2024 Gilmore Festival Program Book

International Piano Festival

APRIL 24-MAY 12, 2024

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The arts play an integral role in making our community a more beautiful place. We’re proud to help The Gilmore Piano Festival 2024 do just that.

Director's Welcome

Dear Friend,

If you’re holding this book, that means you are attending one of the 100+ events at the 2024 Piano Festival. Thank you for being here. There are so many venues hosting great piano music this spring: beautiful Chenery Auditorium, lovely Stetson Chapel, the intimate Wellspring Theater, WMU’s splendid Dalton Center Recital Hall, world-class Miller Auditorium, and a dozen community venues across Southwest Michigan, from St. Joseph to Jackson.

Wherever you are, I hope you waved to a friend, turned off your phone, and are ready for a transporting musical experience.

There are hundreds of musicians, many traveling internationally to Michigan, playing over the course of the Festival’s 19 days. Of course pianists are the majority, but you can also experience Broadway legend Patti LuPone, the gifted tap dancer Caleb Teicher, a handful of vocalists, and more than 30 jazz players including drummers and bassists. What a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself, for example, in the world of Franz Schubert through the lens of Paul Lewis, the extraordinary improvisation genius of Gabriela Montero, or the jazz mastery of Kenny Barron. Take in a film, a master class, or have a well-crafted beer at Bell’s while listening to the incredible Gerald Clayton or Nduduzo Makhathini. Whichever events you choose, we’re so glad for your presence. This is all for you!

I’m grateful to every artist here at the Festival – your creativity and vision, your determination and your grit provide inspiration to us all, and I’m glad we can support and celebrate your talent. I also want to thank every one of our sponsors, donors, friends, and volunteers – and our audience. That support and involvement are why music is alive and thriving, and why organizations like ours can continue our mission.

The Gilmore team has worked for two years to bring you events that delight all your senses, and create experiences you will remember.

I hope to chat with as many of you as possible, so you can let me know what you’re enjoying about the Festival this year. If I don’t see you, please enjoy this concert, and the entire 2024 Piano Festival.

Sincerely,

Pierre van der Westhuizen Executive and Artistic Director

© Chris McGuire

Supporting and enriching the cultural, social, and economic life of greater Kalamazoo.

OUR FOUNDING PARTNER: THE IRVING S. GILMORE FOUNDATION

Irving S. Gilmore was a local merchant, an arts patron, a concert-quality pianist, a business leader, and a military veteran. To honor his legacy, the Trustees of the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation seeded the launch in 1989 of a new nonprofit organization: The Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and Gilmore Artist Awards. The first Festival and Awards were presented in 1991.

The Gilmore Foundation is the primary funder of the work of The Gilmore, providing invaluable and constant support that enables us to consistently plan and expand our work with the security of dependable income – which also serves to leverage support with other funders and individuals.

The Festival and Awards are just part of the wide-ranging programming now presented by this organization, all of which are the legacies of Irving S. Gilmore, who inspired the community to pursue a strong sense of social and cultural awareness for the benefit of all people. We will remain forever grateful to Mr. Gilmore, and the Trustees of his Foundation, for their unwavering support.

William D. Johnston CHAIRMAN

Greenleaf Trust and Greenleaf Hospitality Group are pleased to contribute to the enrichment of Kalamazoo through our support of the arts, economic development and higher education. As proud sponsors again this year of the 2024 Gilmore Piano Festival, we honor the legacy of its founder, Irving S. Gilmore, and applaud the Festival’s distinctly noble efforts in Kalamazoo and within the international community of musicians.

La June Montgomery Tabron PRESIDENT AND CEO

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is proud to support the Gilmore Piano Festival and to welcome its artists and patrons to West Michigan. Children are at the heart of everything we do at the Kellogg Foundation. So, as vibrant music fills our gathering places for a memorable few weeks and draws us together, we invite participants to envision the healthy, hopeful, equitable communities that will make it possible for all children to thrive. For over 90 years, that has been our focus. Together we can change the landscape for children.

Sean P. Welsh

REGIONAL PRESIDENT, WESTERN MICHIGAN

At PNC, we believe that giving back is essential to the economic vitality and growth of the community where we do business and, most importantly, where our customers and employees live and work. We proudly support The Gilmore and its efforts to nurture and celebrate a passion for piano music. Ensuring high-caliber arts and cultural activities for our community is part of our commitment to making life more rewarding. Congratulations to The Gilmore for enriching our lives and making this a prestigious West Michigan event.

Gavin English

PRESIDENT – AMERICAS

On behalf of Steinway & Sons, I would like to welcome you to the 2024 Gilmore Piano Festival, one of the most highlyanticipated events of the season. Steinway is honored to be the artistic choice of The Gilmore and we are proud to sponsor an organization with such a noble goal. I sincerely hope that your experience at The Gilmore is a memory you will cherish for years to come, and that your love of the piano and its repertoire will be further enriched as a result of your attendance.

John Stites FOUNDER

The John Stites Jazz Awards honor the memory of John Stites by funding musicians, concerts, and projects that expand the appreciation of jazz. John loved jazz because it is unconventional and innovative. He believed that jazz is a genre without boundaries or limits, where reinventing oneself is not just possible but encouraged. John would be pleased to know that The Gilmore is using his gift to bring world class jazz to audiences in Kalamazoo. The JSJA is excited to honor John’s legacy by supporting the 2024 Gilmore Piano Festival!

Kevin Lobo

CHAIR AND CEO

We are proud to carry on the heritage of our founder, Dr. Homer Stryker, who believed in giving back to the communities where our employees live and work. We are grateful that the Kalamazoo community continues to offer such a rich tradition of high-caliber arts and cultural experiences, and we are pleased to once again support America’s most prestigious piano music festival, the Irving S. Gilmore International Piano Festival 2024.

Edward B. Montgomery PRESIDENT

Western Michigan University celebrates Irving S. Gilmore’s boundless passion for championing music and culture. As the namesake of our world-renowned music school, the Irving S. Gilmore School of Music, Mr. Gilmore stands as an enduring exemplar for students today and generations to come. Through our experience-driven education in the arts and other disciplines, we challenge our Broncos to use their ingenuity, creativity and talent to pursue their purpose while enhancing the world around them. Today, we are proud to support the beloved biennial culmination of the Irving S. Gilmore International Piano Festival, a fitting tribute to Mr. Gilmore’s vision.

Lynn Chen-Zhang, CFP®, CPA CEO

Welcome to the Gilmore International Piano Festival! At Zhang Financial, one of our core values is giving back to the local community. We are proud to sponsor the festival and continue our support of the arts in Kalamazoo. We believe that music is a way to bring the community together and enrich all of our lives. Thank you for your attendance and for being a part of this valued tradition.

FESTIVAL SPONSORS

FOUNDING PARTNER

Irving S. Gilmore Foundation

PRESENTING PARTNERS

Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne

The John and Rosemary Brown Family Foundation

W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Elizabeth Upjohn Mason

Barbara J. Parish

PNC

Steinway & Sons

John Stites Jazz Award

Stryker

Zhang Financial

DIAMOND

Larry and Shannon Bell Donor Advised Fund

Roger Gauntlett – endowed concert in honor of Uncle Irving

Greenleaf Trust – Greenleaf Hospitality Group

Gail and Tom Kasdorf Fund of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation

Timothy and Joy Light

Diane S. Robertson

Susan and David Thoms

Heinrich von Schreiner in memory of Mary von Schreiner

Western Michigan University

PLATINUM

Bronson Healthcare

Dorothy U. Dalton Foundation

Eaton Corporation

Conrad and Sonja Fischer

Patti and Bob Huiskamp

Kalamazoo College

Faye Luscombe in memory of Robert Luscombe

Michigan Arts and Culture Council

National Endowment for the Arts

The Marvin and Rosalie Okun Foundation

Suzanne U. D. Parish Foundation

Anne and Doug Petersen

The Christopher Roberts and Nancy Zannini

Family Fund

William and Melinda Scott

Peter and Elizabeth Seaver

Three Rivers Manhattan Club

Tyler Little Family Foundation

Meyer C. Weiner Company

Rosemary Willey

Yamaha

GOLD

A Friend of The Gilmore with gratitude to all who so generously support the arts in the Kalamazoo area

Friends of The Gilmore (2)

Carol and Tom Beech

Robert Boisture and Mary Margaret Pipkin

Consumers Energy

DeNooyer Jaguar

Discover Kalamazoo

First National Bank of Michigan

Russell Gabier Fund

Martha J. Harrison Piano Education Fund –endowed

The Kalamazoo Promise

Lakeview Ford Lincoln

Peregrine Company

Nancy F. Richardson in memory of William C. Richardson

Harold and Grace Upjohn Foundation

Varnum

Warner Norcross + Judd

Zoetis

SILVER

A Friend of The Gilmore

Allkins Family Foundation

Hugh and Marian Beattie Family Fund of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation

Bell’s Brewery

The Guido A. and Elizabeth H. Binda Foundation

The Burdick-Thorne Foundation

Alfred Garcia and Sandra Edwards

Gibson Insurance

Havirmill Foundation

Honigman

Howell, Parfet & Schau, PLC

Judy Jolliffe

Martha and Scott Larsen

Laurie Marshall

Marshall Community Foundation

Martin & Associates Environmental, LLC

Beth McIntyre

Millennium Restaurant Group

Ann and Don Parfet

Kevin and Gina Paul

Julie and Keith Peterson

South Haven Community Foundation

Michael and Lindy Storms

Lance and Laura Trexler

Vicksburg Foundation

Carolyn and Sidney Williams

BRONZE

A Friend of The Gilmore

Berrien Community Foundation

Elizabeth Burns and Roger Zinser

Joanna and Scott Dales

DeMent & Marquardt, PLC

Linda and George Dunn

Deborah and Reid Hudgins

Imperial Beverage

Kellogg Community Credit Union

Lake Michigan Credit Union

Tom and Donna Lambert

Bill and Jeannette Maxey

Mercantile Bank

Zaide Pixley and John Fink

Janet and Arthur Riley

Dr. Gary and Dr. Cynthia Ruoff

Jan and Ed Sackley

Schupan

Jacob & Naomi Stucki Fund of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation

Doreen and Ed Thomas

John and Linnaea Thomas

Tropical Smoothie Cafe

UHY

COPPER

Battle Creek Community Foundation

Education for the Arts

Don Flesche in memory of Grace Flesche

Daniel and Barbara Gustin

Karlsons & Associates, LLC

Miller-Davis Company

Raymond James & AssociatesKalamazoo City Centre Branch

D. Terry and Sharon Williams

WMUK

FESTIVAL SPONSORS

AUDIO ENGINEERING SPONSOR

The Christopher Roberts and Nancy Zannini Family Fund

LIVESTREAM SPONSORS

Russell Gabier Fund

The Christopher Roberts and Nancy Zannini Family Fund

Three Rivers Manhattan Club

MEDIA PARTNERS

Adams Outdoor Advertising

Blue Lake Public Radio

Interlochen Public Radio

WMUK

WWMT

INTERMISSION SPONSORS

DeMent & Marquardt, PLC

Kellogg Community Credit Union

Miller-Davis Company

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT

This activity is supported in part by the Michigan Arts and Culture Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pianos provided by Steinway & Sons New York and Steinway Piano Gallery Detroit.

Yamaha CFX and C7X grand pianos provided by Yamaha Artist Services New York, in association with Solich Piano in Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Columbus.

COMMUNITY PARTNERS (2022 - 2024)

Allen Chapel AME Church

Art and Culture Collective of Battle Creek

Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo

Battle Creek Juneteenth Family Day Celebration

Battle Creek Latin American Heritage Initiative

Battle Creek Veterans Administration

Medical Center

Bell’s Brewery

Black Arts and Cultural Center

Bureau of Services for Blind Persons Training Center

Burma Center

Canadiana Fest

Celebration Cinemas

Confections with Convictions

Connecting Chords Music Festival

Corewell Health of Saint Joseph

Crescendo Academy of Music

Dabney & Co.

Discover Kalamazoo

Douglass Community Association

Edison Jazz Fest

Education for Employment Culinary Program

El Concilio / Hispanic American Council

Factory Coffee

Farmers Alley Theatre

First Congregational Church of Battle Creek

First United Methodist Church of South Haven

Franke Center for the Arts

Friendship Village

Gordon Water Systems

Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra

Grand Rapids Symphony Mosaic Scholars

Great Lakes Acoustic Music Association

Gull Lake Center for the Fine Arts

Fox Music Center

Interlochen Arts Academy

Institute of Public Scholarship

Jackson Symphony Orchestra

Peggy Johnston Catering

Kahuna

Kalamazoo Branch of the NAACP

Kalamazoo Civic Theatre

Kalamazoo College

Kalamazoo Film Society

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra

The Kalamazoo Promise

Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital

Kalamazoo Public Library

Kalamazoo Public Schools

Kalamazoo State Theatre

Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra

Kalamazoo Valley Community College

Kalamazoo Valley Museum

W.K. Kellogg Auditorium

Kool Family Community Center

Lansing Symphony Orchestra

Mendel Center at Lake Michigan College

Merze Tate Explorers

Metropolitan Kalamazoo Branch NAACP

M.I. Gente Radio

The Northside Ministerial Alliance Orchestra Jammbo’laya

PianoQuest

Public Media Network

Richland Area Community Center

RiverRun Press

Rootead Enrichment Center

Sarkozy Bakery

Sassafras

Saugatuck Center for the Arts

Society For History And Racial Equity (S.H.A.R.E.)

Sounds of the Zoo Festival

South Haven Performance Series

The Stamped Robin

Suzuki Academy of Kalamazoo

Sweetwater’s Donut Mill

VanderSalm’s Flowershop & Garden Center

Voces

Wellspring Theater

What A Do Theatre Company

Willard Library

Western Michigan University

WMed

WMUK

EDUCATION SPONSORS AND FUNDING PARTNERS (2022 - 2024)

Arts Fund of Kalamazoo County, a program of the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo

Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne

Rob and Lynda Bauckham in memory of Rachael “Rey” Bauckham

Eric and Linda Brown *

Constantin and Ruth Butiu Fund of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation

Terry Creed *

Dorothy U. Dalton Foundation

David Dvorak and Karol Peterson *

Richard and Marsha Early *

Eaton Corporation

Education for the Arts

Friends of The Gilmore

Irving S. Gilmore Foundation

Fred Harrison

Lynn Harrison and Barbara Hazard *

Martha J. Harrison Piano Education Fundendowed

Peggy Johnston in memory of Rachael “Rey” Bauckham

Kalamazoo Community Foundation

Gail and Tom Kasdorf Fund of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation

W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Hung and Elsie Liang Fund for Music

Lake Michigan Credit Union

Elizabeth Upjohn Mason

Michigan Arts and Culture Council

Music Education Fund of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation

National Endowment for the Arts

The Marvin and Rosalie Okun Foundation

Estate of Wanda Pagel Herman

Patti and Bob Huiskamp *

Judy Jolliffe *

Faye Luscombe *

James MacVicar *

Suzanne U. D. Parish Foundation

Polzin Family Fund of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation

PNC Foundation

FESTIVAL AND CONCERT SERIES SPONSORS

Barry Ross and Jane Rooks Ross in honor of Dan Gustin

Glen C. and Gail G. Smith Fund of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation

Michael and Lindy Storms

Stryker

UHY

Harold and Grace Upjohn Foundation

Gayle Witt

* Martha J. Harrison Piano Education Fund in memory of Fred Harrison

RISING STARS SPONSORS (2022 - 2024)

A Friend of The Gilmore

Friends of The Gilmore in honor of John C. and Helen F. Wattles

Julie and Keith Peterson

Jan and Ed Sackley Three Rivers Friends of The Gilmore

The Wattles Family in memory of Helen Fischer Wattles Zhang Financial

PIANO MASTERS AND SPECIAL EVENT SPONSORS (2022 - 2024)

The John W. and Rosemary K. Brown Family Foundation in honor of Daniel Gustin

Robert and Marianne Denes

Barbara J. Parish in memory of Preston S. Parish

William C. and Nancy F. Richardson - endowed John Stites Jazz Awards

Greenleaf Trust is excited (positively thrilled, in fact!) for the upcoming Gilmore Piano Festival, and to sponsor this year's special performance by Pink Martini.

greenleaftrust.com

Committed to community

We are proud to support The Gilmore Piano Festival. Thank you for bringing worldclass pianistic experiences to Kalamazoo and inspiring present and future artists through outstanding keyboard education programs.

