Graham Sterling and Alanna Burden
West Virginia University School of Music students Graham Sterling, a Master of Music in Collaborative Piano Performance, and Alanna Burden, a senior in Vocal Performance, will travel to Miami, Florida, for fellowships during the 2025 Miami Beach Classical Music Festival (MMF) season.
Since 2013, the festival has welcomed the next generation of classical artists to learn from world-class faculty while providing the community with concerts performed by faculty and students from over 25 countries. A MMF fellowship is highly competitive, with only around 200 of 1,500 applicants selected to take part in the festival. Both Sterling and Burden have previously attended and were accepted again to work with the world’s top performers and teaching artists.
Sterling will serve as a Vocal Collaborative Piano Fellow, performing alongside top talent and some of classical music’s greatest living performers. MMF’s Vocal Collaborative Piano program covers housing and attendance costs, allowing fellows to focus on learning and performance.
“My time at WVU has prepared me to take on opportunities like this,” Sterling said. "I’ve done extensive collaborative work and received coaching and assistance from my piano professor and vocal professors. I am most excited about being in an environment where I can make music freely and be surrounded by other professional musicians who care as deeply and are just as passionate about making music as I am.”
Burden will perform as a soprano among some of the world’s most notable opera performers. As part of the festival’s MMF Apprentice Artist Program, she will prepare and perform a role in a full-scale opera production and receive weekly vocal education and training.
“This year, I will be playing the Foreign Princess in Dvorak's ‘Rusalka,’ and I am very excited to do some work by a composer I have never sung before,” Burden said. “I am looking forward to the professional connections, friends and peers I will meet at the festival. I still talk to many of last year’s participants today, and it is so wonderful to have a group of friends around the country, even the world sometimes, that you can reach out to at any point as well as celebrate each other's successes.”
To learn more about the Miami Classical Music Festival, visit miamimusicfestival.com. For more information on music performance degrees, visit music.wvu.edu.