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Named Teacher of the Year by the Alabama Music Teachers Association and Music Educator of the Year by the Arts Council of Tuscaloosa, pianist Kevin T. Chance has been hailed as “a superlative musician” playing “with musical conviction and muscularity.” He has performed throughout the United States and abroad as both soloist and collaborator. Recent engagements include performances at Carnegie Hall as well as concerto appearances with Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety and Rachamninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini with the Huxford Symphony Orchestra, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the University of Alabama Wind Ensemble, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy with the Athens Chorale in Georgia, and Gerald Finzi’s Eclogue. In March 2016, he also appeared with the Tuscaloosa Symphony in a performance of Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals. Recital engagements have taken him throughout the U.S. with recent appearances at the American Matthay Association Festivals, the University of Oklahoma, the Louisiana Piano Series International, and the Albion College International Piano Festival. He has also been presented in performances by the Mobile Opera, the Mississippi Opera, Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre, the University of Texas at Brownsville, the University of South Carolina, Columbus State University, Auburn University, Millsaps College, the University of North Dakota, the Saratoga Arts Fest, and Bucknell University. Dr. Chance was a prizewinner of several regional and national competitions including the National Society of Arts and Letters Career Awards Competition, Music Teachers National Association Competitions (MTNA), and the Brevard Music Center Concerto Competition.

Dr. Chance is a member of the Semplice Duo with flutist Cristina Ballatori. In August 2004, they were named the winners of the Notes at 9,000 Emerging Artist Series Competition in Colorado. Past seasons have taken them to Texas, Colorado, New York, and Louisiana, and they were selected as artist fellows for the 2005 Hampden-Sydney Music Festival in Virginia, where they returned for a series of performances in 2008. They frequently perform in recital on the “Live from Hochstein” series, which are broadcast live on WXXI radio in Rochester, NY, and in 2014, they made their European debut in Paris.

A sought-after teacher, Dr. Chance maintains a prize-winning studio, and he was recently named a Leadership Board Faculty Fellow by the Universtiy of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences. His students are frequently named winners and finalists in local, state, regional, and national competitions, including the 2009 Music Teachers National Association’s National Competition Finals in Atlanta. He currently serves on the faculties of several summer festivals including the New Orleans Piano Institute. In demand as a clinician and adjudicator, he regularly presents workshops and lecture-performances on repertoire and pedagogy throughout the country, and he has served as a guest artist and clinician for the Michigan, Mississippi, and Alabama state music teacher conferences. Additionally, Dr. Chance has presented at the 2019, 2016, and 2008 Music Teachers National Association Conferences. He is a Past President of the Alabama Music Teachers Association and is a past board member of the Music Teachers National Association serving as Director of the Southern Division. Kevin currently serves as the Vice President of Music Teachers National Association and President of the American Matthay Association.

Serving as Associate Professor of Piano and Chair of the Gloria Narramore Moody Piano Area at the University of Alabama, Dr. Chance is a former faculty member at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham. He holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Piano Performance and Literature from the Eastman School of Music where he was awarded the Jerald C. Graue Fellowship for academic excellence. An alumnus of the Aspen Music Festival, he holds the Master of Music degree from Louisiana State University and graduated magna cum laude from Birmingham-Southern College. His teachers have included Barry Snyder, Constance Knox Carroll, Ann Schein, Anne Koscielny, Herbert Stessin, William DeVan and Betty Sue Shepherd.

Pianist Amy Dorfman has enjoyed a wide variety of musical collaborations throughout her career. For more than 20 years, she accompanied American bass virtuoso Edgar Meyer, performing in Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, as well as on NPR’s St. Paul Sunday Morning and The Lonesome Pine Special. She also joined Meyer in his 1990 recording Work in Progress for MCA Records.

Dorfman has performed with the Blair String Quartet and was a member of the Dorfman/Katahn piano duo with pianist Enid Katahn. She has also collaborated with pianist Mark Wait, Dean of the Blair School of Music, in piano duet and duo recitals.

In 2002, she and colleagues Carolyn Huebl, violin, and Felix Wang, cello, formed the Blakemore Trio. The trio performed their New York debut in Merkin Hall in 2010. In 2013 the trio released two recordings, The Blakemore Trio plays Beethoven and Ravel (Blue Griffin Records), and Gates of Silence, composed by Susan Botti and commissioned for the Blakemore Trio (Albany Records). Critics wrote, “another chamber ensemble has arrived to claim the limelight…for Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio, they don’t come any better than this one.” The American Record Guide hailed their performance of the Ravel trio as “Impressionism at its best.” The trio is currently at work on a recording of solo and chamber works of American composer Adam Schoenberg, which is slated for a 2019 release on Blue Griffin Records.

Dorfman’s students have been prize winners in national divisions of MTNA chamber music competitions, the Vanderbilt Concerto Competition and the Curb/Nashville Symphony concerto competition. Her college students have continued on in many prestigious graduate music programs around the country. She served as coordinator of the Blair precollege chamber music program from 2006-18.

Dorfman received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Indiana University School of Music, where she studied with Alfonso Montecino and James Tocco. She also worked with Edith Oppens and Rosalyn Tureck at the Aspen and Banff festivals. She serves as artist/teacher at the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts and spent several summers at the Sewanee Music Center.