Pianist Shannon Wettstein invites audiences to hear connections between daring new music and historical masterworks. With over 400 premieres as soloist and chamber musician, she has collaborated with composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, Julia Wolfe, Chinary Ung, and Frederick Rzewski. In concerts, Shannon pairs new and old repertoire in themed programs around topics ranging from insomnia to meteorology, and from deep space to birds and bugs. When asked why she makes music, Shannon says, “For me, it’s all about taking risks—I love taking audiences along with me into unknown territory.”
In the US, Shannon has performed solo and chamber concerts at Lincoln Center, at Boston’s Gardner Museum, at the Ft. Worth Modern Art Museum, and Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego. Steve Smith of the New York Times wrote that her performance at The Stone was “full of subtleties no recording could catch...a reminder of why we attend concerts.”
Recent U.S. Artists International-sponsored tours include performances at Hong Kong’s City Hall, the Monteverde Institute in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and at the Janáček Conservatory in Brno, Czechia. Grants and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Composers Forum, and Chamber Music America. Shannon has been an invited performer and presenter at the European Piano Teachers Association International Conferences in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, the World Piano Conference in Novi Sad, Serbia, and the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy in the United States.
During the pandemic, Shannon presented livestream performances that have engaged audiences from 23 states and 4 continents. These events featured new or seldom-heard pieces by Jimmy Lopez, Florence Price, and Xavier Beteta. Audience members commenting on these interactive performances wrote that the experience felt like they were, “eavesdropping into the primordial creative mind…”
Shannon is a professor of piano and chamber music at St. Cloud State University and regularly performs contemporary chamber music as half of the Calliope flute and piano duo. Shannon is the host of Dr. Avant-Garde, a podcast about creating community and inspiring creativity through conversations with people moving the art of music forward in the 21st century.
Shannon’s teachers include Sequeira Costa at the University of Kansas, Stephen Drury at the New England Conservatory, and Aleck Karis at the University of California San Diego. Other significant teachers and coaches include Claude Frank, Ben Zander, and Dorothy DeLay.
Learn more about Shannon’s Grammy-nominated recordings of works by Xenakis, Anthony Davis, Chopin, and others at www.shannonwettstein.com.
[ Last Update: Sept. 2023 ]
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