Upon her graduation from Juilliard, she won the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition Chopin Prize (New York), leading to her feature on WQXR’s Young Artist Showcase with Robert Sherman.
Pianist Inga Kapouler Gartner, originally from Riga, Latvia, is a graduate of both the St. Petersburg Conservatory (Bachelor of Music and Master of Music) and The Juilliard School (Advanced Certificate in Piano Performance, Master of Music in Piano Performance, and Post Graduate Artist Diploma in Music Performance). An accomplished performer as soloist and chamber musician, she has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Rubinstein Prize, the Five Towns International Piano Competition, and Diploma and Special Prize at the International Piano Competition in Senigallia, Italy. Upon her graduation from Juilliard, she won the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition Chopin Prize (New York), leading to her feature on WQXR’s Young Artist Showcase with Robert Sherman.
Ms. Kapouler Gartner went on to perform throughout the US, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Israel, Italy, England, and Belgium at prestigious venues such as New York’s Merkin Hall and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie, Los Angeles’s Zipper Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, Latvia’s Philharmonic Hall, and others. The New York Times described her playing as “finely nuanced and thoroughly menacing,” the New York Sun felt she “caught the spirit of exaggeration for strikingly effective results,” and as a chamber performer London’s Musical Opinion hailed her “beautiful accompaniment.”
Ms. Kapouler Gartner was an annual guest artist with the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players for 10 years, where she collaborated and shared the stage with members of the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. She was also a longtime accompanist for New York’s renowned art song master class series, The Joy of Singing with Paul Sperry.
As an educator, Ms. Kapouler Gartner was a teaching assistant at the Juilliard Pre-College Division to her professor Oxana Yablonskaya before becoming a permanent member of the faculty at The Lucy Moses and Elaine Kaufman Musical Center in New York. In 2014 she relocated to the Los Angeles area to join the piano faculty at the prestigious Colburn School’s Community of Performing Arts. She is also the piano/vocal coach at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music.