Double dose of pianist Cann this weekend – JH News&Guide

(Michelle) Cann visited the Tetons last summer to play a solo recital. That invitation came when she performed Florence Price’s “Piano Concerto in One Movement” with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, where Donald Runnicles, Grand Teton’s music director, is resident guest conductor. Runnicles was impressed and invited her to come West.

“I’m excited to be coming back,” she said from Flagstaff, Arizona, where she had performed and given a masterclass last week. “It’s exciting to be playing with the orchestra this year.”

Born in Florida, Cann earned her bachelor’s and master’s at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and got her artist’s diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she has lived since 2010. On the faculty at Curtis and the Manhattan School of Music, she a busy teacher and lecturer, which she juggles with a touring schedule that this year will take her to Hawaii, Quebec, New York City, Berkeley and Denver, among many other North American cities. She has collaborated on chamber music projects with the Dover and Juilliard string quartets, Leila Josefowicz, Nikki Chooi and Vijay Gupta, co-hosted NPR’s program “From the Top” and also served as director of two children’s choruses in Philadelphia.

In 2022, Cann received the Sphinx Medal of Exellence, the highest honor given by the Sphinx Organization, which champions artist of color and those from marginalized populations.

Cann first learned Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” when she started at Curtis, she said, and got to perform it with the New Jersey Symphony in 2010.