News and Reviews

Pittsburgh Tribune - Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Duquesne University concert series to showcase Copland.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 2014:

Duquesne’s Beethoven on the Bluff to focus on ‘Variations’
Read more.

Pittsburgh Tribune: Saturday, April 20, 2013

Making music on the bluff: Pianist Wehr’s concert series has a stellar reputation. Read more.

Pittsburgh Tribune: Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Hungarian music explored in series at Duquesne University.

Wehr Named Chair of King Award Jury

David Allen Wehr has been named Chair of the Jury for the 2010 King Award for Young Artists Music Competition, to be held April 16-17, 2010, in Salina, Kansas. After the successful inaugural edition in 2009, the competition is expanding its scope to pianists and string players between the ages of 18-26 currently studying anywhere in the US. The jury will also include Donald McInnes, world-famous violist and Chair of Strings at the University of Southern California, Dr. Melissa Kraut, cello faculty, Cleveland Institute of Music, and Dr. Sylvia Reynolds Eckes, Professor of Piano Emerita, Ohio University.

Wehr Invited to Judge MTNA Division Competition

For the third consecutive year, David Allen Wehr was invited to judge the Eastern Division Competitions of the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA). The 2009 Young Artist (College) Competition was held on January 10 at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Teaching & Performing: An Ideal Balance

The Winter 2008 edition of Duquesne University Magazine profiles the teaching and performing career of Jack W. Geltz Distinguished Piano Chair, David Allen Wehr.

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Brahms on the Bluff – November 6, 2007

The tumultuous, expressive range of chamber music was explored fully Tuesday night at Duquesne University when pianist David Allen Wehr, violinist Andres Cardenes and cellist Anne Martindale Williams played the three Piano Trios by Johannes Brahms.

Energy verged on the ferocious at the start of the first movement of Brahms’ Third Piano Trio, but the musicians equally were successful at making us really feel the lyricism and spectral moods, and letting us hear the composer’s constant inventiveness.

The musicians maintained the same level of technical refinement in Brahms Second Trio. It was characteristic of the integrity of the performance that Anne Martindale Williams’ played as forthrightly when doubling the piano’s bass as when playing independent lines. Wehr’s dynamic and fastidious playing included sensitive dynamics that helped his colleagues to shine. His tempo flexibility, which heightened expression, was always idiomatic and tasteful.

The concert concluded with Brahms’ First Trio, a “first and last” trio because it was performed, as nearly always, in the composer’s reworking of his youthful piece that he did a few years before his death. Cardenes’ lustrous string tone was applied with perfect weighting throughout the concert. — Mark Kanny Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

New Jack W. Geltz Distinguished Chair At Duquesne

In the 2006 Fall Semester, David Allen Wehr assumes the new Jack W. Geltz Distinguished Piano Chair at Duquesne University. In 2001, the Hillman Foundation donated an endowed professorship to the school, which named Wehr as its first holder for a five-year residency. The Hillman Chair now rotates to the School of Education, and the university is fortunate to have had Jack W. Geltz, an alumnus and retired Pittsburgh businessman, endow a new professorship specifically for the piano. The Geltz Chair is officially inaugurated on September 10, 2006, with a recital by Wehr at Duquesne, “A Little Night Music.”