No Longer Neglected: Franz Schubert’s Ascendance

In honor of Franz Schubert’s pianistic legacy, Paul Lewis will present all of Schubert’s sonatas in four recitals on April 30, and May 2, 4, and 6. We’ve asked Professor Christopher H. Gibbs to share some thoughts on the staying power of this remarkable composer, and why we remain enamored with his work.

© Hadi Karimi

The image and stature of eminent artistic figures inevitably shift over time, yet among great composers Franz Schubert stands out as unusual in his lifetime renown, as well as his posthumous legacy. While the alleged neglect of his music in the early 19th century is often overstated, the trajectory of Schubert’s career, and the public recognition he received, unfolded in vastly different ways than they did for his heroes Mozart and Beethoven. Their extraordinary early gifts as keyboard virtuosos and composers led to first publications at ages eight and eleven and both attracted wide “media” attention since childhood.

Appreciation of Schubert proved far more gradual. The span of his active public career lasted less than fifteen years, from 1814 until his death in 1828 at age 31. At first it was largely confined to his native Vienna and principally related to intimate genres such as songs and dances. Most of his music, beginning with his earliest surviving composition written at age thirteen, involved the piano, the Romantic instrument par excellence. As piano construction improved and its price fell, the instrument became ever more popular, the centerpiece of many a middle-class home. The piano was the foundation of domestic music making, specifically the so-called Schubertiades, in which his music thrived. Schubert was reluctant to perform in public and was not a virtuoso pianist himself. Among friends, however, he would happily play for hours on end.

In addition to the keyboard accompaniments to more than 600 songs, Schubert composed hundreds of dances, character pieces (such as the Impromptus and Moments musicaux), and eleven piano sonatas plus nearly as many he never completed. (The numbering and state of the sonatas is a complicated and much debated issue).

While only a few of his large-scale pieces were published during his lifetime, three of his solo piano sonatas were in the mid-1820s as well as the “Wanderer” Fantasy. Schubert also had a particular attraction to the piano duet, two people playing one piano, a convention of friendship and courtship.

On this series of four Gilmore recitals, Paul Lewis offers twelve Schubert sonatas, composed between 1817 and 1828. The initial three programs each end with one of the published sonatas (D. 845, 850, 894) and the last concert features his miraculous final trilogy (D. 958-60). Rounding out the series is his most famous unfinished sonata, the “Reliquie” (D. 840).

Schubert began writing piano sonatas in 1815, at age 18, but the first ones are incomplete. This engagement came somewhat later than in other genres probably because he had less incentive. He composed his early string quartets for use at home with his father and brothers and wrote his songs, dances, and piano music to play for friends at Schubertiades. A few large pieces, such as sacred works and symphonies, were heard at the local church and played through by school or community orchestras. But until mid-19th century piano sonatas, even Beethoven’s, very rarely appeared in public concerts. (The young Clara Wieck was a pioneer in this regard.)

One of the enduring myths about Schubert is that he was largely unrecognized during his lifetime, a sad situation supposedly allayed to some degree by devoted friends who embraced his music. The reality was more complex. He enjoyed considerable success, both in Vienna and beyond, with domestic pieces, which were occasionally performed in public.

The press referred to him as a “favorite composer.” Schubert’s ambitions, however, went much farther, extending to what he once told a publisher were his “strivings after the highest in art.”

Although as a teenager Schubert composed many chamber, sacred, orchestral, and theater pieces, it was not until his mid-twenties that he claimed real ownership of these genres and pressed for their publication and performance. Even close friends viewed him, as did the wider public, preeminently as a composer of songs, the Liederfürst (Prince of Song). Franz Grillparzer, an acquaintance and Austria’s leading writer, captured contemporaneous perceptions of Schubert in the epitaph he crafted for his grave: THE ART OF MUSIC HERE ENTOMBED A RICH POSSESSION, BUT EVEN FAR FAIRER HOPES. Grillparzer laments a career cut short, which it was, but posterity gradually learned that Schubert had accomplished far more than was suspected during his lifetime.

At the time of Schubert’s death, a surprisingly large quantity of his music had been published in the space of just seven years: some 190 songs, nearly as many dances, dozens of partsongs and piano pieces. The few large works included a Mass, string quartet, the three piano sonatas mentioned earlier, pieces for piano duet, and the E-flat Piano Trio, but no orchestral or theater music. Hundreds of songs remained unpublished, but more significant was the slow unveiling of his greatest instrumental music, beginning with the last sonatas in 1839. That was the same year Mendelssohn conducted the premiere of the “Great” C Major Symphony, which his friend Schumann had recently discovered. The D Minor String Quartet appeared in 1831 and the G Major twenty years later. The magnificent C Major String Quintet was published in 1853 and the “Unfinished” Symphony premiered in 1865.

The six posthumously released sonatas Mr. Lewis presents appeared between 1829 and 1861 with artificially high opus numbers used as a marketing ploy.

The continuing release of so many of Schubert’s most important compositions was unprecedented for a major composer and meant that his stature was constantly reassessed. Eduard Hanslick, Vienna’s preeminent music critic, observed in 1862: “If Schubert’s contemporaries rightly gazed astonished at his creative power, what shall we, who come after him, say, as we incessantly discover new works of his? For thirty years the master has been dead, and in spite of this it seems as if he goes on working invisibly — it is impossible to follow him.” Indeed, Schubert might be said to have had the longest career of the century as the continuing publication of major works delighted audiences and inspired later composers. The discovery of his music was abetted by the ardent advocacy of the leading Romantics, including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms.

Given that Schubert enjoyed some success publishing sonatas, it is unsurprising that during his last summer he produced three more, which Mr. Lewis plays on his fourth program. They are dated September 1828 although surviving drafts indicate a somewhat longer genesis. Schubert intended to dedicate them to the composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, but death delayed their publication.

When the publisher Anton Diabelli finally released them a decade later it was with a dedication to Robert Schumann, who commented in a review: “Whether they were written from his sickbed or not, I have been unable to determine. The music would suggest that they were. And yet it is possible that one imagines things when the portentous designation, ‘last works,’ crowds one’s fantasy with thoughts of impending death.”

The protracted process of releasing Schubert’s music took most of the 19th century, with the complete critical edition finished in time for the centennial of his birth in 1897. But even then much of his music, now so familiar to audiences — symphonies, chamber music, and piano pieces — remained rarities in the concert hall. Charles Hallé played the “complete” sonatas in London’s St. James Hall in 1868. Artur Schnabel is justly credited for championing the piano sonatas around the turn of the century and for making the first recordings in the late 1930s, released on the heels of his landmark series of the complete Beethoven sonatas. Eduard Erdmann, Frederick Lamond, Ernö Dohnányi, and others promoted the sonatas as well but, like much of Schubert’s instrumental music, some viewed them as too long and repetitive. (Igor Stravinsky’s response when asked whether Schubert’s music put him to sleep was “What does it matter if I fall asleep, so long as when I awake I think I’m in paradise?”)

Schubert’s nearly two dozen piano sonatas, finished and incomplete, exhibit a stylistic range that capture different aspects of his musical personality. We find the great lyrical gifts, including memorable moments sometimes inspired by earlier songs. There are bold harmonic experiments, such as unexpected modulations that create wondrous effects.

The music historian Richard Taruskin once minutely analyzed a particularly wandering passage in a piano piece and then apologized for the complicated description by saying that “a mouthful like that is the equivalent of ‘third cousin on the mother’s side twice removed.’ The relationship can be traced logically, and is therefore intelligible, but its distance, not the logic of its description, is what registers.” These effects can take listeners out of time and place, transporting one as few composers are able to do. Dark moods give way to ebullient scherzos and passages of consoling lyrical serenity to moments of anguish and despair.

After Schubert’s serious illness from syphilis in 1822 (a virtual death sentence at the time) a frequent gesture is for him to interrupt a slow movement – one might almost say, briefly “spoil it” – with a violent outburst of loud, dissonant, agonizing pain, what the musicologist Hugh Macdonald calls “Schubert’s volcanic temper.”

Such moments, placed within a context of great beauty, inevitably invite us to relate the music to what we know about Schubert’s life at the time. There are extraordinary moments that hint at personal testimony, such as the devastating interpolated silences in the final movement of the A Major Piano Sonata when the lyrical rondo theme suddenly stops, leaving a harrowing void. There are the otherworldly trills near the opening of the B-flat Major Sonata. Schubert’s incorporation of his earlier songs, often ones that deal with death, creates a mysterious web of intriguing self-quotation and allusions. All these musical devices make one wonder what meaning they might carry.

As Schubert’s greatest music became known there was also a shift in his image, from that of a fun-loving fellow trivialized in operettas, novels, and films to someone far more serious. The familiar Romantic conception of a poor, shy, largely unappreciated figure, surrounded by merry friends, who composed “clairvoyantly,” took a darker turn to someone who struggled valiantly with health, depression, career, and political repression. The revisionist portrait is built on a firmer documentary basis and is surely more nuanced, although it is still often speculative and hampered by large gaps in the historical record, not least because so few letters and diaries survive from Schubert himself.

The greater access to Schubert’s music came and the changes in his biographical image came as there were fundamental shifts in which of his pieces were most highly valued and deemed representative. The “Trout” – both the famous song and the piano quintet derived from it – seceded in importance to the song cycle Winterreise, the late chamber pieces, and the final piano compositions.

Esteem for the more serious Schubert followed in the wake of two devastating world wars and the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima as his most extreme music seemed to resonate with modern times far removed from his own Biedermeier Vienna.

The unusual disparity between Schubert’s fame during his lifetime and the unfolding of his prolific posthumous career may prompt one to ask: What time understands a composer best? His contemporaries breathed the same air as he and lived in a context that has long disappeared. And yet posterity has access to so much more of his music than even the luckiest few did in his own time, now being able to hear pieces that the composer himself never did except in his imagination. We may count ourselves lucky that we know so many rich treasures of which Franz Grillparzer and others in the past could only dream.

Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College and the author of The Life of Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 2000) as well as other books on the composer.

Ways of Listening

POEMS BY ROSEMARY WILLEY

Rosemary Willey’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Crazyhorse, and other journals. She is the author of the collection, Intended Place. Find more of her poems to music at rosemarywilley.com.

The following poems are inspired by Schubert's Sonata No. 18 in G Major, which will be performed by Paul Lewis on Saturday, May 4 during the third concert in his Schubert series. See page 114 for more information.

I began attending the Gilmore International Piano Festival when I moved to Kalamazoo in 1995. I understood the Festival was an opportunity to see first class pianists, though I did not consider myself a classical music connoisseur.

In concerts I would try to let the music fuel my imagination — not unlike when, as children, we were introduced to the idea of emotion and story in music. Now I never attend a concert without a pencil, prepared for whatever thoughts the music might conjure. Sometimes I turn the scribbled notes on my programs into poems. Recently I shared some of this writing with Pierre van der Westhuizen, and we had a compelling conversation about “ways of listening” to music. What follows is his generous invitation to share my piano poetry and invite the questions, “What do you ‘see’ in the music? What memories come to you? What images or feelings arise?”

Sonata No. 18 In G Major, D. 894

Reminiscence

(Molto moderato e cantabile)

What I remember most of those cruel and beautiful mornings is your silence, and the pang that began so keenly in my chest, unfurling just enough for my young body to bear.

How you’d take my hand, father, and in that moment I was yours, and then our way, the light, the road and sky no longer oblique, began to brighten on even the coldest of dawns. I did my best to keep your pace, my best to hush

the childish stirrings rising and falling like a seesaw plank, your wordless gaze set before us and mine to the birds overhead, diving and lilting in their daybreak songs. Too soon I’d hear the ringing from the belltower, the flock of blue-jacketed boys running in the square.

How I longed to join them!

How I did not want you to turn and leave.

My hand would plummet as you let go and it was an unmoored sorrow I would quiet then, my deference so much greater than my will. Was it love or duty, father, that summoned you to send me there? Or had you merely arrived at the end of what you knew? Because there must be music, this much for certain, in whatever progeny you dreamed, the countless lessons

a dour metronome echoing through the halls of my youth, cadences that still haunt my sleepless nights eased now only by the blend of absolution and regret that comes to me on a breeze from an open window. It was I who left you, father, to the prudent details of your days, beneath the faint sound of distant school bells, on those cold blue mornings.

Reverie (Andante)

What if the sky were a vessel holding us, just as it holds the sun with its battened beams of light?

Consider how lovingly rendered in every pastoral painting— A fleet of clouds above a river valley the sky reaching down to caress the hills, washed in rose and silver.

What if the sky held the weather, the wind slipping through its fingers?

Consider how its billowy hem can hold all varieties of rain, can veil the burgeoning storm— The sky erupts with sudden thunder that rattles our bones, torrents that slicken the way home.

What if the sky contained the seas, the ocean and lakes a mirror?

Consider how the sentinel moon reflects across the rippled glass— Tonight, only a lucent sliver but soon the fullness, the dance. The moon swells beneath a net of stars.

What if the sky could hold us forever, with its promise of heaven?

Invocation (Menuetto. Allegro Moderato)

Spring arrives in her shimmering robe, Her woven crown of roses, Exalting us from slumber.

She sweeps the meadow

With her chaff and seed, The sunlight lengthens in her bow.

Spring beckons us

To her throne of blossoms, Our hearts open to the April rain.

Even the fairest of streamlets

Begin to trickle and wend, And roots deeply bedded stir.

Oh, merciful Spring!

Force the buds from the bough

Until the petals shudder loose!

Adorn our path with splendor! And when the work is done, Lie with us as the light is fading,

Beneath the nightingale’s faint song, Bathe us in your seraphic twilight

Until we dream of nothing else.

Rumination (Allegretto)

It is the lupine awash in the breeze nodding their long stems to and fro

in a gesture both diminutive and grand that it fills the whole field with motion.

And sometimes it’s the rain drops punctuating the pond in staccato, not a set pattern but more a trill, a vibration, as when the ballerinas

cross the stage (bourrée en couru), their bobbing tulle unspooling

pirouettes like pale threads from the weaver’s spindle,

amid the perfect axis of the body, both linear and yielding,

refined by years of practice, years of planets spinning night to day.

It is a dragonfly’s mercurial flight that hovers and zags and vanishes, as sandpipers forage at the shoreline, waves cascading in soft repetition.

But their silly scurry is fleeting, under the moon’s rise and pull they disappear before the tide.

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Festival Events by Date

© Mark Bugnaski

OPENING NIGHT CELEBRATION

Hiromi: The Piano Quintet feat. PUBLIQuartet

Hiromi, piano

Hamilton Berry, cello

Chern Hwei Fung, violin

Nick Revel, viola

Curtis Stewart, violin

Wednesday, April 24 • 7 pm

Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

CONCERT SPONSOR

HIROMI

Since the 2003 release of her debut, Another Mind (which won the Recording Industry Association of Japan’s Jazz Album of the Year Award), Hiromi has electrified audiences with a creative energy that eclipses the boundaries of jazz, classical, and pop, taking improvisation and composition to new heights of complexity. Her latest album is Sonicwonderland, further exemplifies her virtuosic hybridity and emotional range.

Born in Hamamatsu, Japan, Hiromi’s first piano teacher, Noriko Hikida, exposed Hiromi to jazz and introduced her to pianists Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson. She studied at the Yamaha School of Music and the Berklee College of Music. Among her mentors was jazz bassist/arranger Richard Evans, who took Hiromi’s demo to his friend, Ahmad Jamal, and the two co-produced Another Mind with Hiromi. In 2009, she recorded with pianist Chick Corea on Duet, a live recording of their concert in Tokyo. She appeared on bassist Stanley Clarke’s Grammy®-winning release, Jazz in the Garden. In the summer of 2021, Hiromi performed at the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympics.

PUBLIQUARTET

Applauded by The Washington Post as “a perfect encapsulation of today’s trends in chamber music,” multi-Grammy®-nominated PUBLIQuartet is an improvising string quartet whose repertoire blends genres and highlights American multiculturalism. Founded in 2010 and based in New York, the ensemble garnered Chamber Music America’s prestigious Visionary Award for outstanding and innovative approaches to contemporary classical, jazz, and world chamber music in 2019.

The group has held artist residencies at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Montreal, Newport and Detroit jazz festivals. Their 2016 appearance on The Colbert Report, “Requiem for a Debate” – in which they improvised a live soundtrack to the third presidential debate – not only received over a million views, but The Washington Post declared them "the winner...indubitably." PUBLIQuartet was the inaugural ensemble-in-residence for Carnegie Hall’s PlayUSA program in 2021-22, working with high school music classes across the country. Their 2023-24 season includes performances at USC and the Library of Congress, with the New York City Ballet, and dates with jazz artists Diane Monroe and Magos Herrera. The quartet’s latest album, the Grammy®nominated What Is American, explores resonances between contemporary, blues, jazz, freely-improvised, and rock-inflected languages, all of which trace their roots back to Black and Indigenous musical traditions.

