This concert is the North Carolina Symphony debut for Dan Tepfer.
New York City-based Dan Tepfer, born in 1982 in Paris to American parents, has recorded and performed around the world with some of the leading lights in jazz and classical music, from Lee Konitz to Renée Fleming, and released eleven albums of his own in solo, duo, and trio formats. He will return this summer to Chicago’s Ravinia Festival with his project Natural Machines—which combines his own free improvisation at the piano with a specially programmed automated piano, allowing the piano’s computer programming to interact with him in real time. His schedule this summer also includes performances in France and in Westport, New York.
Tepfer earned global acclaim for his 2011 release Goldberg Variations / Variations, a disc that sees him performing J.S. Bach’s masterpiece as well as improvising upon it—to “elegant, thoughtful and thrilling” effect (New York magazine). Tepfer’s 2019 video album Natural Machines explores in real time the intersection between science and art, coding and improvisation, digital algorithms and the rhythms of the heart. The New York Times has called him “a deeply rational improviser drawn to the unknown.” His 2023 return to Bach, Inventions / Reinventions, spent two weeks in the #1 spot on the Billboard Classical Charts.
During the Covid pandemic, he performed close to two hundred online concerts from his home. As part of this effort, he pioneered ultra-low-latency audio technology enabling him to perform live through the internet with musicians in separate locations—culminating in the development of his own app, FarPlay.
Tepfer has composed for various ensembles beyond jazz. His piano quintet Solar Spiral was premiered in 2016 at Ravinia, with Tepfer performing alongside the Avalon String Quartet. He has received commissions from the Prague Castle Guard & Police Orchestra for two works: the suite Algorithmic Transform (2015) and a concerto for symphonic wind band and improvising piano, The View from Orohena (2010). In summer 2019, Tepfer unveiled his jazz-trio arrangement of Stravinsky’s Baroque-channeling Pulcinella. In the 2023/24 season he premiered two new major commissions: a suite for choir and piano in memory of his mother, a chorister at the Paris Opera, and a song cycle for jazz great Cécile McLorin Salvant and string orchestra. In 2025, Eugene Symphony premiered a new symphonic work called The Planets, featuring algorithms and visuals.
Tepfer’s honors include first prizes at the 2006 Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, the 2006 East Coast Jazz Festival Competition, and the 2007 American Pianists Association Jazz Piano Competition, as well as fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2014), the MacDowell Colony (2016), and the Fondation BNP-Paribas (2018, 2021, & 2024).
