$25 ($20 senior/student)
The culmination of an intensive annual competition, Concerto Division Winners of the Seattle Young Artists Music Festival Association (SYAMFA) will perform concerti by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Bartók in a stellar event accompanied by Philharmonia Northwest, conducted by Julia
Tai. With generous support from Northwest Pianos, this year's piano soloists are grateful to perform on a 9 ft Fazioli F278. Audience members should prepare to be astonished by the adult level performances they will hear!
One of the most exciting shifts in the piano world right now is the rise of battery-powered, portable pianos. Instruments like Roland’s GO:PIANO88 show that full-sized keybeds, high-quality sound engines, and wireless operation can coexist. Roland
Across the U.S., piano sales have taken a nosedive. A recent CBS News article reported that in 2024, only 17,294 pianos were sold — compared to hundreds of thousands in past decades. CBS News The reason isn’t lack of interest in music; it’s economics, cultural change, and preference shifts. Young people are renting, using digital subscriptions, or choosing digital pianos as introductory tools.
In 2025, one of the most fascinating developments in piano technology is happening at the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, and musical expression. A research team recently introduced PANDORA, a diffusion-based policy learning framework that enables robotic hands to play piano pieces with precision and expressive nuance. The system uses language models to measure stylistic quality and musicality, blending human emotion with algorithmic accuracy. arXiv