© Mari Amita

© Lelanie Foster

Labèque Duo

Katia Labèque, piano

Marielle Labèque, piano

Thursday, April 25 • 7:30 pm

Stetson Chapel, Kalamazoo College

Concert Preview • 6:30 pm

Dr. Sophié van der Westhuizen, Olmsted Room, Mandelle Hall

C. DEBUSSY Six èpigraphes antiques L. 139

Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du vent d'été (To invoke Pan, god of the summer wind)

Pour un tombeau sans nom (For a nameless tomb)

Pour que la nuit soit propice (So that the night is propitious)

Pour la danseuse aux crotales (For the dancer with antique cymbals)

Pour l'égyptienne (For the Egyptian)

Pour remercier la pluie au matin (To thank the rain in the morning)

F. SCHUBERT Fantasie in F Minor for piano four hands, D. 940

:

INTERMISSION :

M. RAVEL Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose)

Pavane de la belle au bois dormant (Pavane of Sleeping Beauty)

Petit poucet (Tom Thumb)

Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes (The Ugly Little Girl, Empress of the Pagodas)

Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast)

Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden)

PHILIP GLASS Four Movements for Two Pianos (2008)

SPONSORS

SUSAN AND DAVID THOMS IN TRIBUTE TO

KATIA & MARIELLE LABÈQUE

The Labèque sisters, Katia and Marielle, are regular guests with Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Staatskapelle Dresden, Royal Concertgebouw and Vienna Philharmonic, under the direction of Marin Alsop, Semyon Bychkov, Gustavo Dudamel, Gustavo Gimeno, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Pietari Inkinen, Louis Langrée, Zubin Mehta, Andres OrozcoEstrada, Seiji Ozawa, Antonio Pappano, Matthias Pintscher, Georges Pretre, Sir Simon Rattle, Santtu Matias Rouvali, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Michael Tilson Thomas and Jaap van Zweden.

An audience of more than 33,000 attended a gala concert with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle at Berlin’s Waldbühne, now available on DVD (EuroArts). A record audience of more than 100,000 attended the Vienna Summer Night Concert in Schönbrunn (now available on CD and DVD by SONY). More than 1.5 million viewers followed the event worldwide on television. The Labèques’ label KML Recordings joined Deutsche Grammophon in 2016.

They have the privilege of working with many composers including Thomas Adès, Louis Andriessen, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Bryce Dessner, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, György Ligeti, and Olivier Messiaen. At Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles they presented the world premiere of Philip Glass’s new Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel. The duo played the American premiere of Nico Muhly’s concerto In Certain Circles with the New York Philharmonic with Jaap van Zweden in 2022.

© Umberto Nicolletti

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)

Six èpigraphes antiques L. 139 Composed 1914

In 1894 Pierre Louÿs, a friend of Debussy and Oscar Wilde, published The Songs of Bilitis, his “translation” from Ancient Greek of 143 erotic poems he had “discovered” in Cyprus. These poems, attributed to Bilitis, a Greek courtesan and contemporary of Sappho, became a literary sensation. Only gradually was Louÿs himself revealed as the author. Debussy was intrigued. In 1897 he brought out his Trois Chansons de Bilitis, and in 1900 provided incidental music for a small ensemble (two flutes, two harps, and a celeste) to accompany the recitation of a dozen of these poems. In 1914, he arranged some of the music from that set for a new work: Six èpigraphes antiques. Debussy gave each of the six “èpigraphes” the title of one of the poems of Bilitis and expressed the atmosphere they evoked with some of his most remarkable music. Like the Symbolist poets he so admired, he gave an impression of the poem; he did not tell the story.

Debussy had the Six èpigraphes antiques ready to hand off to Jacques Durand, his publisher, on July 31, 1914. The next day France declared war on Germany. “It is almost impossible to work,” he wrote to Durand. “What I am doing seems so wretchedly small.” Yet the just completed èpigraphes may have provided some comfort. Stephen Walsh, one of Debussy’s biographers, finds that it “inhabits a world where war is not so much spoken of or even thought.” And in this music Debussy does travel to other realms, in a style groundbreaking even for him. Composerconductor Pierre Boulez believed that “modern” music began with Debussy’s ballet Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, 1894).

The Six èpigraphes antiques carry modernism even further.

Take tonality. Debussy wrote to Louÿs, “Really, what is the point of harmonizing the voice of Bilitis in major or minor, since she is the possessor of the most persuasive voice in the world?” And indeed he doesn’t. Pentatonic, octatonic, and whole tone scales replace the familiar major and minor; tonal centers shift unexpectedly; parallel chords drift up and down. Melodies sounding “oriental” float above patterns that repeat hypnotically; gong-like sonorities ring out against resonant bass notes. Rhythms are fluid, tempos bending, silence punctuating sound.

To invoke Pan, god of the summer wind paints a picture of Pan, that flute-playing satyr, also the star of Prélude à l'aprèsmidi d'un faune. The opening tune, ever so gradually unfolding, creates the dreamy mood Debussy intended by naming the piece a Pastorale. For a nameless tomb opens with a mournful melody marked “distant.” A funeral-march tread, rolled chords in the bass designated as “stifled, smothered,” circular patterns turning back on themselves: all speak of the deepest grief, unresolved. So that the night is propitious creates an atmosphere of mysterious anticipation of just what the evening might bring. Octaves tiptoe in the highest register, a murmuring left hand becomes insistent, an air of jubilant expectation reigns.

For the dancer with antique cymbals evokes a sensuous young woman whose hand-held cymbals flash in the highest register as she twists and turns. Debussy was strongly influenced by the artists around him; here the musical gestures suggest those captured by Auguste Rodin in his watercolor The Cambodian Dancer (1907).

For the Egyptian suggests an imaginary, faraway world. Its pentatonic melodies, grace notes, and the treble, percussive sounds suggest a fanciful “Egyptian” ensemble. When Debussy attended the 1889 Paris International Exhibition, he was completely captivated by the sounds of the Javanese gamelan, which finds echoes here. In To thank the rain in the morning, one of Debussy’s most vivid nature-pictures, buzzing tone clusters flit from top to bottom. With a nod back to the opening bars, this extraordinary set of èpigraphes antiques comes to an end.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

Fantasie in F Minor for piano four hands, D. 940 Composed 1828

In 1840 Robert Schumann wrote, “Musical duets become duets of the heart and the conversation and language of kindred souls; that is when they are most beautiful and valuable.” No work could fulfill this description better than Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, composed in April of that year. It is a profound work, and a late one – if anything can be called “late” for a composer who died just two months shy of his thirty-second birthday. With it Schubert completes his transformation of the piano duet from domestic music for amateurs into the realm of serious art. It is a masterpiece of the repertoire.

Over his short life Schubert composed more than forty piano duets: marches, sonatas, overtures, variations, and fantasias. The first of these was written in 1810 when he was just thirteen; it was assigned the very first “D number” in the catalog of his works made by Schubert scholar Otto Erich Deutsch. Vienna, called the city of pianos, provided an eager market for such pieces, and Schubert readily obliged. The piano held the place of honor in the drawing rooms where such music was performed.

At the Schubertiads (“Schubert evenings” devoted to his music), the composer himself was often found at the piano, ready to play a duet with a friend. Schubert dedicated his F-minor Fantasie to a beloved piano student, fifteen-year-old Caroline von Esterházy: musically gifted, intellectually curious, and the ideal dedicatee of such a remarkable work. Caroline and her sister Marie, described by Schubert’s friend Moritz von Schwind as “the loveliest of duos,” relished the music that he wrote for them.

The fantasia was a favorite genre of the time: improvisatory, unpredictable, harmonically surprising. This one has four movements folded into one, along with a double fugue and a coda. The poignant opening melody is unforgettable. Soon after its appearance Schubert changes its character, moving from somber F minor to bright F major, as if opening a door into a new room. Suddenly the music shifts again, this time to the faraway key of F-sharp minor. Emphatic dotted rhythms (long-short-long) and dramatic pauses mark it as a French Overture, its Baroque grandeur reminiscent of those of Handel, one of Schubert’s favorite composers. The texture is no longer imitative but chordal, both pianists moving together for further emphasis. Next comes a cheerful song in A major, which functions as a Scherzo, with the requisite softer Trio. After the opening theme and key of F minor return, Schubert’s intensive study of Bach makes itself heard in a complex double fugue. Finally we come back home, and this magnificent work ends quietly.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose)

Composed 1908-10

Just as Debussy had done in his Six èpigraphes antiques Ravel used a French model as the source for his Mother Goose suite – but instead of adult erotic poetry, Ravel chose children’s fairy stories: Mme Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast (1756), Mme d’Aulnoy’s Laideronnette, the Ugly Little Princess (1698), and Charles Perrault’s Little Thumb and Sleeping Beauty (1696). Perrault’s collection of fairy stories, Tales from Past Times, with Morals, had been quickly translated into English as Tales of My Mother Goose. “I wrote the work for my young friends Mimie and Jean Godebski” (the neighbor’s children), Ravel recalled. It was an experience he clearly enjoyed: “Writing music to describe the poetry of childhood encouraged me to simplify my style and to refine my means of expression.”

Like the story that inspired it, the Pavane dates back to the seventeenth century. A stately court dance, it served as a processional honoring the dead, as Sleeping Beauty was thought to be when the prince found her. This is the second of Ravel’s pavanes for dead princesses: the first, Pavane pour une infante défunte” of 1899, remains among his most beloved pieces. According to a vignette printed atop the score, when Tom Thumb became lost in the woods (like Hansel and Gretel), he “was not concerned, for he thought he could easily find the way again by means of his bread scattered along the way; but he was very much surprised when he could not find so much as one crumb. The birds had come and eaten every bit of it up.” The music wanders, ascending, dropping back, ascending again. The birds comfort him, tweeting high in the trees, answered by the unmistakable voice of the cuckoo. Finally the peaceful last bars suggest that Tom has found his way.

Laideronnette, who has been turned into the ugliest princess in the world by an evil fairy, is magically transformed into the beautiful Empress of the Pagodas. Ravel paints the scene just before the transformation occurs: “She undressed and entered the bath. Immediately mandarins and mandarinettes began to sing and to play musical instruments. Some had lutes made of a walnut-shell, others viols made of an almond-shell, for it was necessary to suit the instruments to their size.” Tone clusters and pentatonic “Chinese” scales suggest the scampering dancers and their tiny percussive instruments. Like Debussy, Ravel had gone to the Paris International Exhibition and had been powerfully influenced by the gongs and bells of the gamelan and the other unfamiliar instruments he heard there.

Conversations of Beauty and the Beast is another story of transformation. Ravel recounts their dialogue in the score: “When I think of your good heart, you do not appear so ugly..."Oh! milady yes! my heart is good, but I am a monster...Beauty, will you be my wife?...No, Beast!”...“I die happy for I have the pleasure of seeing you once more... No, my dear Beast, you will not die: you will live to become my husband!" The Beast’s voice is rough and growling, low in the bass, Beauty’s sweet and soothing, high in the treble. Gradually the Beast is tamed, and Beauty consents to be his wife. A pianissimo glissando announces the moment he becomes a handsome prince.

With a slow, enchanting waltz, Ravel draws us into The Fairy Garden, where the characters live “happily ever after” in increasing contentment, accompanied by some of his most transcendent music: elegant, balanced, restrained, yet deeply expressive.

The “French temperament,” Francis Poulenc would call it. When Ravel turned the Mother Goose suite into a ballet in 1911, he used this music to depict Sleeping Beauty asleep in the magical garden, awakened by a kiss from her prince. Gorgeous glissandos, fanfares, and wedding bells announce their joyous marriage.

PHILIP GLASS (B. 1937)

Four Movements for Two Pianos

Composed 2008

Philip Glass reports that when he is asked about his music, he says, “It sounds like New York!” The New Yorker critic Alex Ross agrees: it has a kind of “Times Square neon glow,” he observes. Glass, who knew from an early age that he wanted to be a composer, was impeccably trained in the Western classical tradition, first at The Juilliard School in New York City and later at the Sorbonne with Nadia Boulanger. He called himself “a decent pianist – for a composer.” In 1968 he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble, leading his own music from the keyboard and emphasizing the intimate connection between composer and performer. An interest in the piano has stayed with him during his long and distinguished career.

Four Movements for Two Pianos was commissioned by the Klavier-Festival Ruhr and premiered in July 2008 by Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa. What an opportunity – to write for twenty fingers, not just ten! What glorious explorations of sonority, rhythm, and texture present themselves. Two players can cover the entire range of the piano, create gorgeous registral contrasts, and bring out all the timbral variety and sonic richness of that big, resonant box of sound. At times they exchange roles; at others, they swim in separate seas of rhythm, harmony, and texture. “Maximalism,” critic John Rockwell calls such music, an ironic comment for a style thought of as minimalism. Ross suggests that it might better be called post-minimalism. “Repetition is a form of change,” composer Brian Eno has observed, a principle that Glass enthusiastically

embraces. Following the principles that he learned from his work with Ravi Shankar, phrases are extended or reduced by adding or subtracting groups of two and three notes. Crescendos are built on a grand scale. Patterns unfold, gradually shifting and changing; sections are repeated – and then repeated. There is seemingly endless rhythmic complexity between the hands with their polyrhythms and syncopation. The music is aggressively tonal and triadic, with sudden shifts of pitch centers. Notes that initially sound “wrong” are gradually folded into the harmony. In music trance-like, hypnotic but full of change, melodies float in and out. The demands of synchronization between the two pianists are extraordinary.

Each movement is given a metronome marking rather than a tempo or other title. There are no performance directions in the score – no espressivos, no dolces – only the occasional forte or piano, crescendo or decrescendo. In the first movement, one pianist keeps up a constant rhythm, which the other punctuates with chords and octaves. The second movement begins with an impassioned melody shared between the hands, then decorated with gossamer octaves in a sparkling upper register. In the third movement, bubbling and buoyant, each player has a distinctive, often contradictory rhythmic pattern. The opening minor third ostinato, in various guises, permeates nearly every measure. The fourth movement opens with a Bachian chromatic bass line played by just one hand, moving relentlessly along and soon complemented by resonant chords, which build to a double forte conclusion. Time and sound have been transformed, and so have we.

Magnificent Bird

Gabriel Kahane, piano & voice

Friday, April 26 • 7:30 pm Wellspring Theater, Kalamazoo

There will be a 15-minute intermission.

SPONSOR

A FRIEND OF THE GILMORE WITH GRATITUDE TO ALL WHO SO GENEROUSLY SUPPORT THE ARTS IN THE KALAMAZOO AREA

GABRIEL KAHANE

Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work increasingly exists at the intersection of art and social practice. Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, he has released five albums as a singer-songwriter including his most recent, Magnificent Bird, hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a gorgeous, intimate collection of musical snapshots.” As a composer, he has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Public Theater.

This season, Mr. Kahane embarks on a new collaborative commissioning project with the Attacca Quartet, Pekka Kuusisto, and Roomful of Teeth as part of a two-year initiative with San Francisco Performances, with performances scheduled around the U.S. and Europe. Season highlights include the European premiere of emergency shelter intake form in London, duo recitals with Jeffrey Kahane, a conducting appearance with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the New York premiere of his piano concerto Heirloom by Jeffrey Kahane and The Knights. Mr. Kahane has worked with artists including Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers, Caroline Shaw, and Chris Thile.

© Jason Quigley

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT IN MUSIC AND MEDICINE

Bronson proudly welcomes to southwest Michigan the legendary ta l ent and outstanding new artists of the 2024 Gilmore I nternational Piano F estival. W hat a wonderful e xperience it is to witness these inspired performances and to feel the collective energy of the festival unfold in our community. The Gilmore is now heralded around the world, but here at home is where it remains most treasured. We applaud everyone who has had a h and i n bringing this uplifting musical event to life.

