Brian Chung

2024 Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient

Brian Chung’s diverse career includes experience as a performer, composer, arranger, teacher, author, conference speaker and music industry executive. In the business world, he served over 31 years as senior vice president of Kawai America Corporation. As a musician, he is co-author of Improvisation at the Piano (with Dennis Thurmond), co-author of Recreational Music Making Handbook (with Brenda Dillon), author of Expressions of Faith: Eight Inventive Explorations of Classic Hymns and Expressions of Christmas (all published by Alfred Music) and recipient of a 2022 Composer’s Grant from the MTNA Collaborative Music Commissioning Project. As an active member of Music Teachers National Association, he served as chair of the MTNA Foundation Fund Development Committee for 20 years (1999-2019), chair of the 2022 National Conference Planning Committee – and is honored to be a 2004 MTNA Foundation Fellow, 2015 MTNA Endowment Fellow, and recipient of the 2010 MTNA Distinguished Service Award and 2019 MTNA Citation for Leadership.

Mr. Chung has an undergraduate degree in Business Administration from the University of Michigan, where he combined his musical and business interests. In addition to performing in the Michigan Marching Band (on alto horn) and the school's top jazz band (on piano), he spent summers as a pianist and musical director at Walt Disney World. After college, he traveled to London to study piano, conducting and improvisation at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama as a Rotary Foundation Scholar. Upon his return to the States, he was privileged to pursue jazz studies as the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. After years as a professional musician and independent piano teacher, he continued his business education by completing a Master of Management Degree at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. His business pursuits eventually led him to Kawai America Corporation, where he served in senior management from 1988 until his retirement in 2020. As an active retiree, he enjoys composing music, serving in church leadership, playing pickleball, and spending precious time with his wife of 45 years (Jo Anne), his three grown sons and seven energetic grandchildren.

Jon Nakamatsu

2025-2026 CAPMT Teacher of the Year

Now in his third decade of touring worldwide, American pianist Jon Nakamatsu continues to draw critical and public acclaim for his intensity, elegance and electrifying solo, concerto and chamber music performances.  Catapulted to international attention in 1997 as the Gold Medalist of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition—the only American to achieve this distinction since 1981—Mr. Nakamatsu subsequently developed a multi-faceted career that encompasses recording, education, arts administration and public speaking in addition to his vast concert schedule.

Mr. Nakamatsu has been a guest soloist with over 150 orchestras worldwide, including those of Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Florence, Los Angeles, Milan, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo and Vancouver.  He has worked with such esteemed conductors as Marin Alsop, Sergiu Comissiona, James Conlon, Philippe Entremont, Hans Graf, Marek Janowski, Raymond Leppard, Gerard Schwarz, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Michael Tilson Thomas and Osmo Vänskä. 

As a recitalist, Mr. Nakamatsu has appeared in New York City’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Musée d’Orsay and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and in major centers such as Boston, Chicago, Houston, London, Milan, Munich, Prague, Singapore, Tokyo, Warsaw and Zurich.  In Beijing he has been heard at the Theater of the Forbidden City, the Great Hall of the People, China Conservatory, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts.  His numerous summer engagements included appearances at the Aspen, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Caramoor, Vail, Wolftrap, Colorado, Brevard, Britt, Colorado College, Evian, Interlochen, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Santa Fe and Sun Valley festivals.  In 2025 he will participate in an extended residency at the Bowdoin Festival in Maine and return to the Chautauqua Institution in New York where he served as Artist in Residence from 2018 to 2023.  In 2025 Mr. Nakamatsu will also serve on the juries of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and the United States Chopin Piano Competition.

Post-Pandemic, Mr. Nakamatsu returned to live performances in 2021 throughout the United States and in Europe.  Between 2020 and the spring of 2021, he was engaged in a myriad of online events including recording, masterclasses and virtual interviews and lectures for organizations such as the Chautauqua Institution Piano Festival, Colorado College Summer Music Festival, Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute, the Van Cliburn Foundation and the Chopin Foundation of the United States.  In collaboration with clarinetist Jon Manasse, Mr. Nakamatsu also produced and curated an online series of interviews and historical performances taken from the archives of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, where he and Mr. Manasse have served as Artistic Directors since 2007.

