Francisco Cabán

Francisco Cabán combines his career as professor, chamber, and orchestral musician with solo appearances. In both solo and chamber music performances, Francisco has played for audiences at the Casals Festival, Inter-American Festival of the Arts, Clazz International Music Festival (Italy), and FOOSA (California).

In his capacity as Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music, he has created both the Violin and the Strings Festival. Renowned artists and professors, such as Guillermo Figueroa, Federico Agostini, José Francisco del Castillo, Sergiu Schwartz, Nancy Zhou, Miroslav Hristov, the Harlem String Quartet, and Members of the Catalyst Quartet, among others, have participated in them. 

A dedicated and sought-after teacher, several of Dr. Cabán students have performed as soloists with orchestras, won regional competitions, and gone on to earn scholarships at schools such as: the Cleveland Institute of Music, Indiana University, University of Michigan, Bard College, and Lynn University. Moreover, many of his former pupils are now members of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. 

In 2015, with colleagues Diana Figueroa, and Luis Miguel Rojas, he founded the Sanromá Piano Trio, an ensemble-in-residence at the Puerto Rico Conservatory. They have performed cycles of the Beethoven and Brahms trios, as well as works by Arensky, Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Turina, Piazzolla, and contemporary composers.

As soloist, he has collaborated with maestros Maximiano Valdés, Roselín Pabón, and Guido López Gavilán, among others, in orchestras from Puerto Rico, México, Cuba, and the US. He is currently 3^rd Chair of the first violins section of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble where he has been Assistant Concertmaster during the 1997-98 and 2015-16 seasons. His concerto repertoire includes works from Bach to Shostakovich. 

In addition to his concerts and teaching posts in Puerto Rico, Cabán has conducted workshops, master classes, and recitals at universities in the US, Cuba, México, Venezuela, and Peru. He is on the faculty of FOOSA in Fresno, California. He has collaborated with the Clazz Music Festival in Arcidosso, Italy, and the Killington Music Festival in Vermont.

Dr. Cabán studied violin and chamber music at the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music with professors José Figueroa and Joaquín Vidaechea. Later on, he pursued graduate studies in the United States, where he obtained a master's degree from Temple University in Philadelphia and a doctorate in violin performance from the University of Texas at Austin, with professors Helen Kwalwasser and Eugene Gratovich. He also attended masterclasses in Europe with Gerárd Poulet, Valery Klimov, Midori, and José Luis García Asencio.

In his award-winning record productions, Ola nocturna and Ola diurna, Cabán, together with distinguished pianist Ivonne Figueroa, Brazilian violinist Cármelo de los Santos, and US pianist Kevin Class, has captured important works from the Latin American repertoire for violin and piano.

Kevin Class

Born in Belgium, pianist and conductor Kevin Class studied at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, as well as in the U.S and Canada. As a pianist, teachers have included Romeo Fracalanza, Ralph Votapek, Gyorgy Sebok, Murray Perahia and Daniel Blumenthal. In 1997, the Belgian government named Kevin a Fellow of the Flemish Community in recognition both of his performances of the complete Piano Sonatas of Mozart and Schubert, and for his contributions to the performance and promotion of contemporary music, with Jan-Marisse Huizing describing him as “an important ambassador for today’s composers”.

Kevin has made more than 15 commercial recordings, including piano concerti by Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and Schumann as soloist with the Stuttgart Symphony Orchestra, several albums as a collaborative pianist with saxophonists Timothy McAllister and James Romain, cellist Wesley Baldwin, violinists Francisco Caban and Juhi Kee, soprano Soo Yeon Kim and others. He has also recorded several albums of solo piano works by Chopin, Schumann, Liszt’s complete Annees de Pelerinage, and an acclaimed recording of Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata. Fanfare Magazine has described Kevin’s playing as “exceptionally refined” and American Record Guide described his work as “provocative and impressive, simply impeccable.”

Kevin was a top-prize winner in Young Keyboard Artists International Piano Competition, 1991 Mozart Piano Competition Vienna, Munich ARD and, most recently, the American Prize Competition.  Following his performances at the Leeds International Piano Competition, Class received invitations to perform recitals in France, Switzerland, and Austria, including the piano sonatas of Mozart at Vienna’s Musikverein. He has given solo recitals in other important venues worldwide, including Leeds’ Town Hall, Geneva’s Ansermet Hall, Munich’s Grosse Saal of the Hochschule fur Musik, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and six performances in New York’s Carnegie Hall. Following studies with Murray Perahia, which were sponsored by pianists Ruth Laredo and Seymour Lipkin, Perahia invited Kevin to perform an all-Chopin recital at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Lübeck with Perahia proclaiming that Kevin “is a pianistic poet who serves a deeply musical sensibility.” Kevin’s sold-out solo recital performances in Chongqing and Chengdu, China were broadcast nationally by China’s television network CCTV. 

Kevin is particularly invested in the education of young musicians in Asia. For nearly two decades, he has been a frequent visitor to South Korea, China, Taiwan, The Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. He has been a recurring guest of Yonsei University in Seoul as well as the University of Philippines in Manila. He has taught masterclasses and workshops at Shanghai and Sichuan Conservatories, and classes on the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven at Hebei Normal University in China.. He regularly gives residencies teaching masterclasses for pianists, conductors, singers and working with orchestras and wind ensembles. He was a member of the jury for the grand finals of the 2018 Indonesia Steinway Piano Competition and serves as an artistic consultant for several of Asia’s leading orchestras and music festivals.
 
In addition to work as a pianist, Kevin has been active for more than 30 years as an orchestra and opera conductor.  With a repertoire of more than 70 operas, Kevin has taken the podium of the National Opera La Monnaie in Brussels, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the National Opera Studio in London, Shanghai Opera and Opera Illinois (Peoria). He has served as Music Director/Conductor of the Illinois Opera Theatre in Champaign-Urbana, Opera Illinois (Peoria), Seoul Opera (South Korea), Arezzo Opera Festival (Italy), and since 2018 Berlin Opera and Saluzzo Opera Academy.

Kevin has been profiled in the media by the BBC, NPR, PBS, Radio Noord Holland, KBS (Korea), and CCTV (China).