The 5 Browns Family Concert

Desirae Brown, piano

Deondra Brown, piano

Gregory Brown, piano

Melody Brown, piano

Stephen Beus, piano

Saturday, April 27 • 2 pm

Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo

L.v. BEETHOVEN

Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67

/ARR. JEFFREY SHUMWAY I. Allegro con brio

The 5 Browns

C. DEBUSSY Trois Nocturnes: Fêtes

/ARR. M. RAVEL

Gregory and Melody Brown, piano

W.A. MOZART Rondo “Alla Turca” from Piano Sonata in A Major, K. 331

/ARR. GREG ANDERSON

N. MEDTNER

W. LUTOSLAWSKI

B. BARTÓK

/ARR. THE 5 BROWNS

: INTERMISSION :

The 5 Browns

Sonata tragica, Op. 39, No. 5

Stephen Beus, piano

Variations on a Theme of Paganini for Two Pianos

Deondra and Desirae Brown, piano

The Miraculous Mandarin

The 5 Browns

G. GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue

/ARR. JEFFREY SHUMWAY

The 5 Browns

M. RAVEL Jeux d’eau (Water play)

Melody Brown

G. HOLST Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity from The Planets, Op. 32

/ARR. GREG ANDERSON

S. RACHMANINOFF

The 5 Browns

Valse and Romance from 6 Pieces, Op. 11

Melody, Desirae, and Deondra Brown

C. SAINT-SA Ë NS Danse Macabre

/ARR. GREG ANDERSON

The 5 Browns

The taking of flash photographs and the use of recording devices is prohibited. Please turn off all cell phones

SPONSOR ELIZABETH UPJOHN MASON

THE 5 BROWNS

The Juilliard-educated 5 Browns came to critical attention in 2002, when People magazine dubbed them the “Fab Five” and they were featured on 60 Minutes Desirae Brown, Deondra Brown, Stephen Beus, Gregory Brown, and Melody Brown have garnered extensive media coverage ranging from The Tonight Show, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and The View, to CNN, Fox and Friends, Public Radio’s Performance Today, and The New York Times.

Individually and collectively, they have soloed with the National Symphony Orchestra; the Chicago, Philadelphia, Vancouver, New Jersey, Dallas, and St. Louis symphony orchestras; and many more. They have released eight albums that have collectively spent over 30 weeks at #1 on Billboard Magazine’s Classical Album Chart. The New York Post said, “Five pianos and 50 fingers add up to the biggest classical music sensation in years.”

A highlight for the quintet was a commissioned five-piano concerto written by composer Nico Mühly. Under the direction of Maestro James Conlon, the concerto premiered at the Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

After brother Ryan retired from the stage, the group welcomed Stephen Beus as a permanent member after performing with them for four seasons. Gold medalist at the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, Beus joins a group committed to impeccable technique, effortless musicality, and an unquenchable joy for music in every performance. The 5 Browns are managed by IMG Artists, LLC, and are exclusive Steinway Artists.

© Casey Welch

THE FIVE BROWNS

One piano all by itself is a marvelous instrument. Its 88 keys cover over seven octaves, with silvery notes at the very top and a booming bass at the bottom. And what can you play with your ten fingers? Beautiful melodies, alone or with accompaniment. Chords, full of rich, delicious harmonies. The loudest crash, the softest caress. Rhythm, simple or complex. And even percussion. Now imagine what more you could do with four hands on one keyboard—or on two keyboards. And why have just one piano when you could have two? Or even five! And what music these players can make. The possibilities are endless. Ever since its invention in the early 18th century, the piano has been at the heart of musical life, not just as a solo instrument, but as something to share, to bring people together. Perhaps a four-hand duet to brighten a cold evening. Or a new arrangement of a Beethoven Symphony, a way to learn and enjoy music even without an orchestra. A piano – or two or three – can make it happen. Think of the fun, and the glorious din. So much music to choose from. Arrangements of symphonies and ballets. Piano duets on one piano or two. Solo pieces turned into music for more. And all by itself the piano is such an expressive, beautiful instrument. Enjoy!

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

/ARR. JEFFREY SHUMWAY

Allegro con brio from Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67

Composed 1808

During his lifetime Beethoven was Europe's most famous composer. And today his Fifth Symphony is probably his most famous composition. Its first movement - which we hear today - opens with that unforgettable four-note rhythm that some call the fate motif: short-short-short-long. Or "dit-dit-dit-dah," Morse code for the letter V, thus associating this symphony forever with the Allies' victory over Germany in the Second World War.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)

/ARR. MAURICE RAVEL 1909

Trois Nocturnes: Fêtes

Composed 1897-99

French composer Claude Debussy is often connected with the French Impressionist painters he was friends with. His music paints images in the mind that are just as vivid as their works on canvas. “Fêtes (Festivals) is part of his Nocturnes (night pieces) for orchestra. Debussy describes the music we hear today: "Vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light...and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm." Debussy’s contemporary Maurice Ravel arranged the Nocturnes for two pianos in 1909.

W. A. MOZART (1756-1791)

/ARR. GREG ANDERSON

Rondo "Alla Turca" from Piano Sonata in A Major, K. 331

Composed 1783

Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” may be his most popular tune. Written as the final movement for his A-major Sonata, K. 331, it was a novelty item intended to entice Vienna’s many pianists into buying a copy of the music to play at home. Familiarly known as the “Turkish March,” it was inspired by Janissary music, made immensely popular in Western Europe by military bands made up of soldiers (originally Turkish), playing trumpets, drums, triangles, and cymbals. Mozart captures this “Turkish” style with a fast tempo and percussive grace notes. The rondo format ensures that the irresistible “Turkish” theme will keep coming back around.

NIKOLAI MEDTNER (1879-1951)

Sonata tragica, Op. 39, No. 5

Composed 1919-20

Along with those of Scriabin and Prokofiev, Nikolai Medtner's fourteen piano sonatas are the most important Russian works in the genre. They attracted the attention of Rachmaninoff, who added Medtner’s music to his concert programs. Today’s sonata is from a set of pieces called “Forgotten Melodies." It is in just one movement and begins with startling chords, sometimes called “the blow of fate,” before going into a lovely second theme, which is increasingly decorated by a filigree of notes above. Another lovely tune comes in halfway through, and then the “blow of fate” theme takes us to a dramatic conclusion.

WITOLD LUTOSLAWSKI (1913-1994)

Variations on a Theme of Paganini for Two Pianos

Composed 1941

Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski began his study of piano at age six; he wrote his first piano piece at age nine. At age 18 he entered Warsaw University to study mathematics but withdrew after two years to study piano and composition. At age twenty-four he received his diploma in piano from Warsaw Conservatory. During the German occupation of Poland in the 1940s Lutoslawski lived in Warsaw and earned his living by playing in cafés. Today's Variations on a Theme of Paganini were written during that period. The theme comes from Paganini's Caprice #24, considered by many to be one of the most difficult pieces written for solo violin. Nevertheless, the theme is catchy, readily dissected, and easy to identify even in the most ambitious of variations.

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945)

/ARR. THE 5 BROWNS

The Miraculous Mandarin Composed 1918-19

Bartók was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, and musicologist, who collected and transcribed folk songs and dances from villages in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. He used their elements in his own music. The action for this one act ballet takes place in the seamier side of an urban landscape. We can hear the hustle and bustle of the busy city in the opening bars. The Mandarin of the title is "miraculous" because, although severely wounded during the events of the ballet, he fails to die until his love has been requited. Even though it was composed more than a century ago, it still sounds fresh and new.

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)

/ARR. JEFFREY SHUMWAY

Rhapsody in Blue Composed 1924

Happy 100th birthday, Rhapsody in Blue! George Gershwin was only twenty-six when dance bandleader Paul Whiteman asked him to write a concerto for his jazz orchestra. Whiteman’s goal was to bring jazz into the concert hall, blending those new sounds with the classical tradition. The concerto, called Rhapsody in Blue, was premiered at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, with the composer at the piano, in a concert billed “An Experiment in Modern Music.” The concerto was a smash, as popular with critics and audience as it was profitable for the composer, earning Gershwin a quarter of a million dollars in the days before income tax.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

Jeux d’eau (Water Play)

Composed 1901

Of all the depictions of water sparkling in the sunshine, Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’eau is surely one of the most gorgeous. Ravel himself wrote that the piece "is inspired by the noise of water and by the musical sounds which make one hear the sprays of water, the cascades, and the brooks." In his manuscript Ravel included a line from a poem by Henri de Regnier: "The river god laughs as the water tickles him.” It is the perfect description of this irresistible music.

GUSTAV HOLST (1874 - 1934)

/ARR. GREG ANDERSON

Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity from The Planets, Op. 32

Composed 1918

Gustav Holst wrote The Planets as an orchestral suite in 1918. Each of its movements bears the name and supposed astrological character of one of the planets in our solar system. Its fourth movement is Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. In astrology, Jupiter is associated with life and vitality, as suggested by the opening section of this piece. Persons born under Jupiter are alleged to be noble and generous, traits which the music of the slower middle section portrays. Its stately tune came to be used as a hymn in the Church of England, set to the words I Vow to thee my Country. It was sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)

Valse and Romance from 6 Pieces, Op. 11

Composed 1894

Rachmaninoff, a virtuoso pianist, renowned conductor, and popular composer, fled his native Russia with his wife and daughters in 1917, when the Revolution began. He wrote the Valse and Romance as a piano duet in 1894, happier days.

The waltz, with its beautiful singing melody, flies by joyously. Perhaps the Romance, wistful yet passionate, looks back on dancing on a lovely evening long ago. On March 16, 1925, Rachmaninoff came to Kalamazoo to perform in this very auditorium, which had been built just the year before. On the first floor, you can find a plaque that commemorates this historical performance among a collection of similar plaques along the hallway to the north of the auditorium.

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835 - 1921)

/ARR.

GREG ANDERSON

Danse Macabre, Op. 40

Composed 1874

Danse Macabre is one of four tone poems that Camille Saint-Saëns composed for orchestra in the 1870's. This arrangement opens with a lonely tolling of the midnight hour. Before the macabre dancing begins, we hear a series of diminished fifths - called "tritones" by some and "devil's intervals" by others - that signal the kind of night we're in for. In the music that follows, occasional legato passages interrupt the frenetic pace to suggest shrouds billowing in the wind. The music builds to a terrifying climax with all ten hands on all five pianos, and then, suddenly gives way to a single hand on only one piano. The cock has crowed! The five pianos return for a brief but thunderous farewell before giving way to a peaceful conclusion. A new day has dawned.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

Proud to support The Gilmore Piano Festival.

Maria João Pires

Saturday, April 27 • 7:30 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU, Kalamazoo

Concert Preview • 6:30 pm

Dr. David Abbott, Dalton Lecture Hall

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

SPONSORS

PETER AND ELIZABETH SEAVER

MARIA JOÃO PIRES

Born in Portugal, Maria João Pires gave her first public performance at age four. She began her music studies with Campos Coelho and Francine Benoît, continuing later in Germany, with Rosl Schmid and Karl Engel. In addition to performing, she has made recordings for Erato for fifteen years and Deutsche Grammophon for twenty years. Since the 1970s, she has devoted herself to reflecting the influence of art in life, community and education. She has searched for new ways which, respecting the development of individuals and cultures, encourage the sharing of ideas.

In 1999, she created the Belgais Centre for the Study of the Arts in Portugal, where she offers interdisciplinary workshops for professional musicians and music lovers. In 2012 she initiated two complementary projects: the Partitura Choirs, a project which creates and develops choirs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the Partitura Project. In 2023, she partnered with The Gilmore to bring her Partitura Project to the U.S. for the first time, as part of a one-week stay in Kalamazoo, culminating in a concert at Stetson Chapel. The Partitura Project aims to create an altruistic dynamic between artists of different generations by proposing an alternative in a world too often focused on competitiveness, a philosophy she is spreading worldwide at Partitura projects and workshops.

© Felix Broede

COUNTERPOINT

Conrad Tao, piano

Caleb Teicher, dance

Saturday, April 28 • 2 pm

D. Terry Williams Theatre, WMU, Kalamazoo

There will be no intermission.

J.S. BACH

Aria from the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

Caleb Teicher, tap & Conrad Tao, piano

CONRAD TAO/CALEB TEICHER Improvisation

A. SCHOENBERG

Caleb Teicher, tap & Conrad Tao, piano

Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23: V. Walzer

Conrad Tao, piano

R. NOBLE/B. POWELL/A. TATUM Cherokee

C. COLES/ B. BUFALINO

J. BRAHMS

W.A. MOZART/D. PARKER

CONRAD TAO

CONRAD TAO/CALEB TEICHER

G. GERSHWIN

M. RAVEL

J.S. BACH

SPONSORS

TIMOTHY AND JOY LIGHT

Caleb Teicher, tap & Conrad Tao, piano

The Coles and Bufalino Soft Shoe

Caleb Teicher, tap, speaking

Intermezzo in E Major, Op. 116 No. 4

Conrad Tao, piano

Song and Dance

Caleb Teicher, tap, singing

WORLD PREMIERE

Gilmore commission for Conrad Tao and Caleb Teicher

Swing 2 from More Forever

Caleb Teicher, tap & Conrad Tao, piano

Rhapsody in Blue, arr. for solo piano

Caleb Teicher, tap & Conrad Tao, piano

Sonatine: II. Mouvement de Menuet

Conrad Tao, piano

Aria from the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

Caleb Teicher, tap & Conrad Tao, piano

CONRAD TAO

Pianist and composer Conrad Tao has been dubbed “the kind of musician who is shaping the future of classical music” by New York Magazine, and an artist of “probing intellect and openhearted vision” by The New York Times. He has performed as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony. As a composer, his first large scale orchestral work, Everything Must Go, received its world premiere with the New York Philharmonic. The 2012 Gilmore Young Artist and a Warner Classics recording artist, Mr. Tao’s debut disc Voyages was declared a “spiky debut” by The New Yorker, and NPR wrote: “Tao proves himself to be a musician of deep intellectual and emotional power.” His album Pictures, with works by David Lang, Toru Takemitsu, Elliott Carter, Mussorgsky, and Tao himself, was hailed by The New York Times as “a fascinating album [by] a thoughtful artist and dynamic performer…played with enormous imagination, color and command.”

CALEB TEICHER

A New York City-based dancer and choreographer, Caleb Teicher began their career as a founding member of Michelle Dorrance’s tap dance company, Dorrance Dance, while freelancing in contemporary dance (The Chase Brock Experience, The Bang Group), Lindy Hop (Syncopated City Dance Company), and musical theater (West Side Story). Teicher is known for choreographic collaborations with diverse musical talents including champion beatboxer Chris Celiz and indie rock legends Ben Folds and Regina Spektor. In 2015, Caleb shifted their creative focus towards Caleb Teicher & Company, a home for incubating new dance works. Other projects include choreographing Regina Spektor on Broadway, Sister Aimee (streaming on Hulu), and AJR’s Bang music video. Caleb is the recipient of a 2019 New York City Center Choreographic Fellowship, two Bessie Awards, a 2019 Harkness Promise Award, the 2020 Gross Family Prize, and a 2019 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant. Their work has been featured by The New York Times, NPR, Forbes, Vogue, Interview Magazine, on the cover of Dance Magazine and, most recently, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Special thanks to Dom Licavoli for constructing the tap floor used by Caleb Teicher.

© Kevin Condon © Grace Kathryn Landefeld

CONRAD TAO (B. 1994)

Counterpoint

“The title of our program, Counterpoint, came immediately, pianist-composer Conrad Tao reported in a recent interview. The title “represents counterpoint between our different mediums – tap and classical,” he said. “Caleb and I speak different technical languages and come from different traditions, each with long histories. We have been thinking about the counterpoint between those histories, leaning into and embracing their differences and exploring their commonalities. To highlight these approaches, we chose music that feels contrapuntal in various ways.” Although at first some of their choices may seem surprising, he adds, “they represent disparate styles that all fit together. We chose music with dance - and music about dance. This is a conversation.”

The program grew out of a larger project, a complex work combining music, dance, and theater called Now Forever, Tao explained. “A little piece called ‘Swing Two’ comes from that. It is one of the first Caleb and I wrote together” (and the ninth on the program).

“The great thing about bookends is you can imply a narrative between them,” Tao observes. “To begin this program, I chose the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the first music I saw Caleb choreograph.” It is an apt choice, framing today’s program just as it does Bach’s mammoth set of thirty variations. In them Bach demonstrates nearly every kind of counterpoint and variation technique he knew - essentially a summary of Baroque practice. In 1802 his unreliable biographer Johann Forkel described how the work got its title: it was intended to help Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (Bach’s student) fall asleep, his nighttime serenader playing as many variations as it took for him to doze off. The Aria (so called to emphasize its song-like nature) is in two-parts, each repeated.

A steady bass sets the pace; the right hand provides elaborate decorations of the tune, some carefully notated, others to be improvised by the performer, a practice Tao often employs.

