Profile
Richard DYER(U.S.A.)
Jury Member, Piano Section
Richard Dyer covered classical music for the Boston Globe for thirty-three years. While there, he was twice honored with the Deems Taylor/ASCAP Award for distinguished music criticism. He met and interviewed most of the leading pianists of the era. He has also written for many other publications, including High Fidelity, Musical America, Ovation, The Nation, Connoisseur, Opera News, Opera, The Gramophone, and Harvard Magazine, as well as various newspapers including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In addition to these, he has contributed to the Encyclopedia Americana, the Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia of Opera, the New Grove Dictionaries of Music and Musicians.
Born in Texas, and brought up in Oklahoma and Ohio, Mr. Dyer was trained as a pianist and studied in Paris with the late Jacqueline Eymar, while also attending the master classes of Alfred Cortot at the École Normale de Musique; in America he studied with Beatrice Erdely of the Cleveland Institute of Music. After completing his master’s degree in English literature at Harvard, he taught at the University of Iowa, and later returned to Harvard where he was appointed a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in English.
He has written liner notes for Deutsche Grammophon, Naxos, and Sony Classical labels, and program notes for the Boston Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera and other organizations.
Since retiring from the newspaper, Mr. Dyer has remained active as a writer, teacher, lecturer, and adjudicator. He teaches regularly at the Tanglewood Music Center, has led seminars at the Juilliard School of Music, New England Conservatory, Boston University and the Aspen Music Festival. He has made five tours with conductor Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra as blogger – three in Europe, one in South America and one in China. He holds honorary doctorates from Salem State University and the New England Conservatory of Music.
His knowledge of the piano and operatic literature has made him a regular member of panels and competition juries, and he gives regular presentations on historical pianists and singers. He has been served on the jury of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition four times since 2001, as well as on the juries of the Cliburn Competition for Outstanding Amateurs, the Cleveland and Toronto International Piano Competitions. He has also served as a Jury Member of the 6th Sendai International Music Competition.