LUISA GUEMBES-BUCHANAN

Concert pianist, musicologist and educator

Pianist Luisa Guembes-Buchanan has been praised for her performances, recordings and interpretations across a wide repertoire, with a particular specialization in the music of Beethoven, as well as the piano works of the Classical and Romantic periods.

Latest Recording

Domenico Scarlatti Reimagined

A brilliant two-disc set of Scarlatti’s masterful sonatas, beautifully performed

About

Pianist Luisa Guembes-Buchanan has received wide praise for her brilliant pianism, her powerful and poetically insightful interpretations, and her innovative programming and series of uniquely beautiful, and revelatory, recordings.

Renowned as a concert pianist, musicologist and educator, Luisa Guembes-Buchanan was born is Lima, Peru, where she received her early musical education at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música. She holds degrees in Performance and Musicology from the Manhattan School of Music, C.W Post College, New York University and Boston University.

Ms. Guembes-Buchanan has given performances throughout the United States, Latin America and Europe both as a recitalist and soloist. She has held teaching posts at Amherst College (MA), Stonybrook University (NY), and the New England Conservatory at Hingham (MA).

In addition her numerous Master Classes, Ms. Guembes-Buchanan is a founding member of several teaching and performing organizations dedicated to promote young performer’s education and the facilitating of performing opportunities for them. As a musicologist, she has lectured and participated in panel discussions in the United States and Latin America. more

Reviews

“The centrepiece is a wide-ranging and intelligent interpretation of the Diabelli Variations. Guembes-Buchanan marries an awareness of the style of each variation with a fine feeling for the work’s architecture. Her strong fingerwork ensures that the crispness of the so-called ‘Don Giovanni’ variation is magnificent. By contrast, the simplicity of Variation 30 offers a key to her depth and rigour. The second disc is finer still. Guembes-Buchanan is expert at finding the character of each Bagatelle, while her fluency, when required, is ideal. It is not exaggerating to put these readings up there with the likes of Brendel, Serkin and Schnabel. A sense of musicological rigour, too, hangs over the enterprise, with detailed, footnoted booklet notes by the pianist herself.”
Colin Clarke
Read More

“This is a most important and, in its way, significant release: I do not know if Hoffmann’s Sonatas have been recorded before - I have never encountered them, either live or on disc – but the result here, alongside Schumann’s Kreisleriana in a beautifully-proportioned recording, is a set of discs that shed new light on the music of the first half of the 19th-century in Germany. On this showing, Hoffmann’s music would seem to be ripe for rediscovery, in which case this issue will come to be seen as having performed a signal service.”
James Palmer
Read More