Anne-Marie McDermott

Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott has earned plaudits for intelligent treatments of music from Bach to Charles Wuorinen. She is also notable as a chamber music player and a festival organizer. McDermott has amassed a substantial recording catalog, much of it on the Bridge label; it includes complete cycles of Prokofiev's piano sonatas and Mozart's piano concertos. In 2025, she joined violist Paul Neubauer for a recording of Shostakovich's Viola Sonata and, in transcription, his Cello Sonata. McDermott was born in Queens, New York, in 1963, and grew up on Long Island. Her sisters Kerry (violin) and Maureen (cello) were both musical, and together, the three formed the McDermott Trio and have regularly performed together. McDermott began piano lessons at five, and by 12, she had played Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, at New York's Carnegie Hall. Her mother died when she was 15, but she was able to continue her studies with support from the Young Concert Artists organization. After a stint at the Manhattan School of Music, she launched her career at 18, continuing her studies with Leon Fleisher. The McDermott Trio performed at Carnegie Hall in 1982. In 1991, she took the silver medal at the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition in Japan, and the following year, she substituted for an ailing Murray Perahia, playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, with the Atlanta Symphony. She made her New York Philharmonic debut in 1997 under conductor Christian Thielemann. Her recording debut came in 1999 with an album of Prokofiev works on the Arabesque label. That album contained two Prokofiev piano sonatas, and the project became a complete cycle of Prokofiev sonatas, completed in 2003, and later reissued by the Bridge label. McDermott performed critically acclaimed concerts in New York, including one featuring Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, at Lincoln Center in 2006. She has often performed and recorded new music; a 2009 recital at New York's Town Hall featured newly commissioned works by Wuorinen and Clarice Assad. She also performs works by Clara Schumann and Amy Beach, and she has programmed works by other contemporary composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Tobias Picker, and Joan Tower. McDermott's schedule has remained busy into the 2020s, featuring appearances with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (with which she performed Beach's Piano Concerto in C sharp minor, Op. 45), and the Des Moines Symphony, among many other groups. In the 2024-2025 season, McDermott made her debut in Galway, Ireland, with a recital. She has continued to record for Bridge, releasing a cycle of Mozart piano concertos on that label in the early 2020s with the Odense Symphony Orchestra in Denmark. In 2025, she moved to First Hand Records for an album of Shostakovich works with violist Paul Neubauer. McDermott is the artistic director of the Bravo! Vail music festival in Colorado, the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival in Florida, and the McKnight Center Chamber Music Festival at Oklahoma State University. ~ James Manheim, Rovi