ichael Salomon ’05 graduated from Northwestern University with a yearlong mentorship at the Manhattan Theatre Club — an opportunity he won through “REALationships,” a competition, sponsored by the theatre and Dentyne gum, that chal-
lenged young playwrights to take on relationships in the digital age. Salomon’s winning play, RMEO+JULEZ, time-travels Shakespeare’s work into a world of texts and Tweets. Salomon’s play was staged in a showcase at the Manhattan Theatre Club in May.
Ana Luderowski ’09 wrote and directed It’s Clementine Season, My Peach for her Directors Seminar.
course could attend all the Boston Symphony concerts, as well as rehearsals. What has been your most memorable performance? Why? So many performances are memorable (and not necessarily in a positive way!). I’ve been fortunate to have performed in some of the major concert halls across Europe. Aside from the stunning acoustics, what struck me was how quietly attentive the audiences were, in venues such as Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, or London’s Wigmore Hall. The listeners were engaged in a way that I do not sense as often in this country, which is probably a result of the lack of musical exposure in most of our public schools. New York audiences are sometimes terrible — in fact, on stage during a concert at Merkin Hall, I literally heard two elderly women conversing in the front row: “See? I told you he was gonna be good!” “You didn’t say he was gonna be good, you said he’d be handsome.” That was certainly memorable. A reviewer said you have a “highly pianistic sense of fantasy.” What does that mean? I would guess that means that, in his opinion, the performance had a kind of physical spontaneity. Reviews and critiques are often so subjective; my final performance exam at Juilliard kind of sums this up. Regarding my playing of a Schumann sonata, one faculty juror wrote, “The overall concept is good, but the details need more attention.” And another juror made exactly the opposite comment: “The details are nice, but you seem to be missing the forest for the trees.” I could only laugh — in the end, one’s own intuition is vital about musical choices, and also about whose advice to follow. How do you blend or reconcile the worlds of professor and performer? These two worlds truly enhance each other. I see teaching as an interchange at the core, as opposed to an exclusively top-down flow of ideas. After all, a student’s question “why?” or “what
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if?” is how understanding deepens and expands. Of course, my years of performing provide an accumulating base of experience that I share in the studio, but I am also still learning and changing as a performer — often from the interactions with my own students. Of the musicians with whom you’ve collaborated, who made the biggest impression? Tatiana Yampolsky, who was my piano teacher starting while I was at Harvard, has had one of the strongest influences. She develops a student’s sense of how to practice, which is not as self-evident as it may seem; it requires a keen sensitivity to the physics and even biology of playing, connecting the body to the music. She is one of the rare and dedicated artist/teachers who will declare, “If we have to, we will sit here all day until you find that phrasing” — and this means a phrase with your own sound and voice. More recently, I have had a fascinating collaboration with Barbara White, who teaches composition at Princeton. Often, performers are taught to simply carry out the written instructions of the composer, like following Mapquest. But when she and I have prepared her compositions for recordings or concerts, the lines of creativity are blurred — music on a printed page may not yet “exist” until it is heard in the form of sound. Of course, we as interpreters honor what is in the score, but the harder job is to internalize what is “behind the notes” to the point that it is our own voice speaking — like an actor immersed in a character. What recent performances or works should we know about? This past year, I performed on NPR’s Performance Today and on a concert series in Paris in the Louvre auditorium; also in Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Chicago, as well as at various festivals, including at the Hollywood Bowl. This fall, I will be performing several concerts with the violinist Hahn-Bin — at the Kennedy Center, at Carnegie Hall’s new Zankel Hall, and at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I am also in the middle of several recording projects:
two CDs of solo and chamber works by contemporary composers and a recording of Soviet-era sonatas for cello and piano. Did any CA teachers or classes put you on the road to being a professional musician? I think that, in the largest sense, CA’s deep underlying philosophy of “learning for its own sake” created a healthy environment in which I could develop artistically and as a person. I remember being very impressed at my interview (conducted by Ron Richardson), when I learned that CA had no class rank and awarded no academic prizes. This mindset was a huge contrast with my later experience at the Juilliard School, where fellow students often seemed to be motivated mainly by material or financial success. Something I value in particular is the fact that so many CA teachers, in virtually every department, would attend performances at school and would express their genuine interest. Music faculty such as Sandra Rosenblum, Vicki and Bob Sirota, and Maynard Goldman were very generous with their time and energy — and in their own artistic careers were unusually distinguished for high school. Mr. Goldman would sometimes perform with the student chamber groups, then we’d see him performing at Symphony Hall. How was it being so dedicated to your craft and talented in high school? It seemed that so many students at CA “did their thing,” very often quite passionately, and with a striking independence of spirit for ages fourteen to eighteen. There did not seem to be an emphasis on being a “star,” so while my piano playing was appreciated by peers, I didn’t feel put on a pedestal. I remember so many fellow students immersed in music, but also writers, actors, painters. Some of my non-musician friends have had the most perceptive things to say about my music, maybe more so than a music colleague who might be more likely to ask, “Did you lift up the pedal on the third beat of measure 62?” I guess both are crucial — the forest and the trees.
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David R. Gammons
GR8!