Andrew Cooper
Professor of Piano
Piano + keyboard

Pianist Andrew Cooperstock performs widely as soloist and chamber musician and has appeared throughout six continents and in most of the fifty states, including performances at New York's Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the United Nations. He has been featured in recitals and concerto appearances at the Chautauqua, Brevard, and Round Top music festivals, the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, and Hong Kong’s Hell Hot! New Music Festival, in such international locales as London, Paris, Geneva, Beijing, Seoul, Accra, Kiev, Vladivostok, Canberra, Quito, and Lima, and on National Public Radio, Radio France, and the British Broadcasting Corporation. In 2019-20 he performed and taught in China, Hong Kong, Germany, Czech Republic, New York, Minnesota, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, the Carolinas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Arizona, and he was convention artist for Music Teachers Association of California.

Cooperstock’s recent articles have appeared in Piano Magazine and the MTNA e-Journal, and as part of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary, he lectured on the composer’s pedagogical legacy at the MTNA national virtual conference. His video on teaching Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 2, No. 1, created for the Frances Clark Center’s inaugural series "From the Artist Bench," was released in February. An advocate for American music, Andrew Cooperstock has premiered works by composers Lowell Liebermann, John Fitz Rogers, Rob Paterson, and Aaron Copland and participated in commissioning works by Eric Stern, Robert Starer, Dan Welcher, and Meira Warshauer. With a special interest in piano music of Leonard Bernstein, he made the first recording of Bernstein’s complete piano works, for Bridge Records, a portion of which appears in Deutsche Grammophon’s Bernstein: Complete Works.

A sough-after chamber musician, Cooperstock has performed with the Takács Quartet, the Ying Quartet, the Dorian Quintet, violinist James Buswell, violist Roberto Diaz, cellists Andres Diaz and András Fejer, hornist Eli Epstein, and pianist Paul Schoenfield, and he is a member of the Colorado Chamber Players. With violinist William Terwilliger, as Opus Two (www.opustwo.org), Cooperstock has recorded the complete works for piano and violin by Aaron Copland. The award-winning duo has been internationally recognized for its “divine phrases, impelling rhythm, elastic ensemble and stunning sounds,” as well as its commitment to expanding the violin-piano duo repertoire. The duo has appeared throughout North and South America, Europe, and Australia, and it made its Asian debut in 2006 with performances across China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East. In 2011 they were in residence with the National Symphony of Ghana, Africa, and at the University of Ghana Legon. Their appearance at Woodstock, New York’s prestigious Maverick Concerts was called “one of the most significant and worthwhile concerts of the 2010 season.” In 2013 Opus Two were guests of the United States Embassy on tour throughout Peru. With cellist Andres Diaz, Opus Two has recorded chamber music by Lowell Liebermann (Albany Records) and Paul Schoenfield (Azica Records). Opus Two’s recording Bernstein: Violin Sonata, Piano Trio, New Transcriptions (Naxos) features new arrangements by legendary Broadway music director Eric Stern and collaborations with Broadway actress-singer Marin Mazzie, and their following CD, a 75th-anniversary tribute to American composer George Gershwin, features a newly commissioned Eric Stern arrangement of beloved songs from Girl Crazy and collaborations with Broadway singer Ashley Brown.

Prize-winner in the National Federation of Music Clubs Artist Competition, the New Orleans International Piano Competition, and the United States Information Agency’s Artistic Ambassador Auditions, Cooperstock has since served as juror for these competitions, in addition to the Iowa International Piano Competition, the Liszt-Garrison International Competition, China’s Giant Cup Art Talent Competition, and the Music Teachers National Association national competitions, among many others.

Dr. Cooperstock holds degrees from the Juilliard School and the Cincinnati and Peabody Conservatories, where he studied with Abbey Simon, David Bar-Illan, Walter Hautzig, and Samuel Sanders. A Steinway artist, he is Program Director of the Saarburg (Germany) International Music Festival and School and Professor of Piano at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he served as Artistic Director of the University’s Bernstein at 100 celebration. He is President-Elect of Colorado State Music Teachers Association. Dr. Cooperstock’s former students hold positions at important music schools across the U.S. and in Europe and Asia. In 2020 he received the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence Award in Teaching and Pedagogy.

Piano performance