Anthony Padilla is a professor of piano and chamber music at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music in Appleton, Wisconsin. An American pianist of Filipino-Chinese ancestry, Padilla receives public and critical acclaim for performances of “enormous freshness, vitality, and poetry” (Chicago Tribune). Since his debut with the Seattle Symphony in 1983, he has become a popular guest artist throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Highlights include solo and collaborative appearances at the Ravinia, Chautauqua, Schleswig-Holstein, Saarburg, Vianden, Cascade, Bay View, Portland Piano International and San Luis Obispo Mozart Festivals. After his New York debut recital, the New York Concert Review called him “a strong-willed, steel-fingered tornado: he plays the piano with absolute authority and gives new meaning to the idea of ‘interpretation’ to the extent that the U.S. Patent Office might well grant him a number. Nobody could copy him.”
A protégé of the legendary pianist Jorge Bolet at the Curtis Institute of Music, he completed his graduate studies at the Eastman School of Music, where he served as teaching assistant to Jeffrey Kahane and Natalya Antonova. Awarded the prestigious Beethoven Fellowship by the American Pianists Association and top prize at the Concert Artists Guild International Competition, he is also a laureate of the Naumburg, Bachauer, Kapell, and Cleveland International Piano Competitions. He is a founding member of the Arcos Piano Trio, recipients of an Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for commissioning, premiering, and recording new chamber works by Latin American composers Roberto Sierra and Miguel del Aguila.
A nationally certified member of the Music Teachers National Association, he is a popular adjudicator and presenter, and his students regularly earn top prizes at state, national and international competitions. His lecture-recitals and seminars on the Great Pianists, Piano Transcriptions, Piano Trios, Humor in Classical Music, Piano Teaching in the 21st Century, Piano Works of Chopin, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt, and Expanding the Canon: Exploring Diversity and Inclusion in Classical Music have stirred much interest at the MTNA National Conference, summer programs, and state and regional conferences. His recordings include the premiere of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Statements: Second Sonata for Piano featured on an album of African-American composers, chamber works by American women and Latin American composers with the Arcos Piano Trio, and original piano transcriptions for extended range piano to be released soon. He received Lawrence University's Excellence in Teaching Award in 2017.
