05/17/2026
🌻Meet our Musicians🌻
We are excited to welcome back award winning pianist Cynthia Raim to Sunflower! She will be performing the Grieg Piano Concerto on opening night, as well as other significant chambers works over the course of the festival. Welcome back, Cynthia!
“Cynthia Raim, who was unanimously chosen as the First Prize winner of the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition, has been acclaimed for her concerto and recital appearances throughout the United States and abroad. In summing up the performance that won Ms. Raim the coveted Clara Haskil prize, La Suisse (Geneva) noted that “Miss Raim showed a musical nature that has gone far beyond technical mastery: Without afectation, without useless bravado, Cynthia Raim has imprinted herself on us and cannot escape our admiration. Le Monde (Paris) called her “a new Clara Haskil.”
Ms. Raim has won the prestigious Pro Musicis Award and, in 1987, was the first recipient of the “Distinguished Artist Award” of The Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia (America’s oldest continuing musical organization), which was given for “outstanding achievement and artistic merit.”
Ms. Raim has made numerous recital as well as radio and television apearances. She has appeared as soloist with leading orchestras in such major cities as Detroit, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Prague, Hamburg, Lausanne and Vienna. She has also participated in many leading international music festivals including Marlboro, Ravinia, Tanglewood, Meadow Brook, Grand Teton, Bard, Mostly Mozart, Santa Fe, Luzern and Montreux. She has recorded for Gallo, Pantheon, and Connoisseur Society.
Before graduating in 1977 from the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Ms. Raim had won the Festorazzi Award for Most Promising Pianist at Curtis, as well as first prizes in the J.S. Bach International and Three Rivers National Piano Competitions.”
