Rachelle McCabe, professor of music at Oregon State University, enjoys an international career as a concert pianist and artist teacher. She has performed as soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States, and in China, Canada, Southeast Asia, France, and England. She has held residencies as artist teacher in Beijing, Hong Kong, Victoria B.C., Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore.
McCabe is director of piano studies at OSU and is artistic director of Corvallis-OSU Piano International and its prestigious Steinway Piano Series. A dedicated teacher and passionate ambassador for classical piano music, she directs numerous educational programs at Oregon State, including frequent master classes with world-renowned pianists, the OSU Chamber Music Workshop and the OSU Summer Piano Institute.
Believing in the power of collaborative arts to bring about change, Rachelle McCabe has created innovative programs with writer/philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore to address the global crisis of climate change and extinction. Since 2014 the two have performed their compelling program, A Call to Life: Variations on a Theme of Extinction, in many cities across the USA and Canada. In 2019, they will appear in Scotland. Rachelle enjoys a long-time duo-piano partnership with her sister Robin McCabe. In 2018, the duo performed recitals and taught at four leading music conservatories in Beijing, China.
Rachelle holds a doctorate (DMA) from The University of Michigan, a master's degree from The Juilliard School, and a bachelor’s degree from The University of Washington. Her major teachers were Béla Siki, Ania Dorfmann, Gyorgy Sandor, and Theodore Lettvin.
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 force. -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