Donald Betts is both a pianist and a composer. He made his New York debut at the age of twenty-one playing his own music and works by Prokofieff, Liszt and Schumann. Musical America cited his “tremendous technique and bravura style,” and the New York Times called him a pianist of “imagination and poetic feeling.” Soon after, he won the Concert Artist Guild Award and presented two more New York recitals at Town Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall. While doing graduate work at Indiana University School of Music, he was the only piano student given a studio and a roster of music majors to teach. As a professor at Macalester College, he co-founded the Macalester Trio. The group performed virtually the entire repertoire of piano trios and piano quartets and commissioned and recorded several new works. Their recording of Chamber Music by Women Composers was hailed by Newsweek in 1980 as one of the most important recordings of that year. Betts is a composer of over a hundred compositions, many of which have been performed nationally and internationally. He is presently a professor emeritus at Macalester and earlier on was a recipient of the school’s Thomas Jefferson Award and the Schubert Club’s Best Teaching Award. His previous recording, an all-Chopin CD for Inscape Records, is also available online.