2025 Winners

• Samuel Cronk, piano
• Austin Wu, cello
• Alyssa Gabrilovich, piano
• Alvaro Miranda, cello

  (Pictured below with NLMF Artistic Director Veda Zuponcic)

Helen Bradach Zuponcic

Born in 1915 in the little mining location of Meadow, near Aurora, Helen Bradach Zuponcic,was the 10th of 13 children of Slovenian immigrants Janez and Johanna Bradach. She had the good fortune to attend the aspirational Aurora public schools, where she experienced high educational standards in palatial surroundings. She played the piano, and the bass in the orchestra. She was on the women’s swimming team, and studied French; her friendship with her Francophone penpal Alice Sordat lasted for 84 years, with multiple visits to Geneva, Switzerland and annual Christmas gift exchanges. The beautiful things she saw at AHS included grand pianos and a finer way to live than what a first generation immigrant family could provide.

She continued to study the piano after graduation, seeking out the best teacher she could find, Dorothy Crost Bourgin, a student of Rudolf Ganz, in the city of Virginia. She took correspondence courses in music theory and music history. Marrying later than the usual norm, to a brilliant and kind man, Herman Zuponcic, who shared her interests and goals, she bought a Steinway grand piano and became a local piano teacher: her first piano student was Nancy Knuti Johnson. Revealing both her humility and her aspirations for her first child, Veda, she did not teach her daughter herself: She sent Veda to Mrs. Bourgin at age 5. Helen was driven to achieve higher levels of accomplishment in her budding teaching career, and used the materials and methods of Dorothy Bourgin in her own studio. This autodidactic pedagogue, as the only piano teacher in a tiny town, provided high quality piano instruction to hundreds of students for a period of 75 years, retiring only at the age of 90.

Her five children, Veda, Martin, Carl, Cora and Kathy, all studied the piano, as well as second instruments, contributing to the musical life of Aurora, and the school system: When son Carl, who would matriculate at Eastman School of Music as a cellist, graduated in 1967, the orchestra was permanently disbanded. When Carl, a star basketball and track star was late for practice after a cello lesson with Dr. Robert House at UMD, the coach told him that he couldn’t be late again or he would be off the team, Helen called Thomas Reagan, the coach, and said, “Then, he’s off the team. Cello is more important!” Mr. Reagan relented, recognizing Helen’s steely resolve about all things educational, and Carl’s importance to the basketball team.

Mrs. Zuponcic conducted the children’s choir at Holy Rosary Church for many years; treated her piano students to her elegant baking after annual piano recitals; participated in professional organizations like National Federation of Music Clubs, lifting up her student charges to higher levels of pianism. Those who attended college as music majors entered with solid grounding in theory and harmony, as well as in technical skills. When encountering an especially gifted student, she would urge the parents to take the child to a teacher who had higher pianistic levels than she, exhibiting her honest self-knowledge and her genuine interest in the success of her students.

Upon her passing on May 12, 2013 at the age of 98, many cards and letters were received from those who had had the good fortune to have had her in their lives, acknowledging the value of her serious approach to education to their lives, no matter what profession they chose. Mrs. Zuponcic believed music training was a key to intellectual growth: so do we. A homemaker par excellance, a piano teacher, a political progressive and world traveler, she believed passionately in the transformative powers of education; and corrected bad grammar to the day she died.