Yet another counterpoint between past and present is heard in a waltz by Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg, the fifth of his Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, composed between 1920 and 1923. Schoenberg was the inheritor of the rich tradition of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms – and Wagner. He took the next step beyond the nearly complete chromaticism of Wagner, Tao points out. “It was a logical development – not just a paradigm-busting thing.” Schoenberg made all twelve tones equal: the “emancipation of the dissonance,” he called it. In each of the five pieces, he arranged the twelve pitches of the octave in a different order - a tone row – to provide its structure. “There is something meaningful about the fact that Schoenberg’s first go at the twelve-tone method is a dance,” Tao points out. “It’s a bit of an ironic gesture.”

Cherokee, composed by British bandleader Ray Noble in 1938, quickly became a jazz standard, a favorite of Duke Ellington, Christian McBride, and more recently Emmet Cohen. Art Tatum, among the greatest of all jazz pianists, recorded his own version in 1954. It is this one that Tao and Teicher take up. Juxtaposing Tatum’s chromatic Cherokee to Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic waltz is intriguing, Tao believes, creating as it does an immediate comparison of their methods.

Coles and Bufalino Soft Shoe comes next. A vaudeville routine, characterized by graceful, gliding steps, it is often accompanied simply by staccato chords or light percussion. Tap dancer

Charles “Honi” Coles and his partner Charles “Cholly” Atkins presented their own version at the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival, set to Vernon Duke’s Taking a Chance on Love (1940). Coles then took the show on the road with Brenda Bufalino, founder of the Tap Dance Foundation.

Late in his life, Johannes Brahms turned away from major symphonic works to exquisite miniatures, some of the most expressive, beautifully crafted music in the piano repertoire: capriccios, ballades, romanzas, and rhapsodies. Although none are specifically called dances, they move with grace and charm. Among the many possibilities, Tao chose Brahms’ Intermezzo, Op. 116 (1892). “It may seem surprisingly out of place,” he said, “but instinct says it absolutely belongs. It has a real lilt.”

Mozart’s Rondo “alla turca” may be his most popular piece. It was a novelty item, the finale of his Sonata in A Major, K. 331 (1783), and intended to entice Vienna’s many amateur pianists to buy a copy of the music to play at home. Popularly known as the “Turkish March,” Mozart’s rondo was inspired by Janissary music, made immensely popular in Western Europe by military bands made up of soldiers (originally Turkish) playing trumpets and drums, along with the occasional triangle and cymbal. Mozart captures the “Turkish” style by a fast tempo and percussive grace notes, in music not intended to copy the tunes of a Janissary band, but to create a dramatic and “foreign” effect. Since the piece is a rondo, the unforgettable “Turkish” theme keeps coming back around. It’s irresistible.

Tao points out that from its very inception Rhapsody in Blue has been a piece about bridging different mediums. Gershwin was only twenty-six when bandleader Paul Whiteman, dubbed “the King of Jazz,” asked him to write a concerto for his jazz orchestra.

Whiteman’s goal was to demonstrate that the new, vivacious music called jazz could find a happy home in the concert hall. One of Gershwin’s most beloved works, it premiered at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, with the composer at the piano, in a concert billed “An Experiment in Modern Music.”

It was a smash, as popular with critics and audiences as it was profitable for the composer, earning Gershwin a quarter of a million dollars in the days before income tax.

Along with Schoenberg’s waltz, the only other piece on today’s program explicitly labeled a dance is the Minuet from Maurice Ravel’s Sonatine (1906). Ravel was intensely interested in music from earlier times (especially in the French tradition) and frequently turned venerable genres into something new, while retaining their essential traits. Here he clothes the stately 18th-century minuet in musical language irresistibly new and quintessentially Ravel. “There’s something so richly jazzy about this minuet,” Tao observes, pointing out that the composer’s rich harmonic sensibility would inspire many jazz and pop musicians.

Then, with “Back to Bach,” this inventive collaboration comes to an end.

2024 Zaide Pixley

Notes based in part on an interview by Zaide Pixley with Conrad Tao on November 16, 2023.

World Premier, Gilmore Commission

Conrad Tao

Composed 2023-24

This new piece builds on prior collaborative and co-compositional experiences in which we’ve found the most pleasure. The composition’s starting point is a phrasal and rhythmic structure that we initially used as an improvising springboard in our earliest duo performances. The sound palette is soft and subtle—leathersoled shoes, body percussion, twinkling chords that twist and evolve. The pace is similarly gentle, building out of even-keeled eighth note patterns. Lyricism, a priority since our first major collaboration together, 2019’s More Forever, remains a focus. We’re both percussionists in a way — albeit on instruments with very different tones and timbres—and finding lyrical continuity in our instruments, between our sounds, a continuity that might technically always be illusory, is a shared obsession.

Over the course of the composition we move from a duo relationship, each of us distinct bodies, to sharing a single line. Hocketing – alternating notes of a single melody between two or more people –is a technique we use, one that otherwise doesn’t have much of a presence in the Counterpoint program. This is our first piece composed together in several years, during which we’ve had extensive experience playing together as a duo. The trust and intimacy built up over these years of friendship has informed the feeling of it.

©2024 Conrad Tao

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An Evening with Eliane Elias

Eliane Elias, piano

Marc Johnson, bass

Leandro Pellegrino, guitar

Rafael Barata, drums

Sunday, April 28 • 7:30 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

SPONSOR

LARRY AND SHANNON BELL DONOR ADVISED FUND

ELIANE ELIAS

Grammy® Award-winning Eliane Elias is an acclaimed recording artist, pianist, singer, composer, and arranger from Brazil whose South American roots and sultry voice combine with her charismatic personality, and talents in jazz, Brazilian, classical, and pop music. The New York Times has said Eliane Elias “commands the keyboard with a forceful two-handed muscularity.” Her 2021 album Mirror Mirror of piano duets with the late jazz great Chick Corea and famed Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés won the Grammy® Award for Best Latin Jazz Album/Jazz Album in 2022.

Her 2022 album Quietude debuted as #1 on Billboard, iTunes, and Amazon Jazz Charts. With 31 albums and over 2.4 million albums sold to date, Ms. Elias has toured in 74 countries, she is a four-time Gold Disc Award recipient, a three-time Best Vocal Album winner in Japan and winner of the 2018 Edison Lifetime Achievement Award in Holland to name a few accolades. Her 2019 and 2021 albums (Love Stories and Mirror Mirror) were both voted “Downbeat’s Best Album of the Year - Masterpiece” and as most of her previous releases, her recordings hit #1 on the jazz charts worldwide. Ms. Elias received two LIBERA Award nominations for Best Latin Record (2017 and 2023) and has been nominated 11 times in five categories by the Grammy® and Latin Grammys®, winning four total awards.

© Bob Wolfenson

MARC JOHNSON

Bassist and bandleader Marc Johnson has worked with the Bill Evans Trio and Stan Getz Quartet, along with touring and recording with a “who’s who” list of jazz luminaries as a soughtafter collaborator for his elastic sense of time and intuitive interplay. Critically-acclaimed albums on ECM Records include the award-winning Shades of Jade. Since 2003, Mr. Johnson has performed almost exclusively with his musical partner Eliane Elias. They have created over a dozen recordings together, garnering 11 Grammy® Award nominations, two Grammy® Awards and two Latin Grammy® Awards. His most recent album, Overpass on ECM Records, is a solo bass album showcasing his personal voice on the double bass.

LEANDRO PELLEGRINO

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, guitarist Leandro Pellegrino studied music composition and jazz improvisation as a teen, and at the Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship. In 2013, he won first prize at the Montreux Jazz Guitar Competition, awarded by the legendary Lee Ritenour, the first South American guitarist ever to win the competition. He has performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival as the opening act for Mr. Ritenour, and has worked with Dave Liebman, Danilo Perez, Manu Katché, John Pattittuci, Bob Cranshaw, Terri Lyne Carrington, Romero Lubambo, Eric Harland, Donny McCaslin, Gerald Clayton, and Erik Truffaz. He is also part of the Grammy®-award-winning album Beautiful Life by jazz singer Dianne Reeves. Mr. Pellegrino is endorsed by Benedetto Guitars and currently performs on his Bravo model.

RAFAEL BARATA

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Rafael Barata is a self-taught drummer based in New York. He started playing at the age of five and has played and recorded with artists including Leny Andrade, Emilio Santiago, Rosa Passos, Lisa Ono, Jaques Morelenbaum, Kenny Barron, Milton Nascimento, Edu Lobo, Roberto Menescal, João Donato, Marcos Valle, Ivan Lins and Eliane Elias, with whom he worked on the Grammy®-Award-winning album, Made in Brazil. Mr. Barata tours all around the world with several projects including the Eliane Elias Quartet, Cello Samba Trio (Jaques Morelenbaum and Lula Galvão) and lately with Dianne Reeves.

© Jos Knaepen

© Gaia Wilmer

© David Obadia

2006 GILMORE ARTIST

Ingrid Fliter, piano

Monday, April 29 • 2 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall

Concert Preview • 1 pm

Dr. Zaide Pixley, Dalton Lecture Hall

R. SCHUMANN Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13

Theme – Andante

Etude I (Variation 1) – Un poco più vivo

Etude II (Variation 2) – Andante

Etude III – Vivace

Etude IV (Variation 3) – Allegro marcato

Etude V (Variation 4) – Scherzando

Etude VI (Variation 5) – Agitato

Etude VII (Variation 6) – Allegro molto

Etude VIII (Variation 7) – Sempre marcatissimo

Etude IX – Presto possibile

Etude X (Variation 8) – Allegro con energia

Etude XI (Variation 9) – Andante espressivo

Etude XII (Finale) – Allegro brillante (based on Marschner's theme)

: INTERMISSION :

F. CHOPIN Nocturne in B Major, Op. 9, No. 3

Piano Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58

I. Allegro maestoso

II. Scherzo. Molto vivace – Trio

III. Largo

IV. Finale. Presto non tanto

SPONSOR

HEINRICH VON SCHREINER IN MEMORY OF MARY VON SCHREINER

INGRID FILTER

Recognized as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Chopin, Ingrid Fliter is the 2006 Gilmore Artist. The 2004 laureate of the Ferruccio Busoni Competition in Italy, she served as jury president for the 64th Busoni Competition in Italy last Spring. She was awarded the silver medal at the 2000 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and her recording of the complete Chopin Waltzes received five star reviews and was named The Daily Telegraph’s CD of the Week and was chosen as Editor’s Choice in both Gramophone and Classic FM Magazine and was described in Gramophone as setting “a new benchmark for the complete waltzes. From beginning to end, this is among the finest Chopin recordings of recent years.” (Jeremy Nicholas, Gramophone).

Born in Buenos Aires, she divides her time between Europe and the U.S., where she has performed with orchestras including the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Symphony Orchestra. In Europe and Australia, she has performed with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Bergen Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, West Australian Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Hungarian National Philharmonic and Royal Flemish Philharmonic. Ms. Fliter has performed at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Museé d’Orsay, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall and Metropolitan Museum, Cologne Philharmonie, Salzburg Festspielhaus, Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan, and at London’s Wigmore Hall and the Usher Hall in Edinburgh.

© Gary Houlder

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13 Composed 1834-35

In April 1834 Friedrich Wieck welcomed a new piano student, Ernestine von Fricken, into his home in Leipzig, which he shared with his daughter Clara, who was only fifteen but already internationally known as a virtuoso pianist.

Within the family circle, although not living in the house, was another of Wieck’s pupils, one Robert Schumann, an aspiring composer. Although Clara’s feelings for him were deepening, at that time Schumann regarded her as just a friend, and by October had become unofficially engaged to Ernestine. To express his approval, her foster father, Baron von Fricken, gave Robert a set of variations he had composed for his own instrument, the flute. Schumann took the Baron’s theme as the basis for his own set of variations, which after months of effort and many revisions became these Symphonic Etudes: the Baron’s theme, nine variations, two independent pieces, and a finale. It is a big work, expressive and demanding. His biographer Judith Chernaik believes that it was a watershed in his career: Schumann now had the ability “to manage the structure of a long work without suppressing his natural inventiveness.”

Schumann was following in the footsteps of Beethoven, who found the theme and variations structure an ideal vehicle for his most profound thoughts. And like Beethoven, Schumann provided a deeper alternative to the trivial sets of variations so popular at the time. He even marked the theme “grave” in an early draft. Why did Schumann call them “Etudes?” Each one is a study of a particular musical challenge; yet each can stand on its own. Like Chopin’s Etudes of Op. 10 (1830), these too are more suited to the concert hall than the practice room. And why ”Symphonic?”

To indicate that the scale and grandeur of an orchestral symphony could be reproduced magnificently on the piano, an approach modeled by Beethoven and shared by Liszt, Brahms, and later Rachmaninoff.

By the time Schumann had broken off his engagement with Ernestine in 1835, Wieck had become increasingly concerned about Robert’s deepening relationship with Clara, whose career (and whose person) he controlled. He took her on tour and forbade any communication between them. Forced apart, their feelings for each other could only grow. When Clara and her father returned to Leipzig, she reached out in the only way she could – through her public performances. The Symphonic Etudes had recently been published. Clara chose three of them to play in a well-attended concert. She knew Schumann would be in the audience.

In a letter that her maid smuggled to Schumann, Clara wrote about that experience: “Did you not realize that I played it because I knew of no other means to show a little of what was going on inside me?... Didn’t you know that my heart trembled?... You had to see, to feel from my playing what was going on in me.” Schumann, tremendously moved, replied: “The way you played my Etudes – I won’t forget that; they were absolute masterpieces the way you present them – the public can’t appreciate such playing – but one person sitting there, no matter how much his heart was pounding with other feelings, my entire feeling at that instant bowed down before you as an artist.”

Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes open with a complete version of the Baron’s sixteen-measure theme, now reharmonized. Its symmetrical fourbar phrases, singing melodies, rich harmony, and distinctive sections make it an ideal subject for variation, expansion, and transformation.

The performance markings throughout the etudes that follow illustrate their passion and variety: vivace, vivacissimo, agitato, scherzando, presto possible, con gran bravura, allegro brillante, along with andante espressivo, dolce, legatissimo, and morendo (murmuring). The brilliant range of moods, textures, and styles place the composer squarely in the high noon of Romanticism. The music moves us with its beauty, startles us with its originality, amazes us with its virtuosity, and makes us yearn to hear more. No wonder Friedrich Wieck found Schumann threatening. In this kind of music he had more than met his match, and he knew it. Clara would never turn away from this spirit.

The first Etude begins with the voices in imitation in the best Bachian fashion and then becomes a robust march. The second features a passionate melody over the kind of surging accompaniment that Schumann’s contemporary Liszt (and later Rachmaninoff) so loved. The third Etude is one of two that bears no relation to von Fricken’s theme. Brilliant arpeggios in the right hand contrast with a soulful, flowing melody in the left, as warm and earnest as if played on a cello. In the fourth, insistently repeated bouncing staccato chords become even more emphatic. The fifth Etude is a scherzo, fleet and sparkling, honoring Schumann’s friend and colleague Felix Mendelssohn.

The sixth Etude is tumultuous and passionate – con gran bravura indeed (as it is marked). It features syncopation, one hand a half-beat behind the other, with the melody once again ringing out in an inner voice. Brilliant and intense, the seventh features an insistent rhythm (short-long, shortlong), running along in perpetual motion.

The eighth Etude is a sumptuous French Overture in the style of Bach and Handel, full of regal dotted rhythms, profuse ornamentation, and a growling bass. The music soon becomes flavored with Romantic-tinged, rich chromatic harmony –but not more intense than Bach’s own had been. The choice of music in Baroque style is completely fitting for Schumann, a devoted admirer of Bach. The ninth Etude (the other not related to the Baron’s theme) is the only one in triple meter; it is a study of lightningfast repeated chords and octaves covering the keyboard. In the tenth, insistent chords punctuate a restless, relentlessly moving bass. With the eleventh Etude, we enter a new world: a Chopinesque nocturne, a soulful melody over a murmuring accompaniment. Music of yearning and longing, it must have touched Clara’s heart.

The final Etude is not a variation, but an entirely new piece, its melody based on a “Romance” (an aria) from Heinrich Marschner’s popular opera, Der Templer und die Judin (The Templar and the Jewess), based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819) and produced in Leipzig in 1822. The aria’s lyrics conclude with “Proud England, rejoice!” It was Schumann’s tribute to English pianist-conductor-composer William Sterndale Bennett, who was living in Leipzig and had become a dear friend. A singular honor indeed.

