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Image Aurora, New York - The Music Department at Wells College announced that eminent British pianist-composer Roger Steptoe will present a lecture-recital on the Aurora campus. The free event will take place on Friday, April 18 at 4:00 pm in Barler Recital Hall.

Roger Steptoe has established a solid reputation as a performer, teacher and composer in England as well as abroad.  His compositional style has been described in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as “…a refreshingly individual response to the English school from Elgar to Tippett: fine craftsmanship, lyricism, rhythmic suppleness and imaginatively free and translucent harmony, often alternating diatonic and chromatic intervals.”

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Steptoe taught harmony, composition, counterpoint and orchestration privately and as a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, London.  Many of his students have since made international careers, notably Rachel Portman, the Oscar-winning film composer. 

Throughout this period his music continued to receive regular performances by leading international performers throughout the world, including the leading festivals in the U.K., many major European cities (including tours for the British Council), the Far East, Australia, the U.S. and South America.  Numerous broadcasts, especially on BBC Radio 3, were given by the same artists.

Steptoe has toured internationally as a composer-pianist, made a number of recordings of the songs of Vaughan Williams with baritone Peter Savidge, and the first recording in modern times of Walton’s piano quartet.

During this tour of New York City and upstate New York, Steptoe will be performing Frank Bridge’s rarely-heard 1924 piano sonata, as well as music by Hindemith, Vaughan Williams, Brahms and Beethoven.  In addition to the lecture-recital at Wells, he will also be performing at the Goethe Institute in New York City, the Smith Opera House in Geneva, and will present piano master classes at Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges.

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