Michael Unger, organ
Canadian-born organist and harpsichordist Michael Unger currently resides in Rochester, New York. A multiple-award winning performer, he appears in recital as a soloist and chamber musician in North America, Europe and Japan. In 2008, he was awarded First Prize and the Yoshida Minoru Memorial Award in the Sixth International Organ Competition Musashino-Tokyo, Japan. Earlier that same year, he won both First and Audience Prizes in the American Guild of Organists’ National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance (NYACOP), and in 2009, he was awarded Second Prize and Audience Award in the Eighth International Schnitger Organ Competition on the historic organs of Alkmaar, the Netherlands. Other awards include two of Canada’s top scholarships for the study of organ and church music, the Lilian Forsyth and Godfrey Hewitt Memorial Scholarships, both awarded in Ottawa in 2007. His debut solo compact disc recordings on the Naxos and Pro Organo lables have received favorable international reviews, and his performances have been broadcast on radio in the United States, Canada and Germany.
Unger completed masters’ degrees in both organ and harpsichord at the Eastman School of Music as a student and teaching assistant of David Higgs and William Porter. In 2007, he was awarded Eastman’s Jerald C. Graue Musicology Fellowship, and at present he is completing doctoral studies. He completed undergraduate studies at the University of Western Ontario, where he was a graduating recipient of the University Gold Medal. Former teachers include Ethel Briggs, Sandra Mangsen, Joel Speerstra and the late Larry Cortner, in addition to European summer academies specializing in historical keyboard performance. He is a published composer, active teacher, and has worked as the Director of Music of Rochester’s Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word since October 2009.