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)

Nocturne in B Major, Op. 9, No. 3 Composed 1830

When Chopin arrived in Paris in 1831, he wrote to a beloved teacher back in Warsaw that it was with the intention of doing something new, of fulfilling his “perhaps overblown desire” to create a new world for himself as a pianist-composer.

Although he had been advised to do so, he chose not to write either a symphony or the great Polish opera. He concentrated on the music he cared most about: anything involving a piano. His contemporaries exclaimed about his playing, particularly its matchless beauty of sound and uncanny clarity of inner voices.

Chopin’s hands could “suddenly expand and cover a third of the keyboard, like a serpent opening its mouth to swallow a rabbit whole,” one observed. Although a virtuoso, Chopin came to loathe the spectacle of public concerts. Franz Liszt heard him say, “I am not suited for concert giving; the public intimidate me; their looks, only stimulated by curiosity, paralyze me; their strange faces oppress me,” but he found himself completely at home in the brilliant Parisian salons, where he would play his polonaises, scherzos, sonatas and nocturnes for a discerning audience.

The nocturne for piano solo was introduced by Irish pianist-composer John Field, who published sixteen of them between 1814 and 1836. Liszt admired them greatly: “From their very first sounds, we are immediately transported to those hours when the soul, released from the day’s burdens, retreats into itself and soars aloft to secret regions of star and sky.” Chopin found them to be exactly the right model for his own nocturnes. He brought out his first set (Op. 9) in 1830 and the last sixteen years later (Op. 62). Exquisite miniatures, they epitomize the Romantic era’s emphasis on heartfelt, personal expression.

Nowhere is Chopin’s love of a beautiful voice more apparent. “If you want to play, you must sing,” he told pupils, requiring one of them to take voice lessons.” Next to the salon, Chopin’s natural home was the opera house, where he relished the bel canto operas so popular in Paris at the time. He embellished and transformed his lyrical, supple melodies just as a Bellini or Donizetti soprano would do in an operatic scena. Supporting them is a steady left-hand accompaniment, whose reach extends well beyond an octave, its resonance made possible by the newly developed sustaining pedal. The left hand is the conductor of the orchestra, Chopin told his students; the “study of the pedal takes a lifetime.”

Because of the beauty he bathes us in, the remarkable harmonic sophistication, complex chords, and sudden modulations of his music are made delicious rather than shocking. Robert Schumann was right: Chopin’s music can be described as cannons buried in roses.

Chopin composed the three nocturnes of Op. 9 while living in Vienna, newly arrived from Warsaw, and ultimately going on to Paris. He dedicated them to Mme. Camille Pleyel, the wife of one of his favorite piano makers. In the third nocturne, in B major, serene outer sections frame a turbulent middle section, marked agitato – not a peaceful night. Yet however restless the music, Chopin valued restraint. “No barking,” he told his students. Instead, they should make the piano sing.

Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58

Composed 1844

In the summer of 1844 Chopin’s beloved sister Ludwika joined him at Nohant, the summer home of George Sand. “We are mad with happiness,” he wrote to a friend. Yet composing music during this time was becoming increasingly difficult. Op. 58, the last of Chopin’s three sonatas, was “chiseled slowly and painstakingly from a rich but increasingly recalcitrant vein of inspiration,” Chopin scholar Jim Samson writes. Perhaps it was in part the shadow of Beethoven’s great sonatas that made the stakes so high.

The first movement abounds with melodies, enough for two more sonatas, musicologist Alan Walker believes. It begins abruptly with a heroic martial gesture. Soon, in D major, a melodious theme appears, so vocally inspired that Samson calls it an aria without words. Much of the movement is highly imitative, demonstrating Chopin’s veneration of Bach. As Samson points out, the recapitulation is more an apotheosis than a synthesis of what has gone before. The movement ends in bright B major. Next comes a scampering, contrapuntal scherzo, here an interior movement (as in Beethoven’s sonatas) rather than an independent piece (as were Chopin’s four scherzos). Emphatic octaves lead into the warm, sonorous harmonies of its middle section, music that finds echoes in the piano works of Brahms.

The third movement, although often described as a nocturne, is more a funeral march, musicologist Anatole Leikin suggests, in its duple meter, slow stride, and melodic restraint. Samson describes it as “music suspended in some vast, timeless space.” The brilliant finale, a sonata-rondo in a compulsive 6/8 meter, is driving and relentless. Between each appearance of the main theme are contrasting episodes of plummeting scales. The coda is among the most difficult passages in all of Chopin’s music – “diamond brilliance,” Walker calls it –and brings the sonata to a galloping close.

Described by Chopin’s contemporaries as a “big sonata,” Op. 58 was considered so difficult that it was not performed publicly until January 1866, premiered in Warsaw by Polish pianist Alek Zarzycki. In this demanding work, Samson writes, Chopin had “tackled the historical archetype of the most celebrated and prestigious of the classical forms on its own terms...and emerged victorious.”

©2024 Zaide Pixley

CHAMBER MUSIC

Sphinx Virtuosi with Awadagin Pratt

Awadagin Pratt, piano

Monday, April 29 • 7:30 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, Kalamazoo

QUENTON BLACHE

Habari Gani*^

JAVIER FARIAS Abran Paso (Make Way!)*

ANDREA CASARRUBIOS Herencia*

C. PERKINSON Sinfonietta No. 2 (“Generations”)

I. Misterioso: Allegro

II. Alla sarabande

III. Alla Burletta

IV. Allegro vivace

: INTERMISSION :

XAVIER FOLEY

S. COLERIDGE-TAYLOR

Concertante for Two Double Bass Soloists with String Orchestra, “Galaxy”*

Piano Quintet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 1

I. Allegro con moto

II. Larghetto

III. Scherzo

IV. Allegro molto – Vivace – Tempo I

Awadagin Pratt, piano

^Habari Gani was commissioned with a gift from the Keith and Renata Ward Emerging Composer Fund.

*new work composed for the Sphinx Virtuosi

SPONSORS

THE BURDICK-THORNE FOUNDATION

SPHINX VIRTUOSI

The Sphinx Virtuosi is a dynamic and inspiring self-conducted chamber orchestra and serves as the flagship performing entity of the Sphinx Organization – the leading social justice nonprofit dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts. Composed of 19 accomplished Black and Latinx artists, the ensemble aims is to transform the face of classical music through artistic excellence, pioneering programming, and impassioned community engagement. Since 2004, the Sphinx Virtuosi’s concerts have garnered effusive accolades. The New York Times described the group as “...top-notch...more essential at this moment than ever...a vibrant, assured performance..."

The Washington Post wrote “true to their name, the Sphinx Virtuosi call up the vision of an iconic mythological feline with its immeasurable power, unwavering command, and soulful beauty.” Sphinx Virtuosi is represented in North America by MKI Artists.

VIOLIN 1

Alex Gonzalez

Clayton Penrose-Whitmore

Caitlin Edwards

Sandro Leal-Santiesteban

VIOLIN 2

Patricia Quintero-Garcia

Maïthéna Girault

Thierry de Lucas

Sabrina Bradford

VIOLA

Celia Hatton

Robert Alvarado Switala

Bill Neri

Kayla Cabrera

CELLO

Tommy Mesa

Eri Snowden-Rodriguez

Diana Flores

Lindsey Sharpe

BASS

Jonathan Colbert

Xavier Foley

Kebra-Seyoun Charles

© Kevin Kennedy

AWADAGIN PRATT

Acclaimed for his musical insight and involving performances, pianist Awadagin Pratt was the first student at the Peabody Conservatory of Music to receive diplomas in three performance areas: piano, violin and conducting. In 2023, he became Music Director of the Miami Valley Symphony Orchestra in Ohio, and joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He is founder and Artistic Director of Art of the Piano, which in 2023 launched the first Nina Simone Piano Competition for Black pianists in collaboration with the Cincinnati Symphony and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music – where he served as professor of piano and artist-in-residence for 19 years. The competition was made possible by a grant from the Sphinx Organization, and was won by 2022 Gilmore Young Artist Clayton Stephenson.

Mr. Pratt has performed three times at The White House, and with more than 30 U.S. orchestras. He served on competition juries for Israel’s Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, the Cleveland International Piano Competition, and Ukraine’s Unisa International Piano Competition for Young Pianists in Memory of Vladimir Horowitz. His most recent conducting activities include play-conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh, conducting Porgy and Bess with the Greensboro Opera, and a concert featuring the music of Ornette Coleman with the Bang on a Can organization at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

© Rob Davidson

QUENTON BLACHE (B. 2001)

Habari Gani

Composed 2023

Habari Gani! This luminous opener owes its name to the Swahili greeting exchanged during the celebration of Kwanzaa. The ideals of unity and fellowship form the essence of this orchestral showpiece, where rhythm and dance lithely soar throughout. Featuring the number five in its meter and in its use of the pentatonic scale, Habari Gani springs forward like chatter of the latest news in a sub-Saharan community. On the score, the composer offers: “What’s the news? The news is joyful, exuberant, and wondrous.”

African American composer and cellist Quenton Blache is based in Los Angeles and holds degrees in cello performance and in composition from University of Southern California Thornton School of Music as well as a minor in Chinese. His prolific compositional output is distinct beyond the concert stage and extends to scoring numerous short films and documentaries. A prize-winning cellist, and participant in previous Sphinx Virtuosi tours, he returns to the University of Southern California this season as a featured soloist with the Thornton Symphony. Current projects include pursuing a master's degree in screen scoring and competing in national level chess tournaments. Habari Gani fuses the composer’s Cameroonian ancestral roots and character to form an electric string orchestra debut.

©Maïthéna Girault

JAVIER FARIAS (B. 1973)

Abran Paso (Make Way!)

This expression refers to the way in which certain ‘tangueros’ forcefully speak to their fellow dancers; demanding space on the dance floor to show off the brilliant, lithe choreographies they have prepared. This laconic statement immediately connected to the idea I had in mind when I began to write this piece: musicalize the acrobatic provocations and unrepentant attitude of the dancers and move it through each member of the orchestra allowing for their own unique take on a storied tradition.

It should be said that this piece has nothing to do with Tango, however it does have a repetitive, rhythmic motive that is clearly identifiable as Latin American. Although its exact provenance cannot be pinpointed, I’ve used it many times because it is one with which I connect emotionally due to its powerful, driving pulse. The only difference being that this time I’m not using the guitar, but rather, transporting its characteristic “rasgueo” (strum) to bowed instruments.

Returning to the title...Just as the great Astor Piazzolla unapologetically reinvented the tango as a genre in his country, I too have strived to do the same by working with music and rhythms unique to mine. With that said, I endeavor to do the following: Move the strings of the guitar, the most representative instrument of Chile, to the strings of the orchestra, so that the richness of our musical traditions can be shared with the world.

Abran Paso!

©Javier Farias

ANDREA CASARRUBIOS (B. 1988)

Herencia

Composed 2023

In a work titled Herencia, the Spanish for both "inheritance" and "heritage," it is natural for you to wonder about the roots of the piece itself, and the myriad stylistic threads with which it is woven. However, for this work, my inspiration was not a particular musical "heritage" or genre; rather, it was the artists who would be playing it. I envisioned the remarkable musicians of Sphinx Virtuosi taking the stage to play this piece, and I thought of how each individual has trailing behind them a unique history of unfathomable complexity; an epic that they bring to bear in every moment of performance. I also imagined the way this collection of histories would one day coalesce with a shared intention to illuminate their world — your world — with music. This image was the seed from which Herencia came to be. As you listen, I encourage you to observe this phenomenon as it unfolds on stage, and at the same time to reflect on your own epic, in all its wondrous immensity, and how it has led to you sitting here in this moment.

©Andrea Casarrubios

COLERIDGE-TAYLOR PERKINSON (1932-2004)

Sinfonietta No. 2 (“Generations”)

Composed 1996

Composer, conductor, pianist, and versatile musician Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was named after British composer conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. A native New Yorker, he attended the High School of Music and Art, studied education at New York University, and earned bachelor and master’s degrees in composition from the Manhattan School of Music. He later studied conducting at the Salzburg Mozarteum.

Mr. Perkinson co-founded New York’s Symphony of the New World and became its Music Director. He served as composer-inresidence and music director for the Negro Ensemble Company, the Dance Theater of Harlem, the American Theater Lab, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He taught at Brooklyn College and in Chicago at Columbia College's Center for Black Music Research. In his music, he combined styles from classical music to jazz, blues, and spirituals. His works include sonatas, concertos and symphonies, as well as choral music and scores for movies and television.

The score to his Sinfonietta No. 2 includes the composer’s own description. Its subtitle, “Generations,” seems entirely fitting.

Perkinson writes:

The inspiration for this composition, though non-programmatic, is somewhat autobiographical in that it represents my attempts at what were and are my relationships to members of my family - past and present. While each of the movements is without a strict “formal” mode, an informal analysis of their structures is as follows:

I. Misterioso and Allegro (to my daughter) is based on two motifs: the B-A-C-H idea (in German these letters represent the pitches B-flat, A-natural, C-natural, and B-natural), and the American folk tune

Mockingbird, also known as Hush Li'l Baby, Don't Say a Word.

II. Alla sarabande (sarabande, a 17thand 18th-century dance in slow triple meter) is dedicated to the matriarchs of my immediate family (of which there were for me, three), each of whom contributed a unique form of guidance for life's journey.

III. Alla Burletta (to my grandson). A burletta is an Italian term for a diminutive burlesca or burlesque-type work - a composition in a playful and jesting mood. Thematically, this movement is based on the pop tune Li'l Brown Jug

IV. Allegro vivace. This movement is a loosely constructed third rondo which thematically begins with a fughetta (original melody), has a second theme (African in origin), and a third theme (Mockingbird paraphrased). Once again, the B-A-C-H idea from the first movement is the musical thread that ties these elements together. This movement is dedicated to the patriarchs of my family, known and unknown, past, present and future, for generations.

Sphinx Virtuosi President and Executive Director

Afa Dworkin notes, “How fortunate for us to have been left with such a descriptive intent behind this genius’s work! The Sinfonietta is full of substance, contrast, and beauty. In the Alla Burletta movement, listen for humor in the syncopated pizzicatos from each string section.  The work with its clear jazz influences will lift your spirits, and the surprise ending is sure to leave any listener with a sense of effervescent delight!"

©2024 Zaide Pixley

XAVIER FOLEY (B. 1994)

Concertante for Two Double Basses and String Orchestra, "Galaxy"

Composed 2023

When composing "Galaxy," I wanted to experiment with chord progressions one might imagine hearing when envisioning outer space as frequently portrayed in the media.  Simultaneously, I wanted to build a conversation between the double bass soloists and the selfconducted ensemble.

The intrigue and ethos of the work are to showcase the solo instruments as virtuosic and star-like, which is atypical for most conventional repertoire. While the double bass is not often thought of as a solo instrument, that framing has been important to me as both a frequent soloist and composer. Defying stereotypes and fully exploring the range of possibilities of the instrument is at the core of this concertante. In one way, the title suggests that the dominant solo voices are the brightest stars in the galaxy. In another, I imagine 100 billion stars, each offering a different amount and type of light. That perspective enriches our own understanding of the world and the great diversity of voices and lights that comprise such a rich galaxy. In imagining the different types of light, rather than prescribing the experience, I would love for our audiences to explore each of the sound palates and allow their imagination to take them on a unique sonic journey as they experience this work for the first time.

©Xavier Foley

SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR (1875-1912)

Piano Quintet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 1

Composed 1893

A review in the Croydon Advertiser of an October 9, 1893 concert devoted to the works of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, with the composer at the piano, read: “Mr. ColeridgeTaylor seems quite original in his ideas, the work being full of beautiful characters. Indeed, one could not help being astonished that the work of a young man of but few years’ experience in the musical art…From a musical point of view, the concert was an entire success.”

How did this “astonishing” work come about from such a young composer? Coleridge-Taylor, just eighteen years old, had been a student at the recently founded Royal College of Music for the past three years, where he studied violin, piano, and composition. Among his fellow students were Ralph Vaughn Williams and Gustav Holst. His composition teacher was Charles Villiers Stanford.

Coleridge-Taylor's father, Dr. Daniel Taylor, had returned to his native Sierra Leone to practice medicine, most likely before Samuel’s birth. His mother, an English woman of modest means, named her son after the famous English poet and raised him in Croydon, a suburb of London. As a youngster, Coleridge-Taylor studied the violin and was a chorister in local churches. His studies at the Royal College of Music were underwritten by a local silk merchant who was also the Choirmaster at St. George's Presbyterian Church in Croydon.

