Join us for a senior recital featuring the incredible pianist and Columbia College senior, Shiv Yajnik, on May 3rd at 6 PM at the Italian Academy.
Throughout college, Shiv has studied piano with Reiko Uchida (Professor in the Music Performance Program at Columbia University), Alan Feinberg (Professor at Princeton University and New York University), and Matti Raekallio (Professor Emeritus at the Juilliard School). In high school, Shiv studied with Marcy and Alex McDonald. Shiv enjoys the music of many different composers; these days, he finds himself especially enjoying the modern romantics and early 20th century composers, including (both the orchestral and piano-solo music of) the later Liszt, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Medtner, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, as well as the greats of the Baroque and Classical eras such as Bach and Beethoven; he find their compositional developments in motivic transformation and harmonic innovation fascinating.
Some of Shiv's accomplishments include earning a discretionary award and the Best Performance of a Contemporary Work Since 1990 at the 2019 Arthur Fraser International Piano Competition; being a two-time finalist of the MTNA Piano Competition in 2019/20 and 2020/21 and a recipient of the national Chopin Award in 2020; and 3rd Place in the 2024 Liszt Society International Piano Competition in the UK. He has participated in 2019 Southeastern Piano Festival, the 2023 Gijón International Piano Festival, and the 2024 Aspen Music Festival and School, performed as a rising star in the 2018 and 2022 Basically Beethoven Festivals in Dallas, Texas; and performed with the Baylor Symphony in 2018 and the Plano Symphony in 2019. In 2021, Shiv had been accepted into top conservatories for bachelors programs in piano performance, including the Juilliard School, but chose to attend Columbia University. While at Columbia, Shiv has been an active participant in the Music Performance Program, including his lessons with Professor Uchida, chamber music, and the Performance Seminar Masterclass run by Magdalena Stern-Baczewska, all of which have been strong highlights of his Columbia experience.
Shiv has also composed music and studied with David Karp (Professor at Southern Methodist University). He has previously composed neo-Romantic music; inspired by the work of the aforementioned composers, he tends to experiment with motivic transformation and the boundaries of tonality and are often programmatic in nature. Although Shiv's compositional output during college has been more sparse, the Contemporary Civilization course gave him an excuse to compose once again; for his two final projects (one per semester), he wrote an orchestral symphonic poem and a prelude for brass ensemble, timpani, and piano inspired by interesting philosophical concepts covered during the course. Shiv is also working on a piano transcription of Liszt's Dante Symphony; he has completed a draft of the first movement and well into the second but has no idea when he will get around to finishing the whole piece.
Some of his past accomplishments in composition include receiving honorable mention in the 2020 Morton Gould Young Composers contest, sponsored by ASCAP and premieres of his compositions at summer music festivals, including a performance of "Ondine" for piano trio by the Ars Futura at the 2017 Young Composers Program at CIM and a performance of "Two Images" for solo marimba by Garrett Arney at the 2020 Curtis Summerfest. Shiv, along with musicians Jen Betz and Joseph Kuipers, also performed "Ondine" as part of Shiv's rising star performance at the 2018 Basically Beethoven Festival.
Shiv studies mathematics at Columbia University with a particular interest in real and complex differential geometry and its intersections with other areas of mathematics--especially topology and analysis. He has worked on research projects involving curve counting on surfaces and low degree points on algebraic curves (which are topics in topology and algebraic geometry, respectively). He is currently writing his senior thesis on the isometric embedding problem in Riemannian geometry (a topic involving geometric partial differential equations).
