Music

Faculty & Staff

Rachelle McCabe

Professor of Music, Director of Piano Activities
Department of Music
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331
Phone:541-737-4061
Fax:541-737-4268
E-mail: rmccabe@oregonstate.edu

Brief Vita

Rachelle McCabe, concert pianist and professor of music at Oregon State University, enjoys an international career as artist-teacher and is well known to audiences throughout the Pacific Northwest where she appears frequently as a solo recitalist and highly respected chamber musician. She has performed extensively in the United States, Canada, Southeast Asia and England. In addition to solo piano recitals in Seattle, Singapore, Malaysia, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Portland and Cambridge (UK), she has been heard on NPR's Performance Today, the CBC, and PBS television. She has collaborated in chamber music recitals and concerto performances with some of the world's finest artists including David Shifrin, Peter Schickele, Yuri Mazurkevich, and Gary Karr. With her sister, Robin McCabe, she performs duo piano concerts. As concerto soloist, Rachelle McCabe has played with many North American orchestras including the Seattle Symphony, the Pittsburgh, Oregon and Victoria symphonies and is a frequent soloist with the Corvallis-OSU Symphony. She has appeared in many summer festivals including the Victoria International Festival, The Johanessen Summer School of the Arts, The Highlands Festival in North Carolina, Chamber Music Northwest and the Chintimini Chamber Music Festival. As Artist in Residence at LaSalle, a school of the arts in Singapore, she was named an affiliate artist of the school. She is also an experienced harpsichordist and fortepianist.

At Oregon State University, Dr. McCabe directs the piano program and teaches the music history sequence for undergraduate music majors. On the basis of outstanding teaching, she was named a Master Teacher in the College of Liberal Arts. She holds a doctorate (DMA) from The University of Michigan where she studied with Theodore Lettvin and Gyorgy Sandor, her masters The Juilliard School where she studied with Ania Dorfmann, and her bachelors from The University of Washington where she studied with Bela Siki.

Reviews

• McCabe's reading of Bartok's "Improvisations" displayed a true affinity for the eclectic Bartokian style… Debussy's "Estampes" was a model of limpid understatement, always delivered with taste…
  ---Atlanta Constitution
• Rachelle McCabe is an elegant pianist, a considerable mistress of the keyboard and an artist who possesses both fine musical intelligence and intense feeling… She gave Ravel's "Valses nobles et sentimentales" a mesmerizing reading of exceptional concentration, characterized by a marvelously natural sense of rubato, which never sounded calculated or forced.
  ---Victoria Times
• Her technique and interpretation in Mendelssohn's G minor Concerto were brilliant.
  --Seattle Times
• McCabe's passionate but tightly controlled technique is more than equal to the complex palette of light and dark that Schubert demands.
  --The Oregonian