The Young Pianist’s Beethoven Competition is named after Celia Mendez, a piano teacher and musicologist formerly from San José, California, who conceived of and founded the competition in 1987. In the spring of 2007, the Executive Board of the American Beethoven Society unanimously voted to name the competition after her in honor and recognition of her inspirational work in support of Beethoven’s music and the many fine young pianists and their teachers throughout the state.
ONE OF THE LEADING PIANISTS OF HIS GENERATION, Ronald Brautigam is one of the few to perform at the highest level on modern as well as period instruments. A student of the legendary Rudolf Serkin, he has performed with leading orchestras around the world—from the Amsterdam Concertgebouworkest to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra— as well as the foremost period ensembles. He has recorded a fifteen-CD cycle of Beethoven’s music on fortepiano, which in 2015 won an Edison Award and the prestigious Jahrespreis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (Annual Prize from German Recording Critics). His editorial work includes a reconstruction of the orchestra score of Beethoven’s piano concerto WoO4 from 1784. He is also professor of modern piano at the Musikhochschule Basel, Switzerland.