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Host & Producer Kathryn Mishell

Kathryn Mishell, Host of Into the Light Radio

Kathryn Mishell was born in Los Angeles, where she received her early musical training. Her college and graduate work were done at Pomona College, The University of Kansas, and the University of Southern California. During these years she was a piano student of John Perry and a composition student of John Pozdro and then Ingolf Dahl.

Ms. Mishell's works include over a hundred piano pieces, ensemble and orchestral works, and music for chorus, dance and theatre. She is the recipient of the 2011 Sylvia Glickman Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music for her Piano Quartet. Rhapsody for Cello and Piano, composed in the summer of 2011, was played in Carnegie Hall on January 7, 2012 by the cellist Douglas Harvey and Eduard Laurel, pianist. Mishell has participated in the Women's Philharmonic New Music Reading Sessions, the Society of Composers National Conference, and has been guest composer at the University of Texas at Austin. She is one of two women composers honored by the National League of American Pen Women in 1996. She was the 1997 commissioned composer of the Texas Music Teachers Association, and has received ASCAP awards for the past several years. Commissions include chamber works for Trio Contraste, Chamber Soloists of Austin, the Arundel Trio, Pacific Serenades of Los Angeles, and Musiques en Euroregion. She was Composer-in-Residence for Austin Lyric Opera's Armstrong Community Music School. Her published collections of pieces for piano students have sold thousands of copies nationwide. In 2014 she began a successful venture writing for film and television.

Ms. Mishell produced and hosted Into the Light, a weekly radio program devoted to the music of women composers, for ten and a half years. Produced at KMFA, the fine arts station in Austin, it won three Gracie awards for outstanding work in biography for public radio, as well as two international Communicator Awards of Distinction for excellence in broadcasting. This project extended into the concert world as Ms. Mishell produced, lectured, and performed Into the Light, live for audiences. The hundreds of hours of broadcasts of the work of women composers with Ms. Mishell's commentary are available for broadcast throughout the world.

Kathryn Mishell, Host of Into the Light RadioAs pianist, Ms. Mishell has performed extensively in the U.S. and Mexico as a soloist and in chamber music. She has been touring pianist for the Sharir Dance Company, and for the music dramas Paganini! and Heroes and Lovers, for which she wrote the incidental music. She is a regular performer on Salon Concerts in Austin.

A teacher of many award-winning young pianists, Ms. Mishell has taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has acted as clinician, adjudicator, and as consultant in the use of computers in music instruction. She maintains a class of private piano students in Austin, where she has twice been awarded the Outstanding Pre-collegiate Teaching Award.

In 2008, Ms. Mishell assumed the position of Artistic Director for Salon Concerts, presenting the finest chamber musicians in concerts in intimate settings. Its educational arm is CHAMPS, whose mission statement is to promote the playing and teaching of chamber music in the public schools. Now in its twenty-eighth season, she was a founding board member.


 

CDs & Audio

POEM

Contains Poem, Sonata for Violin and Piano, Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello, Nocturne for Violin and Piano, Novelette for Piano, and Elegy for Violin and Piano. Performers include Kathryn Mishell (piano), Robert Rudié (violin), Elisabeth Kufferath (violin), Douglas Harvey (cello), Laura Kobayashi (violin), and Susan Keith Gray (piano). Pierian/Piano Classics, distributed by Naxos.

Buy the CD or download the tracks at Amazon.com.


MUSICAL VOYAGES

Contains Voyage of the Spirit for Violin, Viola and Piano, Four-Hands, String Quartet No. 2, Suite for Piano: Images of Greece, Trio for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano, and Prelude and Vivace for Solo Piano. Performers include Kathryn Mishell (piano), Robert Rudié (viola), Roland Kato (viola), Connie Kupka (violin), Rick Rowley (piano), David H. Speitz (cello), and Miwako Watanabe (violin). Pierian/Piano Classics.

Buy the CD at Amazon.com.


KENNAN, RIEPE, MISHELL, ET AL: PIANO MUSIC / TIMOTHY WOOLSEY

Contains Kathryn Mishell's Preludes (5) for Piano, as well as Kennan's Retrospectives (12) for Piano, Welcher's Pachel's Bells and Digital Watch "High Tech Etude", White's Glimpses (5) for Piano, Riepe's The Philosopher's Path, and Oquin's Nightfall. Performer is Timothy Woolsey (piano). Centaur (CEN2525), distributed by HB Direct.

Buy the CD at HBDirect.com.


FEMME: CELLO AND PIANO MUSIC BY WOMEN COMPOSERS

Kathryn's Rhapsody for Cello and Piano is in good company on this album of music by Amy Beach, Chen Yi, Nadia Boulanger, Ruth Meyer Sacks, and Marcia Kraus, released January 2020. Barbara George, cello; Jim James, piano.

Stream or download the CD at jimjames1.bandcamp.com.

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