Mathilde Handelsman

Visiting Assistant Professor

Piano

Praised by The Boston Globe for her “mesmerizing” performance, and recognized for her “calm technical mastery, immediate understanding of balance” as well as “extraordinary vigor, flawless musicality,” (Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, 2013), Dr. Mathilde Handelsman is a concert pianist, author, and educator from Paris, France.

Handelsman’s career as a soloist and collaborative musician has led her to perform from a young age across Europe, Canada, and the United States, and to work with conductors such as Seiji Ozawa, Stefan Asbury, Luigi Gaggero, JoAnn Falletta, and Ankush Kumar Bahl. Highlights from recent seasons include chamber performances alongside Yo-Yo Ma, Nicolas Namoradze, and Stephen Drury at the Tanglewood Music Festival, fellowships at the Sarasota Music Festival and the Mostly Modern Festival in Saratoga Springs, NY, as well as a solo début at Carnegie Hall in May 2022. Her début solo album Images (Sheva, 2020), featuring Claude Debussy’s complete works of 1903-1907, was noted in the press for its “serene and firm moments of beauty” (Take Effect), “lush sonority,” (Audiophile Audition), and “magical aura” (Sequenza 21, “Best of 2021”).

An advocate for 20th and 21st century music, Handelsman was a protégée of the late French composer and conductor Roger Boutry (Grand Prix de Rome, 1954), who dedicated his last solo piano work to her in 2018. She has worked extensively with composers such as Thomas Adès, Paul Méfano, Philippe Manoury, Poul Ruders, and Marc Neikrug, among many others, and has premiered several solo, chamber, and orchestral works. Additionally, Handelsman has invariably cultivated a great affinity for poetry, literature, and theater in parallel to music – interests which she aspires to combine with her work as a musician and pedagogue through various cross-disciplinary projects and collaborative performances. As such, she has written texts for composers and worked as a professional French-English literary translator on several occasions. Her credits as a poet includes two published volumes,  Pré-sage (2016) and L’Absurde Génie des fleurs (2017).

Mathilde Handelsman’s principal teachers are Menahem Pressler, Laurent Cabasso, and John O’Conor. After graduating Magna Cum Laude from the Académie Supérieure de Musique de Strasbourg in 2015, Handelsman moved to the United States to further her studies at the Jacobs School of Music of Indiana University-Bloomington with a full
scholarship, where she also taught as an Associate Instructor. In 2020, she earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at Shenandoah Conservatory with a full scholarship and teaching assistantship. In recent years, Handelsman also received musical guidance from esteemed musicians Jeffrey Kahane, Joseph Swensen, and Robert Levin, and spent several summers as a piano fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center where she studied with Emanuel Ax, Garrick Ohlsson, Peter Serkin, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet.

Currently, Handelsman serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Prior to this appointment, Handelsman held the Lecturer in Piano position at the University of New Hampshire. She is a co-founder and co-Artistic Director of the St. Andrews Chamber Music Festival in New Brunswick, Canada.