Sara Davis Buechner

Sara Davis Buechner is an American concert pianist known for an unusually wide repertoire, roughly 125 piano concertos performed with orchestras worldwide, plus a sideline reviving scores written for silent films. She won top prizes at several major international piano competitions in her twenties, including a gold medal at the Gina Bachauer competition and a bronze medal at the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. She teaches at Temple University and New York University and chairs the piano program at Greenwich House Music School.

Buechner built a career on range rather than specializing in one composer or era, and that shows in how she programs a concert: expect repertoire chosen for its color and character as much as its fame, drawn from a catalogue of roughly 125 concertos that runs from familiar Romantic works to rarities most pianists never learn. At Winston-Salem Symphony's Violins of Hope program, a concert built around remembrance and resilience, she brings that same attentiveness to mood and narrative, since much of her career has involved matching musical style to a story, including her work reviving scores originally written to accompany silent films. Listen for clean articulation and a willingness to let a phrase speak plainly rather than over-inflect it.

Buechner was born in Baltimore in 1959 and trained with Veronika Wolf Cohen, Reynaldo Reyes and Mieczyslaw Munz before finishing high school in 1976. In her twenties she won prizes at some of the world's leading piano competitions, including Queen Elisabeth, Leeds, Salzburg, Sydney and Vienna, a gold medal at the 1984 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition and a bronze medal at the 1986 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. She has since built a long teaching career, holding the piano chair at Greenwich House Music School in New York, a professorship at Temple University in Philadelphia, and an adjunct position at New York University. In 2022 she wrote, produced and starred in an autobiographical stage show, Of Pigs and Pianos.