ABOUT JULIE TOMPKINS

Julie is an active concert performer, educator and music administrator originally from the San Francisco Bay area, California, USA  who has made her home in the Geneva region since 1988 when she received a Rotary International Foundation Scholarship to work and study there. 

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Julie began her piano studies at the age of four and commenced her professional solo career at age fourteen. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music and English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978 and a Master of Music from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1983 in the class of Mack McCray. She also studied voice with Hermann Le Roux, head of the Vocal Department and 20th century music with John Adams. Continuing her études de perfectionnement, she studied chamber music with Felix Khuner in Berkeley, vocal accompanying with Madi Bacon (sister of the composer Ernst Bacon), conducting with Michael Senturia and piano with Henri Gautier, Head of the Geneva International Piano Competition Jury and Piano Professor at the Geneva Conservatory.

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Julie started teaching privately at the age of fifteen and celebrates 50 years of teaching, lecturing, and coaching this year. She has been a guest lecturer at Foothill College in Los Altos, California, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the International School of Geneva during the Arts Week Festival. She has participated/attended Master classes/lecture series with Anton Kuerti, Leon Fleischer, Charles Rosen and John Cage. She was a Professor of Piano at the International School of Geneva from 1988- 2014, where she founded both the La Châtaigneraie Music School and the International Concert Series, managing both from 1988-1996. In 1995 she founded the Summer Music Program, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2015.  She was the Artistic Director of the Geneva Youth Ensemble  and the Director of the Music Academy at GEMS World Academy Switzerland from 2014-2019.  In October 2019 and 2022 Julie gave master classes in Kosovo while on a concert tour there. With her piano duo partner, Janet Bouwmeester, Julie is now giving teacher training to classroom music teacher training, more Master Classes and helping to set up new music programs in Kosovo.

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As a concert artist, Julie has performed throughout Europe and the U.S.A. as a soloist and with orchestra, in chamber music and in international competitions. She has given special performances for the American Ambassador in Bern, Switzerland and for the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Geneva. Festival performances include the Villars Open, and as a recipient of a grant from Concerts Atlantique, the European International Festival. Julie has performed to standing-room-only crowds in Geneva, Villars and Paris (twice) and has received standing ovations for her rendition of the Grieg Piano Concerto. She has performed at many venues in London, including St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and the Börsedorfer Salle in Vienna. More recent performances include numerous four-hands concerts with Janet Bouwmeester, solo concerts on the newly restored 1903 Bechstein at the Château du Bossey, Switzerland, a concert tour of Kosovo, a benefit concert for Ukraine in Gingins, Switzerland and the Inaugural concert in the Salle Communale of Arnex-sur-Nyon, Switzerland.

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Julie records under the pianoforte productions label and you can listen to and purchase downloads of her recordings on the recordings page of the website.