Zayas- Faust Baer Piano Duo

Name: Zayas- Faust Baer Piano Duo
Start: 2025-10-19T14:00:00-04:00
Location: 107 East Main Street, Bay Shore, NY

Schedule

Sun, 19 Oct, 2025 at 02:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

107 East Main Street, Bay Shore, NY | Bay Shore, NY

FREE Concert Begins at 2pm
Elinor Abrams Zayas is well-known to Long Islanders as a piano soloist, chamber musician, collaborative artist and educator. She studied at Juilliard’s Pre-College Program, and her undergraduate piano studies were at the Manhattan School of Music, with Constance Keene, and also included Jazz studies with Valerie Capers. Her graduate work at Manhattan School was with Robert Helps.
Ms. Zayas formed the chamber ensemble Nepenthe in 1984, and the group performed widely on Long Island, and had a subscription concert series at Bay Shore’s Boulton Center during its initial season. In 2007, she co-founded the cello-piano duo Cross Island, with cellist Suzanne Mueller. She has appeared as a soloist at various venues on Long Island and in New York City, including Trinity Church, Christ and St. Stephen’s Church, and St. Peter’s Church. She has performed and recorded with the string jazz group Cross Road, led by composer/bassist Reynard Burns.
She has worked as a pianist for such dance companies as Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and Dance Theater of Harlem. She had been the Principal Accompanist for the Long Island Children’s Choir, with performances at the Tilles Center, Molloy College, Queens College, and Adelphi University, and has also performed with the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra and Chorus at Carnegie Hall.
She has served on the music faculties of Hofstra University, Adelphi University, Five Towns College, and the Sachem Central School District, and maintains a private piano studio in Brightwaters, NY.

Karen Faust Baer enjoys a multifaceted career in solo piano performance, chamber music, choral conducting, accompanying and pedagogy. An alumna of The Juilliard School and Tanglewood, her teachers included Rosetta Goodkind and Irwin Freundlich. A scholarship student from the age of six, she received both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Piano Performance at Juilliard. The winner of the Brooklyn College’s Concerto Competition, she performed with the orchestra as a teenager. Live performances on WNYC and WQXR Radio followed.
She made her Carnegie Hall debut with the American Symphony Orchestra after winning the WQXR Young Artists’ Competition, and she debuted internationally at the Todi Music Festival in Italy two years later.
In recent years, Ms. Faust Baer has appeared as soloist with the South Shore Symphony performing concerti by Beethoven, Chopin and Gershwin. She has accompanied numerous choruses on Long Island and had been the accompanist for the New York All-State Choirs for over 25 years.
As half of the Baer-Nelson duo, a two piano and duet team, her fingers have graced the stages of the Juilliard School, Hofstra University, Kingsborough College, the Heckscher Museum, the Gold Auditorium and several libraries in the metropolitan area. Their multi-media presentation of Petruschka and Scheherazade brought them to a cultural exhibition held in Omaha’s art museum and was also presented throughout Long Island.
More recently, Ms. Faust Baer was Professor of Choral Studies at Adelphi University as well as accompanist for the Mineola Choral Society. Serving on the faculties of both NYU and SUNY Purchase, she was both IB instructor and vocal music director at South Side High School in Rockville Centre for thirty-two years.