Christopher White & Melanie Reinhard
Biography Christopher White & Melanie Reinhard
Christopher White
graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in 2007 with first-class honours, as well as awards for academic and practical music making. He recently completed Masters study at the Academy (gaining a distinction), in which he was supported by the Musicians Benevolent Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He studies piano with Hamish Milne and Nicholas Walker, and piano accompaniment with Michael Dussek.
Christopher has studied Chopin with the late Prof. Alexander Satz, Messiaen with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Busoni with Ronald Stevenson. He has performed as a chamber musician in the Wigmore, Fairfield and Queen Elizabeth Halls, as well as the Clore Studio of the Royal Opera House with members of the Royal Ballet, and on BBC Radio 3’s ‘In Tune’ programme. He contributed to the Ronald Stevenson 80th birthday celebrations at St. John’s, Smith Square in April 2008, playing Busoni. Other solo performances have taken him as far afield as Vienna and New Zealand, the latter for a Chopin recital on a piano donated to the city of Auckland by Paderewski.
As a chamber musician, Christopher has twice visited the International Musicians’ Seminar in Prussia Cove, Cornwall , studying trio and cello-piano duo repertoire with Valeria Szervansky. He made his Park Lane Group debut, with bassoonist Rosemary Burton, in January 2009 at the Purcell Room, London.
He has worked extensively for singers on lieder and song recitals as well as on opera scenes by nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers. He participated in the Das Lied competition in Berlin in February 2009, and the Young Songmakers Almanac series of Masterclasses in March of the same year. He is also a founder member and Artistic Director of the Little Opera Company (www.thelittleoperacompany.co.uk).
Christopher spent the summer of 2008 as a Piano Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Centre in Massachusetts, in which he worked with Maestro James Levine and assistant conductors from the Metropolitan Opera, New York, on a staged production of Kurt Weill’s opera Mahagonny, as well as playing the role of onstage pianist in the production. He also made no fewer than seven solo and chamber appearances at the Centre’s Seiji Ozawa Hall, participated in vocal masterclasses by Phyllis Curtin, Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Martin Katz and James Levine, and contributed to the centennial celebrations for Elliot Carter, including preparing the world premiere performance of Mad Regales.
In addition to piano studies, Christopher is an organist and conductor. As a writer on music he is now a regular contributor to Piano Professional and International Piano magazines. His Masters dissertation focussed on the music of Mahler, and he is taking his Mahler studies further in his current Doctoral research, due for completion in 2011.
