About the Artists
George Clark
Pierre-Nicolas Colombat
Pianist Pierre-Nicolas Colombat’s musical activities include performance, research, writing, recording, and community organizing. He and his duo partner Vinicius Costa received prizes in both of the competitions in which they participated (Bollinger/Wigmore Hall Competition 2022 and IVC 2023). OperaWire praised his tight partnership and brilliant programming with soprano Meredith Wohlgemuth on the occasion of his Carnegie Hall debut in 2021. He regularly performs in international art song festivals and competitions (Hugo Wolf International Lied Competition, Renée Fleming’s Carnegie Hall Song Studio, LIEDBasel, Source Song Festival, Brigitte Fassbaender’s masterclasses with the International Hugo Wolf Akademie). In 2024, alongside his longtime friend Elias Dagher (with whom he also hosted the Boston Community Studio Class), he founded the Boston Text and Tone Festival which centers language as the common ground for performers of all levels and audiences to experience the rich expressive worlds that are created when text and music intertwine.
Pierre-Nicolas believes restructuring the distribution of and access to digitally released music is one of the greatest problems facing modern musicians. Efforts to address this have included limited circulation experiments (Across Artists Collaborative Collective, 2020-21), private collectable digit releases as well as subscription based research/writing (Wagner’s Nightmare Limited Digital album), and developing guérilla streaming practices with Henri Colombat (Sept fois cis, 2024). His writing on music includes his Doctoral Dissertation (Music and Modern Power: A performer’s tracing of virtuosity and systems of musical value, Boston University 2021), his Masterarbeit which includes a Marxist analysis of methods/media involved in the historical dissemination of music (Lied and the de-fetishization of music as a commodity, MAB 2023), further essays, and concert reviews for the Boston Music Intelligencer and Sinfonieorchester Basel.
His experience in opera began with collaborations with the Guerilla Opera company and rehearsal pianist engagements with Promenade Opera Company in Boston. He has also been on staff as pianist at Boston University and Boston Conservatory. Presently he continues his work as correpetiteur in productions with the Theatre Basel and the FHNW Musik Akademie Basel as well as other freelance work in Switzerland. He began his musical studies in Chicago (DePaul University, BM), continued in Boston (New England Conservatory, MM, and Boston University, DMA), and eventually moved to Basel, Switzerland (Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, Specialized Masters in Liedgestaltung) to pursue his love of languages and the vocal literature.