Spaniard's LAPO debut last December. "He's terrific," Rich wrote on his blog, So I've Heard.  "His bio, which has him leading virtually every new-music, experimental-music and youth-oriented organization here and abroad, goes on for days; that document is breathtaking, and so is his work."  In his December concerts with the Philharmonic, Heras-Casado, who counts Pierre Boulez and Peter Eötvös as mentors, led a program of Stockhausen and Ligeti.  Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed praised these concerts, stating: "Heras-Casado did a superb job controlling the dramatic gestures and let the [Ligeti] speak for itself."

Last month Heras-Casado made his Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra debut conducting the world premiere of Chinese-American composer Chen Yi's Prelude and Fugue, along with works by Beethoven, Prokofiev, and Richard Strauss, in Saint Paul and Chicago.  Under the "batonless young Spaniard of boundless animation," wrote the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the concert "felt like a multi-century symposium on the vitality and viability of the Western classical tradition."  This August, Pablo Heras-Casado makes his debut with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, Japan, conducting Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras.

Although his recent schedule might suggest that Heras-Casado is a symphonic specialist, he is equally at home in the opera pit.  The Spaniard has a strong association with the Opéra National de Paris, where he made his full debut in autumn 2008 conducting the world premiere of Marc-Olivier Dupin´s ballet Les enfants du paradis.  In the coming seasons, Heras-Casado will return to the Opera National de Bordeaux and Madrid's Teatro Real and make his debuts with the English National Opera and the Canadian Opera Company. 

For more information, visit www.PabloHeras.com or the Harrison Parrott web site.