American Pianists Association announces award finalists. (Items of Interest).

The 1999 MTNA Collegiate National Piano Competition winner Thomas Rosenkranz is one of five candidates selected by the American Pianists Association (APA) to compete for the 2003 Classical Fellowship Awards.

Each finalist will be featured in a full-length concert in a season-long series beginning this month. Two fellowships, each worth more than $70,000 in cash prizes and career assistance, will ultimately be awarded in April 2003. The Classical Fellowship Awards is a musical endeavor dedicated to exclusively assist young American pianists between the ages of 18 and 30.

Rosenkranz, 25, a doctoral candidate at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, studies with Nelita True and is artist affiliate at Syracuse University. The other candidates who will compete include Robert Henry, a twenty-eight-year-old Georgia native who is pursuing a doctorate in piano performance at the University of Maryland and studies with Larissa Dedova; Brenda Huang, a 1991 Gilmore Young Artist from Taipei, Taiwan, who is currently a faculty member at the Chicago Institute of Music in Winnetka, Illinois; Jill Lawson, an American-Portuguese pianist born in Mexico who graduated in 2000 from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, studying with Leon Fleisher; and Michael Sheppard, a Philadelphia native who studies with Leon Fleischer and recently was a semi-finalist in the Hilton Head International Piano Competition.

Finalists and alternates were chosen from a record-setting field of forty-five nominees by a distinguished panel of judges, including Alan Chow, Northwestern University; Emilio del Rosario, The Music Institute of Chicago; Panayis Lyras, Butler University; and Marilyn Neeley of The Catholic University of America.