The Academy Faculty 2025
Audrey Axinn
Audrey Axinn’s sensitive and compelling performances on fortepiano and modern piano have been hailed by the Washington Post and others as a “truly admirable” and “Axinn is an artist…her touch is magical and the fluidity of her playing exceptional.” “Her musical sensibility reminds one of Landowska.”
Performance highlights on historical and modern pianos include solo performances and collaborations with artists including Monica Huggett, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, Eugene Fodor, Daniel Heifetz and Rufus Muller in venues including Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Caramoor, and the Edinburgh International Festival.
Ms. Axinn teaches vocal and instrumental chamber music on fortepianos at The Juilliard School. She teaches collaborative piano and classroom courses at Mannes School of Music. Ms. Axinn has given master classes at prominent conservatories in China, the U.S., and Europe.
From 2018-21, Ms. Axinn served as Associate Dean and faculty at the Tianjin Juilliard School in China. Previously, she held the position of Assistant Dean at Mannes School of Music. Ms. Axinn holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts degree from The Juilliard School, as well as degrees from The Curtis Institute of Music, and The Manhattan School of Music. She also attended Sweelinck Conservatorium on a U.S. Fulbright and Netherland-America Foundation grant.
Maria Rose
Maria Rose-van Epenhuysen, originally from the Netherlands, combines her experience as a fortepiano performer with her research as a musicologist. She has performed extensively as solo performer and in chamber music, and has a PhD in Musicology from New York University. Ms. Rose has performed chamber music with the Festetics String Quartet from Budapest, the Gamerith Trio in Austria, and with the Romanian violinist Vasile Beluska as the Mozart Fortepiano Duo. She has written many articles and lectured on piano performance practice. Her path-breaking research on early French piano music has led the way for a new generation of fortepianists focusing on previously unfamiliar repertoire.
Ms. Rose received her piano performance training in the Netherlands, London, and the U.S. She has recorded a wide range of repertoire on period instruments; including the complete Mozart Sonatas and Haydn Trios on an original Anton Walter piano in Austria. She received the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society for her recording projects and a grant from the Netherland America Foundation. She is a Board member of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America and a Senior editor at RILM, the bibliographic database for music research, in New York City. Ms. Rose lives in the Catskill region, where she founded the Academy of Fortepiano Performance in Hunter, and hosts the International Fortepiano Salon with Yiheng Yang.
2010 - present
Andrew Willis
For several decades Andrew Willis has explored the historical development of keyboard instruments and their performance practice through the study, performance, and teaching of the widest possible repertoire. He participates frequently in conferences, festivals, and concert series and has held leadership roles for the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society and the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, serving as a finals juror of the Westfield International Fortepiano Competition. Willis teaches performance and related subjects on instruments ranging from harpsichord to modern piano as a Professor in the School of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where for over a decade he directed the biennial Focus on Piano Literature symposia. Willis holds degrees from Cornell University, Temple University, and The Curtis Institute of Music, where his mentors included Malcolm Bilson, Lambert Orkis, and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. He has recorded solo and ensemble music of three centuries on historically relevant pianos for the Albany, Bridge, Claves, Centaur, and CRI labels, collaborating with Malcolm Bilson and others in the first complete Beethoven sonata cycle recorded on historical pianos
2010 - present
Masayuki Maki
Masayuki Maki specializes in historical keyboard instruments as a performer, teacher, and technician. As Adjunct Assistant Professor at Queens College, he teaches the organ, harpsichord, fortepiano, chamber music, Baroque Performance Practice seminar, and leads the Baroque Ensemble. Formally he was the curator of the historical keyboard collection at the Juilliard School. Between 2010 and 2018, he served as the Associate Director of the "Rethinking Bach" summer workshop at Queens College and Tokai University in Japan. He has been on faculty with The Academy of Fortepiano Performance at the Catskill Mountain Foundation since the inaugural year of 2017. Mr. Maki's creative and insightful lecture demonstration of “Applying Violin Bowing Expression on the Clavichord” was a highlight of AFP 2018. He has played with New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, New York Classical Players and various chamber ensembles and soloists. Besides the activities in the US, he teaches and directs ensembles in Colombia and Ecuador. He has studied from the Early Music Institute at Indiana University, Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, and Smarano Organ Academy in Italy, and he received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Stony Brook University. He studied the historical keyboard (harpsichord, fortepiano, clavichord and organ) technology and building from Robert Duffy (IN), Klop Orgel- en Clavecimbelbouw (NL), Onno Peper (NL), Yasushi Takahashi (JP), and Richard Hester (NY).
Anders Muskens
Anders Muskens is a Canadian early keyboard specialist, music researcher, and ensemble director, active as an international artist in North America and Europe. He began piano studies at the age of 4 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and completed an Associate Diploma (ARCT) in modern piano from the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto under the tutelage of Dr. Irina Konovalov. With support from the Edmonton Community Foundation and the Adriana Jacoba Fonds, he completed a Masters in Fortepiano at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague under Dr. Bart van Oort and Petra Somlai, with Fabio Bonizzoni and Patrick Ayrton for harpsichord. He is currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Matthew Gardner, Prof. Dr. Thomas Schipperges, and Dr. Jed Wentz as an artistic advisor, where he is researching the connection between rhetorical acting and music in the period 1740–1830. He has performed regularly at the Utrecht Early Music Festival, and has given performances at the Schwetzinger SWR Festspiele, Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the National Music Centre, the London International Festival of Early Music, the Salle Bourgie in Montreal, and many more. He was awarded a scholarship for the 2024 Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg artist promotion scheme, and he is represented as a performer by the Sonus Agency for Early Music. Finally, he is the founder of the ensemble Das Neue Mannheimer Orchester: an international initiative to revive the music of the Mannheim School in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Elizaveta Miller
Guest artist Elizaveta Miller is a true and inspired multi-instrumentalist, who plays harpsichord, fortepiano and piano; as well as clavichord and organ. Her repertoire covers five centuries of music, from late Renaissance to contemporary music. In 2013, she was awarded First prize at the Bruges Musica Antiqua Competition. She has performed throughout Europe and Russia, taking part in the Bruges MA Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, Bozar Music, Dubrovnik Music Festival and The Homecoming Music Festival. As a continuo player, she has collaborated with numerous conductors, including Václav Luks, Reinhard Goebel, Maxim Emelyanychev, Robert Hollingsworth, Christian Curnyn, and others. Elizaveta studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and at Yale School of Music. She held a teaching position at the Moscow State Conservatory in the Historical Instruments Department for nine years but resigned and left the country in March 2022 after the beginning of the full-scale Russian aggression on Ukraine. In May 2022 she was invited to teach at McGill University in Montreal, where she is presently holding a position of Assistant Professor of harpsichord.