David Korevaar

David Korevaar stands out as a pianist of wide-ranging interests whose concert programs and recorded output place special weight on both modern compositions and ensemble repertoire, while his teaching career has left a notable mark on successive generations of musicians.

Born July 25, 1962, in Madison, Wisconsin, he spent his childhood in La Jolla, California. Piano study began at age six in nearby San Diego, where he also took up the flute during his youth. Music became his chosen profession by age eleven, and three years later a meeting with the virtuoso Earl Wild prompted him to concentrate exclusively on the piano under that master’s guidance. At the Juilliard School he worked with Wild on piano and with David Diamond on composition, receiving his doctorate in 1983 and continuing piano lessons afterward with Paul Doguereau.

Korevaar made his New York recital debut at Town Hall in 1985. Since then he has appeared across the Americas, Europe, East Asia, and Australia both as a solo recitalist and as concerto soloist. Additional tours took him to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan as a Cultural Envoy under the U.S. State Department, where he also gave master classes. Contemporary scores figure prominently in his programming; among the composers he has consistently supported are Aaron Jay Kernis, Harrison Birtwistle, and Lowell Lieberman, the last of whom he has partnered with and recorded at length.

An active chamber musician, Korevaar helped establish the Prometheus Piano Quartet, the Boulder Piano Quartet, and Hexagon, an ensemble combining piano with winds. After several years on the faculty of the Westport School of Music in Connecticut, he joined the University of Colorado in 2000. By the late 2010s he had attained the rank of Distinguished Professor, and in 2016 the university further recognized him as a Distinguished Research Lecturer.

His extensive discography encompasses both solo and chamber projects, many centered on recent repertoire. During the 2000s and 2010s he recorded multiple albums of Lieberman’s music for the MSR Classics label and, in 2019, an album of Paul Juon’s violin sonatas for Naxos.