Piano Chamber Music Faculty
Lyudmila Lakisova graduated from the School of Music for Gifted Children, affiliated with the Belarusian State Conservatory of Music, receiving her Bachelor’s degree in 1988. She earned her Master’s Degree in Piano Performance, Pedagogy, and Chamber Music in 1993 with a Ph.D in Piano Accompaniment in 1995, both from the Belarusian State Conservatory of Music in Minsk. In 1989, she became a recital pianist and accompanist for the Belarusian State Philharmonic Chamber Choir and performed with the Belarusian State Symphony.
Lyudmila has been a featured soloist and ensemble performer with many orchestras in the Chicago area, including the North Shore Chamber Orchestra, Wheaton Symphony, West Suburban Symphony, Camerata Chicago, and the Landolfi Piano Trio. She has performed in many well-known venues, such as Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, Harris Theater in Downtown Chicago, Bennett Gordon Hall at Ravinia, and Carnegie Hall in New York. Lyudmila has also given performances in the Steinway Society Concert series, Stradivari Society, and was featured on WFMT with Kerry Frumkin and in the Myra Hess Concert Series at the Cultural Center Downtown Chicago. In previous years, she toured extensively in England with violinist Drostan Hall and on the continents of Africa and Asia with Trio Chicago & Friends.
In addition to her successful solo and chamber career, Lyudmila has become well known in Chicago music circles as a collaborative pianist, accompanist, and chamber coach. She collaborated with conductor Alan Heatherington, pianist Irina Lupines, singer Don Caasch, as well as violinists Yossif Ivanof, Olga Kaler, Julian Rachlin, and more. Lyudmila provides her skills to the students of Chicago's well known violin and piano teachers, such as Olga and Ilya Kaler, Drew Lecher, Desiree Ruhstrat, Almita Vamos, Brenda Huang, and Sueanne Metz. Lyudmila is also a chamber music coach at Midwest Young Artists Conservatory in Highwood, Illinois and a rehearsal pianist for the Chicago Master Singers.
Originally from Kiev, Ukraine, Tatyana Stepanova graduated from Tchaikovsky Kiev State Conservatory and Rimsky-Korsakov St.Petersburg Conservatory of Music, Russia, where she worked as an assistant professor, while taking her Doctoral Program in Piano Performance under Professor Tatyana Kravchenko. During her studies, she won many piano competitions, most notably receiving the first prize in the Russian National Piano Competition in 1981. From 1982 to 1991, Ms. Stepanova taught piano at the Tchaikovsky Kiev State Conservatory and continued participating, as an accompanist, in various competitions, including the Oistrakh International Violin Competition in Odessa, Ukraine; the Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa, Italy; the Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Poznan, Poland.
Ms. Stepanova has been sharing her collaborative talents with faculty and students of Northwestern, De Paul, and Roosevelt Universities. She is a member of Music Teachers’ National Association, Chicago and Northshore Music Teachers’ Association, Society of American Musicians. She has been a faculty member of summer camps of the Young String Academy at Indiana University, Cursos Internacionais de Musica de Guimaraes, in Portugal, and, recently, International Music Festival in Beverly Hills, California. Tatyana Stepanova has been on faculty at MYA since 2001, teaching the Sonata Class and coaching chamber groups.
Michael Tan has performed extensively throughout the United States and Asia both as a soloist and a collaborative pianist. He has received enthusiastic critical acclaims from the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicles, and others. Tan received his BA from the Julliard School in composition and piano performance. He has worked as a staff pianist at the Eastman School of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as well as chamber music coach for the Young Chamber Musicians, an inspiring chamber music program based in the Fan Francisco Bay area. Tan has given masterclasses in many music institutions and festivals, such as the Aspen Music Festival. While residing in Beijing, China (2012-2020), Tan, in addition to performing and teaching, also devoted himself to create several series of lecture concerts, exploring the cultural, social and spiritual contexts of western classical music. Moving to Chicago in 2022, Tan joined the faculty of Midwest Young Artists Conservatory. He believes that a living art must strive at once to attain to the highest standard of excellence, conveying that excellence to a wider public.