A resident of Austerlitz for the past 13 years, composer and pianist Timothy Dunne studied composition in St. Petersburg, Russia, following a Fulbright Scholarship to the Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory. He studied there with the late composer, Sergei Slonimsky, earning first a post-graduate certificate and then a Doctorate of Musical Arts. He was an important figure in the small, but passionate contemporary music scene and was a frequent performer of new music and even gave the first performances of major piano works by Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, and Pierre Boulez.  In St. Petersburg he also conceived and curated concerts including, on the centenary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen, a performance of the complete Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus with 20 different pianists. He has written works for orchestra, choir, chamber music, solo instruments, and recorded an album released in 2016, Metaphrase, which included his violin and piano concertos. His most recent works include a new collection of sonnet settings for soprano and piano—building off his 2002 Millay Sonnets—to be orchestrated and recorded in 2023. Timothy Dunne began playing piano at age 5 and early on began tackling works by Chopin—the composer who simultaneously produced both the most profoundly beautiful and compositionally intricate music ever for the piano.