Piano Masterclass Chair
Dr. Janet Favreau
(310) 357-4693 • Email
String Masterclass Chair
Dr. Cheryl Scheidemantle
(626) 585-8894 • Email
2025
Violin, Cello, and Piano Masterclasses
February 2, 2025
Murphy Recital Hall
Loyola Marymount University
- Cello Masterclass with Alexander Zhiroff • 9:15am–10:45am
- Violin Masterclass with Maia Jasper White • 11:00am–12:30pm
- Piano Masterclass with Christopher O’Reilly • 1:00pm–3:00pm
Participant application information:
- Piano participants email to Dr. Janet Favreau favreaujanet@gmail.com
- Strings participants email to Dr. Cheryl Scheidemantle cscheidemantle@polytechnic.org
Please include the following information:
- Name of student
- Age of student
- Email address of student and/or parent if under 18
- Name of teacher
- Teacher’s email address
- Full title and movement of piece to be performed
- Exact timing of piece to be performed
The deadline to apply to perform is December 15, 2024.
- After the 12/15 deadline, we will respond to you whether you have been selected to perform or not.
- If you have been selected, you will receive a link to pay the $50 participant fee.
We invite you to attend the Masterclasses as an auditor.
- Costs for pre-registration are $20 for adults and $10 for students (with student I.D.)
and includes admission to all masterclasses. - Faculty, staff, and students of LMU may attend free and do not need to pre-register.
Adults paying at the door will be charged $30. - Auditor Application & Payment Form
About the Masterclass Teachers
Alexander Zhiroff • Cello
Dr. Alexander (Sasha) Zhiroff, born in Ishim, Soviet Union, is a renowned Russian cellist celebrated for his versatile performances across various genres, from classical to new age. His musical journey has led him to perform as a soloist with orchestras in the United States, Russia, and Cuba, and to give recitals in major concert halls worldwide.
Zhiroff’s recordings as a soloist for Warner, Disney, GosTeleRadio (USSR/Russia), and EGREM (Cuba) have been acclaimed for their depth and artistry. In 1996, he joined Yanni’s orchestra, contributing to the global success of the Tribute concert in 1997, held at the Taj Mahal and the Forbidden City. He continued to tour with Yanni during the Tribute 1998 World Tour, the 2003 and 2004 Ethnicity world tours, as well as the 2005 Yanni Live! The Concert Event and Yanni Voices tours.
His collaboration with Sarah Stanton on the album “A Glimpse of Heaven” further highlights his musical versatility. In 2005, he became a part of Classical Edge, a genre-crossing group whose debut CD “Edge” features a fusion of Argentinian Tango and American Jazz.
Zhiroff’s dedication to music extends beyond performance. He graduated with honors from the Gnessin’s Musical-Pedagogical Institute (today: Gnessin’s Music Academy) in Moscow in 1978 with a doctorate and was invited to remain on staff as an assistant professor of cello. His teaching career took him to Cuba as Professor of Cello at the Superior Institute of Arts in 1982, and in 1985 he returned to Russia as an associate professor of cello at the Sergei Rachmaninoff Conservatory of Music in Rostov-on-Don.
Over the years, Alexander has published his work, including “Methodology for Teaching Cello Playing” and the first edition of the Sonata for cello and piano by A. Krasnoskulov. His best students, such as Douglas Vistel (Cuba/Germany), Wesley Yu (USA), and George Ma (USA), have become laureates of national and international competitions.
In his teaching method, Alexander continues the Russian Pedagogy tradition from W. Fitzenhagen, A. Brandukov, J. Slobodkin, A. Georgyan, and A. Latinsky, with influences from his teachers, including the famous Mstislav Rostropovich and his assistant S. Kalianov. Alexander continues to teach young cellists today in California in his private studio and remains active in the recording and film industry. He is currently working on the publication of “Chaconne” by J. S. Bach (for cello).
Maia Jasper White • Violin
Maia is a chamber musician, teacher, orchestral and studio musician, and musical entrepreneur.
She is the Executive Director and Co-Artistic Director of Salastina, a Pasadena-based chamber music series and the proud winner of San Francisco Classical Voice‘s Audience Choice Awards for “Best Chamber Ensemble.”
Maia is also a member of the first violin section of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. She was a member of the Pacific Symphony’s first violin section for ten years, and served as Concertmaster of the Crested Butte Music Festival Orchestra.
Maia’s orchestral work also includes scoring for motion pictures and television. She’s contributed to nearly a hundred film scores. Recent highlights include Frozen, Encanto, Wish, Avatar: The Way of Water, Moana 2, and Star Wars: Episodes VII, VIII, and IX.
A dedicated teacher, Maia has served on the faculties of the Colburn School of Performing Arts, Chapman University, and the Luzerne Music Center. She has been the Director of Chamber Music at Caltech since 2016.
Maia studied English and Musicology at Yale. She continued her violin studies at USC and the Paris Conservatory. She honed her administrative chops through the League of American Orchestra’s Essentials of Orchestra Management program and the Center for Nonprofit Management’s Certificate Program.
