Claudia Knafo

Grammy Award-nominated pianist pianist Claudia Knafo has captivated audiences here and abroad with her distinctive programming and her passionate artistry. A winner of the 1993–1994 Artists International Competition, she was presented in her New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 1995. She has received critical acclaim for her “fiery and passionate approach to the piano” and “for her luscious sonority and definitive execution of technical complexities.”

​​This past summer, she was featured at the 10th World Piano Conference in Novi Sad, Serbia, where she performed, taught master classes and lectured on Latin American music. The winter prior, she was joined in the tri-State area by French artists Gilles Lefèvre, violin, and Lys Nordet, soprano, in a series of recitals entitled: "Echoes of Nationalism and Folk Music in Concert Works of Eastern Europe and Latin America." Among the works performed were the US premieres of pieces by the Ecuadorian composers Gerardo Guevara, Humberto Salgado, and Enrique Espin Yepez. In 2017 she was invited to Guayaquil and Cuenca, Ecuador, to perform Grieg’s Piano Concerto with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca and the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil de la Prefectura del Guayas. Also, she was a featured soloist and chamber musician at Guayaquil’s Centro Ecuatoriano Norteamericano, in a program of music from South and North America.

​Past highlights as soloist with orchestra include the Grieg Piano Concerto, also with the Danbury Symphony under the baton of Ariel Rudiakov, and Mendelssohn’s rarely heard Piano Concerto in D Minor with the Manhattanville Orchestra, under the baton of Elliot Magaziner. She has toured with the Manchester Festival Orchestra performing, among others, Bach’s F Minor Concerto and Bloch’s Concerto Grosso for Piano and Orchestra. Other appearances include the premiere of Binette Lipper’s Circles of Light with the North/South Chamber Orchestra, under the baton of Max Lifchitz, a work recorded for commercial release and nominated for the 2010 Grammy Awards in the category of best soloist with orchestra. In 2003, Ms. Knafo was selected as one of the twenty-one pianists to perform at the American premieres of Daniele Lombardi’s Sinfonias 1 & 2 andThrenodia for twenty-one pianos, an event held in New York City’s World Financial Center to commemorate the victims of September 11.

Ms. Knafo has appeared on concert series at the Caramoor Music Festival, the Goethe Institut, Merkin Concert Hall, Weill Recital Hall, Wave Hill, Steinway Hall, University of Campinas (Brazil), Carnegie Mellon University, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Manhattanville and Assumption Colleges, among others. In 1998 she was Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern State University in Louisiana, where she performed, lectured and presented master classes on South American Music. Active as a pedagogue, she is on the faculties of Hunter College and Manhattan School of Music Precollege.