Michael Lewin, Chairman of the Jury, enjoys a distinguished international concert career that has taken him to 30 countries, launched by victories in the Liszt International Competition, the American Pianists Association Award and the Kapell International Piano Competition. He has received the National Endowment for the Arts Solo Recitalists Grant and the Aaron Copland Recording Grant. He has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Netherlands Philharmonic, Cairo Symphony, Bucharest Philarmonic, Youth Orchestra of the Americas, Thessaloniki State Symphony of Greece, Moscow Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Pops, and the Phoenix, Indianapolis, Miami, North Carolina, West Virginia, Nevada, New Orleans, Colorado, Guadalajara, Puerto Rico and Jupiter Symphonies. Mr. Lewin has performed in New York’s Lincoln Center, Boston’s Symphony Hall, Taiwan’s National Concert Hall, Hong Kong’s City Hall Theatre, Holland’s Muziekcentrum, Moscow’s Great Hall, the Athens Megaron, London’s Wigmore Hall, Bargemusic, Spoleto Festival and PBS Television. His highly-praised recordings include the complete piano music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes, 19 Scarlatti Sonatas, “Michael Lewin plays Liszt”, a Russian recital, piano music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and the 4 Bolcom Violin Sonatas with Irina Muresanu. Coming out this year is “If I Were a Bird”, a collection of solo piano music inspired by birds. A Juilliard School graduate, his teachers included Leon Fleisher, Irwin Freundlich and Adele Marcus. Mr. Lewin is a member of The Boston Conservatory Piano Faulty, where he teaches a select group of gifted young pianists. For more information please visit www.michaellewin.com

Bruce Brubaker is chairman of the piano faculty at New England Conservatory in Boston. He trained at the Juilliard School where he received the school's highest award, the Edward Steuermann Prize, upon graduation. He joined the Juilliard faculty in 1995. The pianist has given masterclasses and forums at Julliard, Columbia University, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His writing about music has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Piano Quarterly, Keyboard Classics, Chamber Music, USA Today, and other periodicals. He was co-editor and a contributor to Pianist, Scholar, Connoisseur: Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner (Pendragon Press, 2000), a collection paying homage to his former teacher. As a festival director, Brubaker was the creator in 2000-2001 of B-A-C-H, a six-concert series in New York examining the connections between J. S. Bach and the composers who followed him. The previous year, at the turn of the millennium, he organized Piano Century, in which 101 pianists performed 101 20th-century pieces in 11 concerts. In May 2004, Brubaker created and performed Pianomorphosis, a new 70-minute multidisciplinary performance piece for the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Michigan. Brubaker's performance piece Haydnseek, created with Nico Muhly, was presented for the first time in the U.S. as the first public musical performance at Boston's acclaimed new Institute for Contemporary Art in 2007.

Ya-Fei Chuang has performed in major festivals around the world, including the Beethoven Festival (Warsaw) with Christoph Eschenbach, the European Music Festival (Stuttgart), Schleswig-Holstein, Bach (Leipzig), Ravinia, Sarasota, Gilmore, Tanglewood (USA) and the Celebrity Series in Boston. The Ruhr Festival (Germany) has released the CD of her May 2007 solo recital, which is also included as a premium in the leading German music magazine ‘Fono Forum’. She has appeared in venues such as Boston’s Symphony Hall, Jordan Hall, the Cologne and Berlin Philharmonic Halls, the Schauspielhaus Berlin, the Gewandhaus Leipzig, and as a duo partner with Kim Kashkashian, Robert Levin, and Steven Isserlis. Her recent engagements include concerts and recordings in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Malaysian Philharmonic, at the Taiwan Festival, among performances in South America, Europe and throughout the US. She has recorded for Naxos, Harmonia Mundi, New York Philomusica and ECM. Ya-Fei Chuang is on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory, teaches a piano performance seminar at New England Conservatory SCE, and gives master classes throughout the US, Europe and Asia, including at Tanglewood, and annually at the International Summer Academy of Mozarteum Salzburg.

Gregg Pauley has been praised by critics for having “perfect dynamic nuances,” being “at all times technically brilliant,” (The Newark Star Ledger) and for “playing with a maturity that belied his age.” (The Portland Press Herald) A native of Southern California, Mr. Pauley earned his Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Southern California. He also holds a Master’s Degree from Mason Gross School for the Arts at Rutgers University where he studied with Ilana Vered. Mr. Pauley has performed at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall among many others, and has performed live on radio and television in Vermont, New York, Maine and Alberta Canada. In addition to performances in New Hampshire, concerts have taken Mr. Pauley to Florida, Alabama, Kentucky, Vermont, New York, Michigan, Maine, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Massachusetts and California. Mr. Pauley’s most recent recording, “What the West Wind Saw,” is a CD of solo piano music inspired by elements of nature (earth, wind, fire and water) which features works by Ravel, Chopin, Beethoven, Debussy and Scriabin. In addition to his busy performance schedule, Mr. Pauley maintains a full teaching schedule and is in demand as an adjudicator and Master Class teacher. Mr. Pauley lives with his family in Concord, New Hampshire. He is on the piano faculty at Tufts University, St. Paul’s School, and the Concord Community Music School in Concord, NH.

Roberto Poli has appeared as a soloist, harpsichordist, chamber musician and conductor around the world, in cities such as New York, Dublin, Rome, Boston, Brussels, Calgary and Seoul. He has studied with Giorgio Vianello, Phillipe Cassard and Boris Petrushansky. After moving to the United States in 1998, he received a Master’s Degree and the prestigious Artist Diploma from the New England Conservatory of Music under the guidance of Russell Sherman. The music of Chopin, which he has studied through manuscripts and original editions, is the current center of a project including the recording on video of the composer’s complete works; the organization of the Chopin Symposia, featuring illustrious performers, pedagogues and lecturers; and the publication of his first book, The Secret Life of Musical Notation: defying interpretive traditions (Amadeus Press, 2009) - a volume on pianistic interpretation which provides a new vision of Chopin's works that is both scholarly and practical. His debut CD, Shall we dance..., was released on Americus Records in 2002. An all-Liszt album was recently presented by Onclassical, a European label which will also release his recording of the complete works of Chopin. Roberto Poli is an enthusiastically sought-after teacher and holds positions at the Rivers School Conservatory in Weston, Massachusetts, where he is the Artist in Residence, and at the New England Conservatory's Preparatory School, where he teaches a select group of talented pupils. He also enjoys a busy schedule of masterclasses and lectures around the country.