Shiv Yajnik, 21, will be attending his third year at Columbia University in the fall, studying mathematics. Throughout college, he has been studying piano performance with Professors Reiko Uchida, Alan Feinberg, and Matti Raekallio. Shiv studied with Mrs. Marcy McDonald and Dr. Alex McDonald in high school. Shiv enjoys performing music by a diverse array of composers, especially Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and Scriabin, whose considerations of tonality and sonorities in both their music for piano and orchestra captivate him. He has won top awards in competitions including the David Dubois Piano Competition, the Music Teachers National Association, and the Arthur Fraser International Piano Competition. He has performed with the Baylor Symphony and the Plano Symphony and in masterclasses for nationally and internationally acclaimed concert pianists and faculty, including Alvin Chow, Yoheved Kaplinsky, Joaquin Achúcarro, Reid Gainsford, Nelita True, John Weems, Olga Radosavljevich, Yekwon Sunwoo and Alessandro Mazzamuto. Summer festivals Shiv has attended include the Southeastern Piano Festival, the Summer Sonata at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Indiana University Piano Academy, and the Cooper Piano Festival at Oberlin; he will also be attending the Gijón International Piano Festival this coming August.
Shiv also composes music and studied with Dr. David Karp. Shiv has composed neo-Romantic music and also enjoys experimenting with tonality. His compositions find their inspiration in his surrounding environment. Shiv received top awards in the National Federation of Music Clubs and the Morton Gould Young Composers Awards sponsored by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. He has taken lessons with nationally and internationally renowned composers including David Ludwig, Nicholas Landrum, Jie Wang, Daniel Ott, Jonathan Holland, Dimitry Tymoczko and Nina Young. Shiv was featured as a Rising Star in the 2018 Basically Beethoven Music Festival at the Moody Performance Hall in Dallas, Texas, where he was asked to perform his composition, “Ondine.”
At Columbia, Shiv participates in the Music Performance Program and frequently performs chamber and solo music in recitals; last year, he was invited to perform for the Emeritus Professors at Columbia, and this year, he performed with his piano quartet at the Weill Recital hall in Carnegie. Also, in support of his attendance of the Gijón International Piano Festival, he has received the Richard and Brooke Kamin Rapaport Summer Music Performance Fellowship, sponsored by Columbia University’s music performance department.
You can find Shiv’s 2023 19th Century Music Competition piano performance here.