Schuler Theater Performing Arts Series Opens with
Piano Virtuoso Teresa Walters

New Mexico Online
Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014
By Tim Keller

"Her performances of Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Schumann and George Gershwin have inspired the world’s music critics.”

Acclaimed classical pianist Teresa Walters’s web site offers its content in a choice of eight languages – French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Chinese, and English.  Her talent keeps her on the move throughout the world.  Thursday night, she brings it to New Mexico for the opening concert of the annual Performing Arts Series presented at the Shuler Theater by the Arts & Humanities Council.

Walters’s recent concert venues have included Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, the Salle Cortot in Paris, and Moscow’s Great Hall.  Arriving during the Shuler Theater’s centennial year, she may join the long list of world-touring performers who have been inspired to find such a gem of a theater in such an unexpected location.

Her performances of Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Schumann, and George Gershwin have inspired the world’s music critics.  The New York Times said, “A musician ready, willing, and able, Teresa Walters tackled a program of large-scaled, big-boned pieces, and she sailed through them with an easy fluency that made each one sound like child’s play.”

The London Times called her “an enormous talent.”  The Jerusalem Post critic wrote, “Her playing was marvelous, as close to perfect as I hope to hear.”  The Washington Post reported, “Teresa Walters is a splendid musician whose marvelous technical prowess and rich expressive resources create music of intimate introspection, orchestral grandeur and the most minute inflections of color.”  After a Walters concert, a Tokyo critic observed, “The audience left with a feeling of ecstasy, so spiritually powerful was her performance.”

Walters grew up on a farm in the American Midwest.  At age four, she simultaneously began studying piano and a map of the world.  Since earning a doctorate from Peabody Conservatory and a year of study in Paris, she and her husband have lived in New York City.  They enjoy getting away to their lake cottage where Walters indulges her love of wildlife and bird watching.  Her two cats apparently don’t interfere.  Her favorite cause is animal welfare. 

Her touring schedule, however, suggests that she’s not home much.  She makes her living on the road, performing concerts for audiences around the world.

Thursday night’s performance at the Shuler Theater begins at 7 p.m.

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