Upon his graduation from the Royal College of Music in 1897, Coleridge-Taylor entered into what would be a multi-faceted and successful career. He was a noted teacher, serving as Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music, London. He made three visits to the U.S. (1904, 1906, and 1910), where he toured with the Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, an African American group founded in Washington, D.C. in his honor. He had become a conductor so skilled that by 1910 he was called the “Black Mahler” by orchestral musicians in New York, where Mahler himself had served as conductor of the Philharmonic from 1908 to 1911. Booker T. Washington considered him "the foremost musician of his race."

Perhaps the most famous of his many works are the various choral and orchestral settings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha. Like Dvořák, a composer he admired, Coleridge-Taylor was deeply interested in the stories of Native Americans, even as seen in fiction through a white American’s lens. And he was particularly drawn to the African Americans he met, whether in person or through their writings. The works of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Dubois influenced him profoundly. “I am a great believer in my race,” he wrote.

Coleridge-Taylor’s Quintet, which he designated Opus 1, did not receive another documented performance for at least a century after its 1893 premiere. Inspired by Dvořák and Brahms, it is a big, ambitious work. The turbulent first movement begins with Brahmsian surging melodies; the lyrical second theme richly demonstrates the young composer’s melodic gifts. The second movement, a serene Larghetto, opens with a soulful melody in the cello. After an agitated middle section with a lively piano part, the peaceful melody returns. The third movement, a Scherzo, begins with an insistent dialogue between the instruments, which stands in stark contrast to the folklike Trio. The finale opens with a flourish. With a sudden shift in key, the trio theme reappears, this time posing as the subject of a fugue, which soon becomes motivic play. The Quintet ends with a G-major bang, as dramatically as it had begun.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

SCHUBERT SONATA SERIES I

Paul Lewis, piano

Tuesday, April 30 • 2 pm

Wellspring Theater, Kalamazoo

Artist Conversation • 4 pm

Paul Lewis and Pierre van der Westhuizen

F. SCHUBERT

Sonata No. 7 in E-flat Major, D. 568

I. Allegro moderato

II. Andante molto

III. Menuetto. Allegretto — Trio

IV. Allegro moderato

Sonata No. 14 in A Minor, D. 784

I. Allegro giusto

II. Andante

III. Allegro vivace

Sonata No. 17 in D Major, D. 850

I. Allegro vivace

II. Con moto

III. Scherzo. Allegro vivace — Trio

IV. Rondo. Allegro moderato

SPONSORS

DON FLESCHE IN MEMORY OF GRACE FLESCHE

MARTHA AND SCOTT LARSEN

ARTHUR AND JANET RILEY

Mr. Lewis will also play Schubert sonatas on May 2, 4, and 6.

PAUL LEWIS

Internationally regarded as one of the leading musicians of his generation, Paul Lewis CBE has won awards including the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist of the Year, two Edison awards, three Gramophone awards, the Diapason D'or de l'Année, the Premio Internazionale Accademia Musicale Chigiana, and the South Bank Show Classical Music awards. In 2016 he was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list, and holds honorary doctorates from Southampton University and Edge Hill University.

Mr. Lewis performs regularly as soloist with the world's great orchestras and is a frequent guest at the most prestigious international festivals, including Lucerne, Mostly Mozart, Tanglewood, Schubertiade, Salzburg, Edinburgh, and London’s BBC Proms, where he became the first pianist to perform a complete Beethoven piano concerto cycle in one season (2010). His recital career takes him to venues including London's Royal Festival Hall, Alice Tully and Carnegie Hall in New York, Vienna’s Musikverein and Konzerthaus, the Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Berlin Philharmonie and Konzerthaus, Tonhalle Zürich, Palau de Musica Barcelona, Symphony Hall Chicago, Oji Hall in Tokyo and Melbourne’s Recital Centre.

© Kaupo Kikkas

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

Sonata No. 7 in E-flat Major, D. 568 Composed 1817; revised c. 1826

In a recent interview, Paul Lewis described Schubert’s Sonata in E-flat Major as “an incredibly beautiful, lyrical piece. It doesn’t have the storm clouds or the particular depth you have in the later sonatas, but it’s a big piece, on a grand scale, and it has all the ingredients of what would become dark in his music later on. There’s a sense of longing, ‘sehnsucht,’ which turned into something a little bit more desperate later on but is merely nostalgic in the early pieces.”

Schubert was fully prepared to write such a beautifully composed work. He had enjoyed an excellent education at Vienna’s Imperial and Royal City College, studied composition with Antonio Salieri, immersed himself in the city’s rich musical life, and was already an astonishingly prolific composer. Musicologist Robert Winter points out that before he was twenty, Schubert had written five symphonies, over 300 solo songs, several dozen partsongs, four Singspiele (little operas), four masses, seven string quartets, and innumerable smaller works. Schubert biographer Maurice J. E. Brown noted it was “an outburst of composition unparalleled in the history of music." Now Schubert was ready to tackle the piano sonata, a genre that Beethoven had dominated –and in which his shadow loomed large.

In fall 1816 Schubert moved into the spacious apartment of the mother of a friend, Franz von Schober, where he had the leisure to compose as he wished. He had access to their six-octave piano – a prized opportunity since he never had one of his own. In 1817 a trio of completed sonatas appeared: in March, the Sonata in A Minor, D. 537; in June, the Sonata in E-flat Major, D. 568; and in August, the Sonata in B Major, D. 575. (We hear the second on today’s program.) None was published in his lifetime.

In Schubert’s autographed manuscript of this work, dated June 1817, the sonata was set in D-flat major. At some point it was extensively revised and transposed to E-flat major (the version we hear today). Otto Erich Deutsch, the indefatigable cataloguer of Schubert’s works and the source of their “D numbers,” believed that this revision was completed in July 1817. But Schubert scholar John Reed has made a convincing case, now widely accepted, that Schubert’s revision was done in 1826, in hopes of publication. Reed bases his view on its musical style (more consistent with music of those years) and details of its publication in 1829, one year after the composer’s death, as his Troisième Grande Sonate. It is the only candidate for that designation.

The sonata begins with a quiet figure in octaves outlining the E-flat major triad. In the seemingly endless comparisons of Schubert with Beethoven, this theme has sometimes been likened to the beginning of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony (1803), also in E-flat major, which begins with an arpeggiated version of that same chord. Yet this sonata could not be more contrasting to Beethoven’s symphony in mood and affect. Instead, in its gracefully decorated melodies and elegant proportions, Schubert acknowledges his debt to Mozart, whose works he had studied and performed. Both Schubert and Mozart were exquisite melodists, both brimming with ideas, both writing music in which one melody cascades upon another, both such adventurous harmonists. But Schubert‘s harmonic genius is in a class by itself, with his sudden ventures into other keys, his frequent mixing of major and minor, his surprising juxtapositions of chords and keys.

After the E-flat major opening theme of the sonata-form first movement comes a lilting ornamented melody, the second theme. The development features a coquettish tune in conversation with repeated chords and arpeggios, spinning through changing keys. Both themes return in the recapitulation, more profusely decorated and transformed. The pensive second movement, set in G minor, provides the “sehnsucht” that Lewis described. Its graceful expressive melody reminds us of Schubert’s genius as a songwriter. Midway through, passionate repeated chords and agitated octaves sound an alarm, and are quieted when the gentle opening tune returns. A wistful minuet follows, a dance that was still popular in Schubert’s Vienna. It is an elegant choice, very much in keeping with the mood of the sonata. The charming, lyrical trio explores a gentle rhythmic gesture. The gently flowing last movement is as genial as the first.

At the musical evenings devoted to his music – the “Schubertiades” the composer himself would play his sonatas and piano pieces, join a friend in one of his piano duets, and provide the accompaniment for his songs (often performed by the well-known baritone Johann Michael Vogl). This amiable sonata would have been ideal for such a purpose.

Sonata No. 14 in A Minor, D. 784

Composed 1823

Just as he was about to turn twenty-five, Schubert began experiencing the first symptoms of syphilis, a dreaded disease untreatable at the time that would cast its shadow over the rest of his life. Such a diagnosis was a death sentence, with a life expectancy of no more than ten years. Schubert would have just five.

A year later, still suffering, he wrote to his friend the painter Leopold Kupelweiser: “Imagine a man whose health will never be right again...Imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have come to nothing; for whom the joy of love and friendship

have nothing to offer but pain, at best, whose enthusiasm...for all things beautiful...threatens to vanish, and ask yourself, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?”

As Beethoven had done upon realizing that his deafness would only worsen, Schubert also declared that he would devote himself to his art as an antidote to his anguish. John Reed notes, “Such is the resilience of genius that out of his despair came a whole series of instrumental masterpieces,” among them this remarkable sonata, such an intimate, personal work. Another of Schubert’s biographers, Elizabeth McKay, believes it to have been “one of the darkest of all his compositions, autobiographical in the emotions it expressed of pain, distress, anger, and ill temper, and certainly the grimmest music he had written to date.” A brilliant songwriter who captured the essence of any poem he might set and often interpreted them in the piano part, Schubert was well versed in expressing sorrow and loss in his music. In fact, he had done this so powerfully in this sonata that when he sent the manuscript to the noted Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli for review, Diabelli immediately returned it, saying that such a work had no place in his catalog. (Diabelli would bring it out in 1839, eleven years after the composer’s death.)

In this unusually concentrated work, the thematic material is concise, the treatment dramatic and intense. The sonata is in three movements, the minuet or scherzo movement omitted. Including a “dance” movement would have broken the spell. Schubert wanted this sonata to express exactly what he wanted it to say. The autograph manuscript shows a number of corrections.

The first movement, marked Allegro giusto (fast and in a strict tempo) begins with mysterious hollow octaves, punctuated by silence. They are followed by the plodding, ominous tread of a funeral march, accompanied by a drooping, sighing motif in the right hand and interrupted by ominous rumbles in the bass. In a startling juxtaposition of loud and soft, the octaves return, now double forte and growing in intensity. His recent biographer Brian Newbould points out that nearly a quarter of this movement is made up of a single line in up to four octaves, sinewy and lean. Yet light shines temporarily: musicologist Alfred Einstein calls the comforting second themes of both outer movements “visions of paradise.” They are fragile and transitory, he writes, and quickly extinguished, "dispelled by the return of forceful accents and turbulent music.” The development is devoted to crashing chords and agitated octaves racing along in jagged, dotted rhythms until the opening theme returns, as stark and unsettled as ever.

The tender main theme of the slow movement, set in serene F major, is interrupted by a mysterious ornament in octaves growling in the bass, which only grows in intensity as the movement progresses. After an interlude filled with the repeated chords Schubert so loved, hovering over low bass trills, the central theme returns. Its melody, heartbreakingly beautiful, travels into an inner voice, accompanied by celestial figures in the right hand. The ornament reappears, now tamed and in the softest treble. A last statement of the main theme, now unadorned, brings the music to a peaceful close. Few movements of Schubert “say so much in so small a space,” musicologist Philip Radcliffe has observed.

In the finale, whirling scales tumble over each other, rushing upward, turning back, and racing upward again. Chordal outbursts punctuate the scales before the music gives way to a peaceful second theme.

The octaves return, even more agitated. In an ongoing frenzy the music changes from major to minor, from tranquil to tumultuous, from rage to lyricism. The peace does not last; drama and rage consume the ending. Usually Schubert tempers his sadness with sweetness, but not here. There would be no escape.

Sonata No. 17 in D Major, D. 850 Composed 1825

In the summer of 1825 Schubert went on an extended summer holiday in upper Austria with his friend baritone Johann Michael Vogl. This was not his first summer away with Vogl, but his longest and happiest one. For Schubert, who rarely left the confines of Vienna, this was the holiday of a lifetime, his biographer Brian Newbould believes. Schubert was awestruck, writing that the falls, lakes, and mountains around him were “truly heavenly,” adding that it “deeply moved and benefited me.” The countryside “surpasses the wildest imagination,” he observed. And to his great relief, Schubert was in a period of remission from the syphilis that had blighted his life for the past three years, a remission he hoped (in vain) would be long-lasting. He was in desperate need of such a respite.

A friend who visited him in July 1825 wrote that Schubert “looks so well and strong, is so pleasantly cheerful and so genially communicative that one cannot but be inwardly delighted by it.” He was struck by the composer’s “penetrating intelligence,” reporting that “I have never seen nor heard him like this: serious, profound and as though inspired. How he talked of art, of poetry, of his youth, of friends and other people who matter, of the relationship of ideals to life, etc. I was more and more amazed at such a mind.”

During the final leg of the trip – three weeks in Bad Gastein in the Austrian Alps – the Sonata in D Major was born. It is a major work, brimming with joy: optimistic, self-confident, and bold. Schubert dedicated it to a friend, the excellent pianist Karl Maria von Bocklet, and he had his fingers in mind when he wrote this sonata, Newbould believes, writing that he “forged a work of extravert abandon...[and takes] possession of the keyboard with racy abandon, as if he were writing another symphony.” And in fact, Schubert was doing exactly that: working on what would become his C Major Symphony, D. 994, dubbed “The Great,” and considered by many to be his orchestral masterpiece.

Confident that the sonata would be a success, the composer sent it off to the well-known publisher Mattias Artaria in Vienna, who brought it out the next spring, calling it Schubert’s Deuxième Grande Sonate. It would be one of only three sonatas published in his lifetime. Its success endured: Josef von Spaun, his lifelong friend, described it in his extended obituary of Schubert as “a most original sonata.”

When Robert Schumann reviewed the sonata in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (General Musical Magazine), he wrote of its opening movement, “What a different vitality gushes out of the spirited D major [sonata] – pulse upon pulse, seizing and carrying [us] away!”

Symphonic in conception, this sonata begins with powerful chords. The sounds of an orchestra are not far away. Imagine trumpets, brass, and timpani playing them in D major, the key of triumph, rarely expressed so vividly as in this sonata.

The stunning slow movement is built on two themes, each expanded, decorated, and exquisitely varied, supported by an undercurrent of warmth and vitality. Schubert’s fertile imagination is in full play, as is his harmonic magic.

Such a miniature masterpiece could easily be extracted and played on its own, but is even more effective when embedded in the sonata, framed by the other movements. Schumann loved it, considering it to be “wholly in the Schubert manner, [so] compelling, [so] overflowing that he scarcely can bring it to an end.”

The Scherzo, like the first movement, is symphonic in scope. Brian Newbould describes its insistent dotted-rhythm chords (long-short-long) as having a “Beethovenian toughness,” a quality countered by a lilting rustic dance in the Trio: legato and serene, built on repeated chords, and quintessentially Schubertian. When the Scherzo returns, Schubert does not simply go back to the beginning, as had been the custom, but uses those musical materials to create an entirely new piece. Mixing major and minor, traveling from key to key, miraculous harmonic flights – only Schubert could have written this.

In the last movement, a country dance, Schubert moves from heroic to convivial. It has an air of intentional naïveté. The tune, deliberately simple and marked con delicatezza and leggiermente (lightly), provides a counterweight to the powerful first movement and Scherzo. Cast as a rondo (A-B-A-C-A-coda), its cheerful, skipping theme is immediately recognizable when it reappears between the jubilant episodes that surround it. Yet Robert Schumann was not quite sure about Schubert’s choices: “The last movement hardly fits into the whole and is a bit comical. Who[ever] tried to take the thing seriously would make himself very ridiculous,” he wrote. “It all adds up to humor." Which was surely Schubert’s intention all along. His world was brimming with a joy that needed to be shared.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

Nduduzo Makhathini

Nduduzo Makhathini, piano

Logan Richardson, saxophone

Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere, bass

Francisco Mela, drums

Tuesday, April 30 • 6 & 9 pm Bell’s Eccentric Café, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

SPONSORS

ANNE AND DOUG PETERSEN

NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI

Pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini blends traditional jazz and innovative storytelling, fueled by his upbringing in South Africa, where music is used for motivation and healing. He has performed at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival (South Africa) and the Essence Festival (New Orleans). In 2019, he made his debut at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York, and played Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on The South African Songbook. Dr. Makhathini is head of the music department at Fort Hare University. He is a member of Shabaka Hutchings’s band Shabaka and the Ancestors, appearing on their 2016 album Wisdom of Elders. He has released eight albums since 2014 and in partnership with his wife and vocalist Omagugu Makhathini, created the label Gundu Entertainment. His 2017 album Ikhambi was released on Universal Music South Africa and won Best Jazz Album at the South African Music Awards in 2018. His Blue Note debut Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds was named one of the “Best Jazz Albums of 2020” by The New York Times and was followed by In the Spirit of Ntu in 2022.

