Voice and piano lessons on the Upper West Side, and collaborative piano for auditions, competitions and recitals across New York. Rates are on this page. So is my calendar.
Turn sound on, or click any note — the staves above are the opening of Fauré’s Après un rêve, roughly.
Private study — in the studio, in your home, or online
Most teachers in this city specialise in one and refer out the other. I don’t — which means a singer gets a teacher who can actually play their accompaniment down at tempo, and a pianist gets one who can sing them the line they’re trying to shape.
Classical technique first — breath, registration, resonance — then the repertoire you actually need. Diction in Italian, German and French is part of the lesson, not an extra.
Repertoire and reading, weighted to whichever one you’re avoiding. Every student sight-reads for five minutes of every lesson — it’s the skill that separates people who keep playing at forty from people who stop at fourteen.
Collaborative piano — con moto
That’s most of this work. I read well, I transpose on sight, and I’ve played enough audition rooms in this city to know when to hold a fermata for you and when the monitor is about to call time. Send the PDF, tell me the key.
Travel below 96th Street is included. Above it, or into Brooklyn, add $25.
About — senza fretta
I was a pianist for eighteen years before anyone heard me sing. That gap is the whole reason I teach the way I do.
Piano came first — a BM in performance from Oberlin, then five years of accompanying other people’s lessons, which is where you learn what teaching actually is. You sit at the instrument for three hundred hours a year watching a teacher say the same thing eleven different ways until one of them lands. Then I started singing, badly, at twenty-six, and found out from the inside how much of that advice is useless if you’ve never had to do it.
“Support from the diaphragm” is not an instruction. It is a description of something that happens after you’ve done the actual instruction.A master’s in voice from Manhattan School of Music followed, and since 2012 I’ve kept a studio on West 108th — fifth floor, Steinway B, walk-up, sorry. Fourteen years of Tuesday-through-Saturday teaching, and a parallel life playing auditions in midtown rehearsal studios that keeps me honest about what the industry is asking for this season rather than what it asked for in 2015.
Sight-reading is not a talent. It is the one skill I have never seen fail to improve with fifteen minutes a week.I take about twenty-two private students at a time and I don’t take more, because the collaborative work is half my calendar and I’d rather do both properly. If the studio is full when you write, I’ll tell you that and give you a real date — not a waiting list you never hear from again.
On the stands — Autumn 2026
Not a syllabus — the real pile of scores on the piano this term. It changes every term, and if you want to work on something that isn’t here, that’s usually a better lesson than one that is.
Gabriel Fauré
Three students, three different keys. It transposes beautifully and it teaches legato faster than anything else I know.
W. A. Mozart
For the pre-college crowd. Panels know them cold, which is exactly the point — there is nowhere to hide in them.
Benjamin Britten
English-language repertoire that isn’t condescending, and it sits well under a young voice.
J. S. Bach
The C minor prelude is doing a lot of work for four separate students right now, for four different reasons.
Frédéric Chopin
Where returning adults usually want to end up. We get there — usually by way of Op. 9 No. 2, usually slower than they’d like.
Claude Debussy
Harder than it looks, which is a useful lesson in itself. Nobody has ever nailed “Golliwogg” on a first pass.
Not a work — a rule
Non-negotiable, ages six to sixty-eight. It is the one skill I have never seen fail to improve with fifteen minutes a week.
Rates — sempre chiaro
You should not have to email a stranger to find out whether you can afford a piano lesson. Everything below is the actual price, including the parts most studios leave off the page.
First lesson Half price, both instruments, no obligation to continue. I’d rather find out in forty-five minutes whether we work well together.
Cancellations 24 hours’ notice and it’s rescheduled, free. Less than that and it’s charged — the slot was held for you and can’t be resold that fast.
Sliding scale Four places per term at reduced rates for students who need them. Ask. I don’t require documentation and I don’t make it a conversation.
Booking — a tempo
This is my real teaching calendar. Choose what you want and when, and you’ll have a confirmation the same evening — there’s no enquiry form sitting in a folder somewhere.
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Open times
Demo booking — nothing was actually sent. On the live site this writes straight to the calendar and emails both of you a confirmation.
Nothing selected yet.
“Two sentences about how their child went from resisting practice to asking for it.”
“One specific audition, one specific outcome. Named results beat adjectives every time.”
“A line from a singer you’ve accompanied about sight-reading or transposing under pressure.”