Richard Masters

Pianist Richard Masters maintains a multifaceted career encompassing solo recitals, chamber music partnerships, opera conducting, writing, and teaching. He serves as Associate Professor of Piano and Collaborative Piano at Virginia Tech, where he is also the Associate Director of the School of Performing Arts.

His recent concert calendar includes appearances at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the English Music Festival in Oxfordshire, the San Francisco Conservatory, and the Schola Cantorum in Paris. As a collaborative artist, he has performed alongside Grammy Award–winning baritone Donnie Ray Albert, flutist Valerie Coleman, Juilliard Quartet violinist Earl Carlyss, and under the baton of legendary conductor Lorin Maazel at the Kennedy Center. Masters’s discography includes releases on the Albany Records, Blue Griffin, E-M Records, and Heritage Records labels. His 2020 album with sopranos Emily Martin and Ariana Wyatt, Let Evening Come: American Art Songs Old and New (Albany Records), was named one of the year’s best classical recordings by Chicago Tribune critic Howard Reich.

Masters is particularly distinguished for his advocacy of the solo keyboard works of English composer John Ireland, performing them across the United States and the United Kingdom. His recording of Ireland’s delicate miniature The Cherry Tree has been broadcast several times on BBC Radio 3, making him the only American pianist to be so featured on the network in Ireland’s music.

In addition to his work as a solo and chamber pianist, Masters maintains an active career in the operatic world. As Music Director of Druid City Opera, he has conducted productions of Tosca, Rigoletto, Lucia di Lammermoor, Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Don Pasquale. A recent performance of the continuo recitatives for Il nozze di Figaro with Opera Roanoke was described by an Opera magazine critic as “brilliant.”

Masters has also appeared as a musical theatre conductor, leading performances in past years of Carousel, Fiorello!, Oh, Kay!, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and Babes in Arms. In April 2019, Masters and his Virginia Tech colleague Amanda Nelson revived The Sap of Life, a show written by Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Maltby Jr. and Oscar Award-winning composer David Shire that was last performed in 1964.

Masters is the author of Encyclopedia of American Classical Pianists: 1800s to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), which the piano historian Mark Ainley (The Piano Files with Mark Ainley) referred to as “unparalleled…invaluable.” He reviews recordings regularly for MusicWebInternational, the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Journal, Piano Magazine, and several other publications.

Masters holds degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder (BM), the Juilliard School (MM), and the Eastman School of Music (DMA). His primary teachers included Joseph Werner, Robert Spillman, Brian Zeger, Margo Garrett, Jean Barr, and Douglas Humpherys.

He lives in Blacksburg with his husband, two children, and a pug named Coleslaw.