Boyers and Blaich to present chamber music recital July 22

Violinist Gabriel Boyers and pianist Tanya Blaich will present a free chamber music recital of works by Bach, Brahms and others at 7 p.m. Sunday, July 22, at the Tang Teaching Museum on campus. Admission is free and open to the public.

Boyers was recently praised for his “rock steady finger and bow technique” (New Music Connoisseur Magazine) and has been described as an “elegant, accomplished player” by the Boston Phoenix. Blaich won the top prize at the 2000 Robert Schumann competition in Germany and has performed at Alice Tully Hall, among many other places.

About the artists

Pianist Tanya Blaich 

Born in Walla Walla, Wash., Tanya Blaich made her concerto debut with the Washington-Idaho Symphony at age 15. In addition to recent North American performances at such venues as Alice Tully Hall, Jordan Hall, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, Blaich performed in recital halls in Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland, and France. She has performed for the Piatigorsky outreach program in New England and has been heard on WGBH, Austrian National Radio, and the WCRB Radio Performance Series.

Currently on the faculty at the New England Conservatory, Blaich teaches for the collaborative piano and voice departments. She attended the Sorbonne in Paris and graduated from Walla Walla College with high honors, studying humanities, French, and music. After earning a diploma with distinction in vocal accompaniment and chamber music from the Vienna Conservatory, Blaich completed M.M. and D.M.A. degrees at the New England Conservatory, studying with Irma Vallecillo, John Moriarity, John Greer and Kayo Iwama. She was the recipient of the Hannah Adler scholarship in Vienna and the Natica Righter Williams endowed scholarship at the New England Conservatory. In collaboration with baritone Klemens Geyerhofer, Blaich won the top prize at the 2000 Robert Schumann competition in Germany.

Gabriel Boyers has performed as recitalist and chamber and orchestral musician at the Sandor Vegh International Chamber Music Festival in Prague, the Banff Centre in Canada, and Boston's Jordan Hall, among others. As a member of the Rembrandt String Quartet, Boyers performed throughout New England and at the Vail Valley Bravo Music Festival in Colorado as the "Bravo! Young Ensemble in Residence" from 2002 to 2004.

He won top prizes at the Stefan Competition in New York and the Arthur K. Virgin Competition in New Hampshire, served as concertmaster of orchestras at the New England Conservatory and elsewhere, and performs regularly with the new-music group, the Callithumpian Consort. Committed to the performance of a wide variety of repertoire, Boyers served as concertmaster in the sold-out world-premiere of "Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra" with DJ Radar at Carnegie Hall in 2005 and has participated in many other world-premiere performances.

In 2006, he premiered “For Lou” by John Luther Adams and recorded the work on CD. More recently, Boyers was a resident artist at the “Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, where he worked with composer Lee Hyla to develop “Cadenza,” for solo violin, based on portions of composer’s Violin Concerto.

Boyers is a graduate of Tufts University and the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Masuko Ushioda and James Buswell. A musician with a wide variety of interests, Boyers is a student of the Alexander Technique, and a poet whose work has appeared in The Paris Review and Midstream. Owner of Schubertiade Music, Boyers is also a dealer of rare musical autographs, antiquarian music, music books, and art and photographs of musical interest, and of rare musical ephemera.