Thomas Lanners has appeared as a solo and collaborative
pianist and clinician throughout the U.S. and abroad, presenting
his New York solo debut in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in
2004. His performances have been broadcast nationally and
internationally on programs such as American Public Media’s
Performance Today, BBC3 in London and RTÉ Radio 1’s Sunday
Miscellany in Ireland, among many others. Designated the 2014
Distinguished Music Teacher by the Oklahoma Music Teachers
Association and inducted into the Steinway & Sons Teacher Hall
of Fame in 2021, he currently serves as Professor of Piano at
Oklahoma State University.
Thomas has performed, presented master classes, and given
lectures on various musical topics as a guest artist throughout
the United States, in Mexico, Canada, Europe and Asia. In recent
summers he has served on the faculties of the Shanghai
International Piano Festival and Institute (in both 2018 and 2023),
the Conero and AmiCaFest Piano Festivals in Italy, and the 2024
International Keyboard Odyssiad and Festival in Colorado. Within
the past five years, he’s performed and/or presented master
classes at Rice University, Florida State University, the University
of Washington, at Yonsei University in Seoul, in China at the
Sichuan, Shanghai and Zhejiang Conservatories, the Shanghai
Conservatory Middle School, and East China and Beijing Normal
Universities, and in Mexico at the Unidad Académica de Artes de
la Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. Thomas served as a
performer, teacher, and adjudicator at the Lee University
International Piano Festival and Competition in Tennessee in
2021, having also been one of the three guest artists in 2012. He
gave a master class on the NYU Steinhardt School of Music’s
Piano Artist Master Class Series in 2012.
Other institutions he has visited as a guest artist include the
Eastman School of Music, the Universities of Texas-Austin,
Colorado-Boulder, North Texas, Miami, South Carolina,
Oklahoma, Western Ontario (Canada), and Iowa; Northwestern,
Syracuse, Louisiana State, Southern Methodist, and Baylor
Universities.
His latest recording, Ned Rorem: Piano Works, Volume 2, was
released worldwide by Centaur Records. The disc received great
critical praise, including this from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
“Thomas Lanners brings exceptional detail and urgency to the
repertoire, taking as much care with inner voices as he does with
arching statements. Grade: A.” An American Record Guide
review of Thomas’ previous CD, Ned Rorem: The Three Piano
Sonatas, read: “Anyone who cares about mainstream 20th
Century piano music should seek out this superlative recording.”
Links to three tracks on the recording were included in Sunday
New York Times articles in 2018 and 2022, on the occasion of
Rorem’s 95th birthday and then as a tribute soon after his death.
In a review of Lanners’ recording of Leonard Bernstein’s solo
piano works, Jed Distler wrote for ClassicsToday.com: “All told,
Lanners’ loving mastery easily holds its own in any company.
Warmly recommended.” His championing of American piano
music was the topic of an interview article in a 2010 issue of
Fanfare.
Thomas is an active writer on musical topics, with several feature
articles, column contributions and reviews published in American
Music Teacher, most recently in 2024. His writing has also been
published in Piano Magazine, with a feature article appearing in
the Winter 2024 issue, Clavier and Canadian Music Teacher,
among others. Always in demand as a clinician, he has presented
many sessions at national and international conferences,
including six appearances at the Music Teachers National
Association (with another upcoming in 2025) and three at the
China International Piano Pedagogy Conference, hosted by the
Shanghai Conservatory, which boasted 850,000 online attendees
in 2021. Thomas has served as a juror in state, division, and
national MTNA competitions, and for numerous international
piano competitions based in North America, Europe, Asia and
South America.
Lanners’ students have been accepted into graduate piano
performance degree programs at the Eastman School of Music,
the Universities of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Southern California,
Washington, Kansas, Missouri-Kansas City, Minnesota, the
Manhattan and Mannes Schools of Music, and the Cincinnati
College-Conservatory of Music. They have had success in
numerous competitions, winning Oklahoma Music Teachers
Association Collegiate competitions (including 16 first place
winners and numerous runners-up), 6 state winners in the MTNA
Senior Artist competitions, 3 MTNA Young Artist winners (plus a
national finalist in the String Chamber Music category), and 2
MTNA Junior winners. His students were named Alternate
(Second Place) for the South Central Division four times since
2017. Seven of his students have won the OSU Symphony
Orchestra’s annual Concerto Competition in the past four years
alone.
Lanners was the 2021 recipient of the Wise-Diggs-Berry
Endowed Award for excellence in the visual, performance or
written arts at OSU, and a 2022 recipient of the OSU Regents
Distinguished Research Award, presented each year to one arts
and humanities faculty member at the university.
Thomas received his Master’s and Doctoral degrees from the
Eastman School as a student of Barry Snyder. He earned his
Bachelor of Music degree summa cum laude as a student of
Leonidas Lipovetsky at Florida State University, where he won
the Brautlecht Award as the School’s Outstanding Rising Senior.
He also studied under John Perry at the Aspen Music Festival
and Jerome Lowenthal at the Music Academy of the West.