Sunday, June 10, 2007
The Birmingham News
Ophthalmologist Drew Mays will give an Alabama audience a chance to hear what made him a piano champion last week.
Wednesday at 6 p.m., Birmingham’s newest musical phenom, who took first prize at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs a week ago, will perform at Moody Concert Hall on the UA campus in Tuscaloosa. He will play some of the music that won over judges and audiences in Fort Worth Texas, which included Schumann, Bach, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven and Liszt.
Mays topped 74 other contestants in what is widely considered the most prestigious competition of its kind. Contestants 35 and older, whose day jobs were something other than piano playing, were invited from 23 states and 6 foreign countries. Mays also took the Audience Award and Best Performance of a Romantic Era work.
A former and present student of UA faculty pianist Amanda Penick, Mays earned bachelors and masters degrees in music at UA and studied at the Manhattan School of Music and Hanover Conservatory of Music in Germany before shifting his career to medicine. He oversees the residency program in ophthalmology at UAB and has a private practice in Vestavia Hills.
The concert is free and open to the public.