Her writing about music has been published by New Music Box, I Care if You Listen, The Huffington Post, and Strings Magazine. She has been a guest speaker at the Women in Classical Music Symposium and on several classical music-industry podcasts.
Maia lives in Glendale with her husband, film composer Philip White, their son Galen (7), and their daughter Naomi (5).
Christopher O’Reilly • Piano
Pianist, arranger, collaborative artist, composer, educator and media personality; Christopher O’Riley follows his passions into a fractal array of innovative directions, ever striving for the truest and deepest human connection, through performance, collaboration, communion. Living by the Duke Ellington adage, “There are only two kinds of music in the world; good music and the other kind” O’Riley spotlights the greatness inherent in all great music, self-evident in his all-embracing genre-fluid range of projects.
It is with Mr. O’Riley’s dedication to empowering the learning abilities, the personalities and imaginations of artists, young and old, that he comes to his latest endeavor. As he shares performances of his home-recorded traversal of J.S. Bach ~ The Well-Tempered Clavier he has produced an online archive of video lectures, Everything We Need To Know About Playing The Piano We Learn From The Well-Tempered Clavier, a series illuminating a new perspective on each Prelude and Fugue, expanding on all the ways the paucity of Bach’s notation encourages us to engage creatively, imaginatively, engaging the inherent freedoms in all parameters of musical notation; instruction and insight to inspire transcendence and epiphany.
In his solo repertoire, O’Riley has always been expanding and building transformatively, first branching out into early Virginalists, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Giles Farnaby, then Bach’s less celebrated keyboard creator, Jean Phillipe Rameau. O’Riley first ventured into the art of piano transcription most famously with his arrangement of the Flower Duet, “Viens, Mallika!” from Leo Delibes’ Lakme, then two by Bach, the Trio Sonata in C Major, and the Dorian Toccata & Fugue, Astor Piazzolla’s Verano Porteño. Apollon musagete, O’Riley’s favorite work of Igor Stravinsky, and Liszt’s transcription of Berlioz ~ Symphonie Fantastique are two major works which O’Riley has amended copiously
More genre-fluid projects resulted from his work with cellist, Matt Haimovitz. Their first project was an homage to the iPod: Shuffle.Play.Listen (Oxingale/Pentatone), a two-disc set, featured repertoire of Stravinsky, Piazzolla, Martinu, Janacek as well as arrangements of Radiohead, Cocteau Twins, Blonde Redhead, John McGlaughlin, and movements from recent Centenary-celebrant, Bernard Herrmann’s score to the Alfred Hitchcock film, Vertigo. A similarly genre-straddling, Russian oriented project, TROIKA posed established masterpieces for cello and piano by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff with arrangements of each, as well as of more contemporary Russian artists, Victor Tsoi and the protest band, Pussy Riot, and The Beatles’ anthemic Back In The U.S.S.R.
O’Riley’s work with Matt Haimovitz crossed disciplines as well as genres: 2015 saw the release of their Beethoven.Period (Pentatone), their traversal of the Sonatas and Variations recorded on Matt’s gut-strung cello and an original 1828 Broadwood, a maker whose sound found in Beethoven deep sympathy.
O’Riley has collaborated with lifetime idol, Argentine Tango Master, Astor Piazzolla’s pianist, Pablo Ziegler. Their touring partnership, originally of Pablo’s arrangements of Piazzolla Tango, lately celebrating Pablo Ziegler’s own compositions, spans a quarter century and 2016 saw the Steinway release of their collaboration, Nuevo Tango.
O’Riley’s recorded oeuvre is extensive, beginning auspiciously with his debut recording of Ferrucio Busoni’s epic reimagining of Bach’s unfinished ending of his Art of the Fugue, Fantasia Contrapuntistica. Ensuing releases celebrated Contemporary American Composers (Adams, Helps, Brief, Sessions), Maurice Ravel, Beethoven Sonatas. O’Riley’s 1994 Nonesuch release, Stravinsky featured the perennial virtuoso favorite, Trois movements de Petrouchka as well as O’Riley’s extensively reimagined piano versions of movements of L’histoire du soldat and his favorite of all Stravinsky’s works, the ballet Apollon musagete.
O’Riley’s recorded immersions into the work of Scriabin: Vers la flamme (Image Recordings, 2004) and Franz Liszt, O’Riley’s Liszt (Oxingale, 2013) were each borne of grand, cross-media collaborations. Vers la flamme was choreographer, Martha Clarke’s synthesis of short stories of Anton Chekhov and the piano music of Alexander Scriabin. The ambiguous harmonic equilibrium and interaction between the synesthetically-conceived piano music created a portal of possibilities pairing particular works with specific dramatic scenario. This Lincoln Center production toured to the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC, to the Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow, and through Lincoln Center’s sponsorship, on Broadway at the Victory Theater.
O’Riley’s most recent New York collaboration was with puppeteer, Basil Twist. 120 performances took place Summer 2018 and was widely praised, including by Ben Brantley of the NY Times.
For more information, please visit: https://christopheroriley.com/about/