With clarinetist Jon Manasse, Mr. Nakamatsu tours as a member of the Manasse/Nakamatsu Duo.  Following its Boston debut in 2004, the Duo released its first CD for harmonia mundi usa (Brahms Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano) which received the highest praise from The New York Times Classical Music Editor James Oestreich, who named it among the “Best of the Year” for 2008.   A frequent chamber musician, Mr. Nakamatsu has collaborated repeatedly with ensembles such as the Emerson, Escher, Jupiter, Miró, Modigliani, Prazak, St. Lawrence, Tokyo and Ying string quartets, the Imani Winds and the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet with whom he made multiple tours beginning in 2000.

Mr. Nakamatsu’s 13 CDs recorded for harmonia mundi usa have garnered extraordinary critical praise.  An all-Gershwin recording with Jeff Tyzik and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra featuring Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F remained in the top echelons of Billboard’s classical charts for over six months.  Other acclaimed discs include the recording premiere of Lukas Foss’ first Piano Concerto with Carl St. Clair and the Pacific Symphony, the Brahms Piano Quintet with the Tokyo String Quartet in the quartet’s final recording as an ensemble, and a solo recording including Robert Schumann’s Second Piano Sonata whose YouTube posting has garnered over 800K hits. 

Mr. Nakamatsu has been profiled extensively in print, radio, television and online.  He has appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, in Readers Digest magazine and recently on Live from Here! with Chris Thile.  In 1999, Mr. Nakamatsu performed at the White House at the special invitation of President and Mrs. Clinton.  He has also performed for the United States Mayor’s Convention in San Francisco and in 2001 was the featured guest artist during the opening and dedication of the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II in Washington DC.  

A former high school teacher of German with no formal conservatory training, Mr. Nakamatsu studied privately with Marina Derryberry for over 20 years beginning at the age of six; worked with Karl Ulrich Schnabel since the age of 9; and trained for 10 years in composition, theory and orchestration with Dr. Leonard Stein of the University of Southern California’s Schoenberg Institute.  Mr. Nakamatsu holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University in German Studies and secondary education.  In 2015, he joined the piano faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and in 2023 the Department of Music at Stanford University as a Visiting Artist.  He lives in the Bay Area with his wife Kathy and young son Gavin.

Craig Richey

2024 CAPMT MTNA Foundation Fellow

A graduate of the Juilliard School, and Hailed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for his "No-nonsense pianism!" Craig Richey made his New York debut as guest duo-soloist with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall. He is currently a member of the Piano Faculty at the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University Long Beach. Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Craig taught at the esteemed Third Street Music School Settlement in New York City where he also directed their Chamber Music Program. He has appeared in collaborative, chamber music and solo performances throughout the United States and has performed live on National Public Radio and Air America Radio. 

Mr. Richey’s students have been regular winners of the Bob Cole Conservatory Concerto Competition, have frequently garnered first and second prizes in solo and concerto competitions in California as well as top prizes in international competitions. He is a frequent adjudicator at competitions throughout the Southwest. He is also a regular guest master teacher in Tokyo, Japan for the Piano Teachers Music Guild. 

Mr. Richey also has a thriving career as a composer for film and television. Lauded by Film Music Magazine for his ‘effortlessly gliding melodies’, Craig is a Sundance Fellow, an alum of the Composers Lab, and has returned as an Advisor in the Sundance Film Music and Sound Design Lab at Skywalker Sound. He has appeared on BMI Composers Roundtable Panels at the Sundance Film Festival and SXSW. Recent television credits include 2 seasons of ‘Dear…’ on Apple TV+. His feature films have screened in prestigious festivals including Sundance, Toronto, Edmonton, SXSW, Tribeca, Berlin and Sedona Film Festivals.

Craig is the CAMPT Commissioned Composer Chair and the MTNA Student Composition Competitions Coordinator.