Javier Arrebola
Piano
Javier Arrebola is a pianist, chamber musician, vocal coach and scholar driven to enhance students’ and audiences’ understanding of music through exploration of history, politics, literature, poetry, geography, artwork and music theory.
His professional activities have taken place in over ten countries throughout Europe, North America and Latin America. Recent engagements have included frequent invitations to Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute as staff pianist and vocal coach, as well as to serve on the faculty of SongFest at The Colburn School in Los Angeles.
As a scholar, he mostly lectures on chamber music and song literature, including Nordic, Russian and Spanish repertoires, among the core German, French and English traditions. Bilingual in Spanish and English, as well as proficient in German, French, Italian, Finnish and Swedish, Arrebola provides a unique, scholarly perspective on Art Song.
Arrebola has served on the faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music as Visiting Assistant Professor in Voice/Collaborative Piano, and he is currently the Chair of the Collaborative Piano Department at Boston University.
Performance career:
For the last three years, Arrebola has been invited to coach and perform at Ravinia Festival (Chicago, IL) alongside singers of the Steans Music Institute. As part of his faculty appointment, he has also been frequently heard in public performances at SongFest in Los Angeles.
In addition, Arrebola has collaborated with the National Youth Orchestra of Spain (JONDE) and represented Spain at the Schwetzingen Music Festival in Germany. Together with the Swedish mezzo-soprano Susanna Sundberg, he claimed the First Prize in the Kokkola V Nordic Lied Competition. He has twice been invited to the Franz-Schubert-Institut in Austria, to the Aurora Chamber Music Festival in Sweden, to SongFest in Los Angeles (recipient of the 2012 Marc and Eva Stern Fellowship) and to the 2013 Vancouver International Song Institute in Canada. Among other orchestras, Arrebola has performed as a soloist with the Peru National Symphony Orchestra and the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra.
His multiple projects with advanced students of the IU Jacobs School of Music during his time as faculty at that institution included entire evenings dedicated to the vocal and chamber works of Nordic, Spanish and French composers, Johannes Brahms, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss, as well as to Schubert’s Winterreise and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
Training:
As a student, Arrebola worked under Claudio Martínez Mehner (Madrid/Basel/Köln), Ferenc Rados (Budapest) and Ilmo Ranta (Helsinki), and took part in masterclasses by, among others, Elly Ameling, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Graham Johnson, Susan Youens, Margo Garrett, Malcolm Martineau, Anthony Spiri, Steven Blier, Kevin Murphy, Barbara Bonney, Martin Katz, Roger Vignoles, Julius Drake or Helmut Deutsch.
During his doctoral studies, Arrebola gave master classes at the Universidad Mayor of Santiago de Chile and taught at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Among other initiatives, he is a co-founding member of kohoBeat, an international music organization based in Finland and devoted to the development of the arts in Finland and other countries.
Arrebola holds a Doctor of Music Degree and a Masters Degree in Piano from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (Finland), as well as degrees in Piano and in Chamber Music from the Madrid Royal Conservatory (Spain). His doctoral project at the Sibelius Academy included the public performance of all of Franz Schubert’s finished piano sonatas both on historical fortepianos and on modern instruments, as well as a thesis on The Unfinished Piano Sonatas of Franz Schubert (available online).
More info at www.javierarrebola.com