© Arthur Diamani

LOGAN RICHARDSON

Composer, bandleader, alto sax player, and producer Logan Richardson grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, where he met legendary drummer Max Roach and at 16, he performed with the Kansas City Symphony. He leads the group SHIFT, featuring his own compositions. His debut recording as a bandleader was the 2007 album Cerebral Flow, and his major label debut, Shift on Blue Note Records, featured Pat Metheny, Jason Moran, Harish Raghavan, and Nasheet Waits. His latest release, AfroFuturism, synthesizes Black American improvised music tradition, and contemporary sounds of the global diaspora, Jazzwise.com has said, “Richardson has proved an indefinable, forward-looking and singularly expressive artist over his five albums to date.”

ZWELAKHE-DUMA BELL LE PERE

Born in South Africa, bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the New England Conservatory, and studies privately with Ron Carter. He has performed and recorded with Christian Scott, Dave Holland, Randy Weston, Dave Liebman, and Jason Moran, and performed at the Monterey, Charlie Parker, Panama, Lagos, Joy of Jazz, and Osaka jazz festivals, and MoMA's "Summergarden" series. He is a teaching artist for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s "Jazz for Young People," Litchfield Jazz Camp & New England Conservatory Jazz Lab. The New Haven Independent said of a 2023 performance, “Bell le Pere’s strong, deep, yet intricate rhythms, anchored by his own muscular bass playing…expressed a wide range of emotion: joy, humor, anger, sadness, resignation, and hope flowed into one another, springing from the same well.”

FRANCISCO MELA

Grammy Award-winning drummer and bandleader Francisco Mela serves as sideman for the Kenny Barron Trio, Esperanza Spalding Trio, John Scofield Trio, Chucho Valdes, and Joe Lovano quintet and Lovano’s two-drummer quintet Us Five, Quincy Jones All Star, Gary Bartz quartet, and the McCoy Tyner Trio. He has also played with Cooper-Moore, William Parker, Ingrid Laubrock, and Bobby Watson. Born in Cuba, he has taught at the Berklee College of Music and leads Francisco Mela and the Crash Trio and Cuban Safari, He has released five albums as a leader: Melao, Cirio, Tree of Life, Fe, and Ancestros. He has served as Artistic Director of the Xalapa Jazz Festival and the Twin Cities Jazz Festival, and earned a 2022 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, with Esperanza Spalding.

© Courtesy of the Artist

© Lauren Desberg

© Courtesy of the Artist

2024 GILMORE YOUNG ARTISTS

Kasey Shao & Harmony Zhu

Wednesday, May 1 • 2 pm

Stetson Chapel, Kalamazoo College

J.S. BACH

F. LISZT

F. CHOPIN

Partita 5 in G Major, BWV 829

I. Praeambulum

II. Allemande

III. Corrente

IV. Sarabande

V. Tempo di Minuetto

VI. Passepied

VII. Gigue

Valse de l'opéra Faust de Ch. Gounod, S407

Kasey Shao, piano

Fantaisie in F Minor, Op. 49

N. KAPUSTIN Variations, Op. 41

Harmony Zhu, piano

: INTERMISSION :

CHRISTOPHER CERRONE

Uncanny Valley

I. Birch Copse

II. Void Pattern

III. Silicon Estuary

WORLD PREMIERE, Gilmore Commission for

S. PROKOFIEV

/ARR. MIKHAIL PLETNEV

A. DVOŘÁK

CONCERT SPONSOR

COMMISSION SPONSORS

FRIENDS OF THE VAN DER

Selections from Cinderella, Op. 87

Cinderella's Waltz

Galop

Kasey Shao and Harmony Zhu, piano

Selections from Slavonic Dances for piano four hands

Op. 72, No. 2

Op. 46, No. 5

Harmony Zhu & Kasey Shao, piano

NANCY F. RICHARDSON IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM C. RICHARDSON

WESTHUIZEN FAMILY

IN MEMORY OF MADELYN AND PIETER VAN DER WESTHUIZEN SOLO

KASEY SHAO

Kasey Shao started playing piano at age six, and made her concerto debut at 12 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézét Séguin. A Young Steinway Artist and 2021 U.S. Presidential Scholar, Ms. Shao studies with Dr. Ran Dank, and Magaret Kampmeier at Princeton University (class of 2025) concentrating in music and pre-med courses. She is the founder and president of the Princeton chapter of Doctors Without Borders, and Music Director of the Princeton Pianists Ensemble. She hopes to become a hand surgeon, helping other musicians keep playing.

Ms. Shao’s competition successes include the Gold Medal in the Classical Music Division of the 2020 National YoungArts Week; first place at the 2020 Overture Awards and 2020 Dubois International Piano Competition; and finalist at the 2022 New York International Piano Competition, 2021 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, 2020 Hilton Head International Piano Competition, and 2020 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. She has performed with the Blue Ash Montgomery Symphony Orchestra and Louisville Orchestra.

HARMONY ZHU

Harmony Zhu began piano study at The Juilliard School at age eight, with teachers including Emanuel Ax and Veda Kaplinsky. A Young Steinway Artist, she was invited to perform for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 118th season opener at age 10, playing under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. She made her debut at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium at age 14, and won the 2021 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. She has appeared as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Orlando Philharmonic, Illinois Philharmonic, Aspen Philharmonic, and Hawaii Symphony.

Ms. Zhu stepped in with less than 24-hours’ notice to perform Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3 with the Illinois Philharmonic in 2022, substituting for the late maestro Alexander Toradze. She was noted by the Chicago Classical Review as having “both the stellar technique and musical insight to have a major professional career,” and “a deeply musical soul and nimble technician [with] probing sensitivity” (Chicago Tribune). She will graduate this spring from the Brearley School in New York, and plans to attend Harvard in the fall.

© Taren Frazier

© Courtesy of the Artist

CHRISTOPHER CERRONE

Acclaimed for his handling of timbre and resonance and a deep literary fluency, Christopher Cerrone is known for balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact and interiority in his multi-Grammy®-nominated music. Mr. Cerrone’s first opera, Invisible Cities, was a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist praised by the Los Angeles Times as “A delicate and beautiful opera.” His recent opera, In a Grove (libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann), jointly produced by LA Opera and Pittsburgh Opera, was called “stunning” by Opera News and a studio version was praised by The New York Times as “Vividly produced…commanding attention until the end.” Other projects include The Year of Silence, based on the story of the same name by Kevin Brockmeier, for the Louisville Symphony; A Body, Moving, a brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony; The Air Suspended, a piano concerto for Shai Wosner; and Meander, Spiral, Explode, a percussion quartet concerto co-commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, the Chicago Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony, and the Britt Festival. Mr. Cerrone holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, and in 2021 joined the faculty at Mannes School of Music. In 2022-23, he was a resident at the Laurenz Haus Foundation in Basel, Switzerland.

PROGRAM NOTES

J. S. BACH (1685-1750)

Partita No. 5 in G Major, BWV 829

Composed in 1730

In 1723 Bach was appointed Cantor at the two biggest churches in Leipzig, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, to serve as composer, organist, choirmaster, and Latin teacher. In 1731, aiming for a broader, more secular audience, he published at his own expense what he called Opus 1: the first part of his magisterial Clavierübung (“Exercise for the Keyboard”), containing six partitas, described as “Clavier Practice, consisting of Preludes, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gigues, Minuets and other Galanteries composed for the pleasurable diversion of music lovers.” On the title page he identified himself only as “Acting Chapel Master to the Court of Saxe-Weisenfels” and “Conductor of the Leipzig Musical Choir.”

The encyclopedic Bach would add three more parts to his Clavierübung: in 1735, a partita and the Italian Concerto; in 1739, four duets; and in 1741, the Goldberg Variations, an exhaustive study of the myriad ways in which a theme can be transformed.

A renowned harpsichordist and organist, Bach knew exactly what he was doing as he led keyboard players through some of the most important styles of the day.

Like its sister, the suite, the Baroque partita is a collection of venerable dances, in two-part form, all in the same key, each with its own distinctive traits. By now far from the dance floor, they had become stylized. Because Bach’s contemporaries knew each type intimately, they would have been intrigued by his imaginative reworkings.

© Jacob Blickenstaff

Partita No. 5 starts with a Praeambulum (a prewalk), full of introductory flourishes. The first dance, an Allemande (in French, “German”) is serious and dignified (as befitted the supposed character of the German people), featuring a profusion of notes in a complex pattern of triplets. In the Corrente (in Italian, current), a sparkling melody dances over a rippling bass. In the Sarabande (from the French court) Bach breaks the norm completely. Instead of a chordal, stately dance, he presents a highly decorated melody, indicating precisely which ornaments to play, combined with the persistent dotted rhythm (long-short-long) traditionally associated with royalty.

Now comes the first of the Galanteries, a Tempo di Menuetta. Pianist Phyllis Rappeport once pointed out that when Bach says “Tempo di” anything, what follows will be a surprise. Instead of elegant, balanced phrases, we hear lively eighth-notes set in scampering cross rhythms. The second Galanterie is a passepied (pass-foot). Traditionally, its focus was not on the elegance of steps, but on the formation of geometric patterns on the floor. Perhaps to honor this practice, Bach employs a hemiola pattern, alternating pairs of measures in the scheme 1-2-3/1-2-3/1-2/1-2/1-2. The highly contrapuntal Gigue (jig), structured almost like a fugue, begins with a six-note subject, stated first in the middle voice, then the top, then the bass, and continuing in three independent lines. When the second half begins, the same theme passes back through the voices, and a musical pile-up brings this delightful work to an end.

FRANZ LISZT (1811-1886)

Valse de l'opéra Faust de Ch. Gounod, S407

Composed 1861

In spring 1861, Liszt was in Paris, back for the first time in seven years. Immensely popular, he was immediately caught up in its social whirl, dining out nearly every evening.

His biographer Alan Walker recounts that on one occasion, “Liszt dined with Gounod, who had brought along with him the score of his latest opera, Faust, a work that was already the talk of the town.”

Liszt, never to be outdone, recalled, “I presented him with his waltz for dessert – to the great entertainment of those listening.” It must have been an occasion indeed to hear the spectacular Liszt at the piano after dinner. Although the piece as printed is full of wildly improvisatory sections, he undoubtedly added his own twist that evening. His students said that Liszt would never play a piece the same way twice, always dazzling and delighting his listeners with his ingenuity. The publication of such works was an important part of his income, yet prospective buyers must have been limited. Such music as Liszt presents can be played (successfully) only by the most virtuosic of pianists.

Charles Gounod’s Faust premiered to much acclaim in Paris in 1859 and steadily grew in popularity. Liszt had a life-long fascination with the story of Faust: his seduction and ultimate destruction of the innocent Marguerite, all under the diabolical influence of Mephistopheles. For this paraphrase Liszt chose from the opera’s lighter fare: the ebullient waltz that ends Act II and the love duet Ne permettez-vous pas (Won’t you allow me?) that Marguerite and Faust sing when they first meet. Both excerpts were so familiar that his listeners could hear exactly how clever Liszt was being in reinterpreting and transforming them. After an introduction in open fifths, comes the waltz in bright D major, traversing the keyboard. With its slightly manic edge, it perfectly captures Mephistopheles’ deadly charm, and leads into the love duet of Marguerite and Faust, an Andantino in A-flat major.

The relentless waltz returns, followed by a bravura coda that brings back a glimpse of the introduction. The work is full of Liszt’s trademarks: pounding octaves, improvisatory-like passages full of filigree, and heart-stopping leaps—yet with a hint of the hidden darkness behind the frivolity.

Musically, Leslie Howard notes, “Gounod is transformed and transcended at a stroke!” Sir Donald Tovey exclaimed that his transcriptions and paraphrases “prove conclusively that Liszt was by far the most wonderful interpreter of orchestral scores on the pianoforte the world is ever likely to see.”

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)

Fantaisie in F Minor, Op. 49

Composed 1841

Chopin’s Fantaisie was composed in the tranquility of Nohant, the country home of George Sand (the pen name of his companion Aurore Dupin). It was his second summer there and a productive one, as such summers usually were. He produced a trilogy of major works: his Third Ballade, Op. 47; Polonaise, Op. 44; and the Fantaisie, which his biographer Jim Samson calls “one of the great works of Chopin’s maturity.” The painter Eugène Delacroix visited Nohant a few summers later and found it to be idyllic. “The entertainment I like involves wandering along garden paths talking about music,” he told Sand, “and spending every evening on a sofa listening to music when God takes over [Chopin’s] divine fingers.”

Chopin was doubly inspired because Ignaz Pleyel, one of his favorite piano makers, had delivered a new piano. Having a good instrument was essential, since Chopin used the piano to compose. Although a virtuoso, Chopin had come to loathe the spectacle of public concerts.

Instead, he found himself completely at home in the brilliant Parisian salons, where he would play his fantasies, polonaises, and nocturnes for a discerning audience. The aristocratic ladies present eagerly signed up as his pupils, paying top prices and performing his pieces. Many of these were dedicated to them — this one to his student, Princess Catherine de Souzzo, the daughter of George III and Queen Charlotte. The fantasia was a favorite genre of the Romantics because of the personal expression it allowed. Its very name implies improvisation: no expectations, no particular form. To achieve that sense of freedom, impeccable craftsmanship is required. Chopin provides exactly that.

The Fantaisie begins with the slow tread of a funeral march, then, with its symmetrical phrases and simple tune, the march becomes a grand opera chorus, quickly followed by the arpeggiations Chopin’s improvising contemporaries so loved. These introduce a sonata – or at least the first part of one. An impassioned melody with a sprawling Chopinesque accompaniment makes up the first theme, a heroic statement the second, and a march-like codetta wraps up the exposition (the first part of a sonata form). Samson points out that this sonata structure is unambiguous, but its altered proportions, so greatly condensed, confirm that the work is indeed a fantasy. A chorale-like “slow movement” breaks up the momentum. The final reprise is not simply the recapitulation of the sonata theme, but a recollection of the entire work.

NIKOLAY KAPUSTIN (1937-2020)

Variations, Op. 41

Composed 1984

Born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Kapustin was trained as a virtuoso pianist firmly rooted in the Russian tradition, shared by Rachmaninoff and Horowitz. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1961 with a degree in piano performance and played, as his graduation piece, Prokofiev’s daunting Second Piano Concerto. In the 1950s, Kapustin became fascinated by jazz, tuning in to the radio program “Voice of America,” hearing jazz pianists perform in Moscow, and listening to bootleg records.

While still a student he formed his own quintet and then joined Oleg Lundstrem’s Jazz Orchestra, a group highly influenced by the music of Duke Ellington. Kapustin stayed with the band until 1972, touring in the Soviet Union and abroad. He recalled, “My eleven years of work with Lundstrem became my second Conservatory, as they involved a large amount of arranging and performing.” Yet Kapustin was swimming upstream as he immersed himself in what was regarded as decadent music and sometimes even banned. To him it was a symbol of freedom.

A prolific composer, Kapustin combined the structures and genres of classical music with jazz harmonies and rhythms and infused them with a Lisztian virtuosity. He wrote in the classic genres for piano: sonatas, etudes, variations, concertos, and a rhapsody for piano and orchestra, twentyfour preludes and fugues, and a set of Etudes. Yet Kapustin himself said, “I am not a jazz musician...I’m not interested in improvisation – and what would a jazz musician be without improvisation? All my improvisations are written, of course, and they became much better; it improved them.”

Canadian pianist Leslie De’Ath notes that Kapustin’s music “could only be composed by one steeped in the experience of jazz performing and improvising, and at the same time could only have been committed to paper by one possessing a solid classical training.”

When Gilmore Piano Master Marc André Hamelin first heard Kapustin’s music, he recalled, “My jaw dropped to the floor. I thought: What is this? This is really rather incredible.” When performing Kapustin’s music, Hamelin notes, “You really have to be able to swing correctly and to negotiate all the crossed accents between the hands.” Yet, he said, “It’s worth the effort.”

Kapustin’s Variations, Op. 41, marked “Medium swing,” consist of a theme with six variations strung together without a break. The theme is a jazz version of the bassoon solo that opens Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The music has the rhythmic intricacies, complex harmonies, and swing of Gershwin, the virtuosity of Art Tatum, a touch of blues and boogie woogie, and a bit of bebop. Punchy chords provide syncopated responses to both stride and walking bass. After a Larghetto variation, in which the theme sings loud and clear, a bravura finale races to the finish.

2024 Zaide Pixley

CHRISTOPHER CERRONE

(B. 1984)

Uncanny Valley

WORLD PREMIERE, Gilmore commission

The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. Forty years ago, he imagined the discomfort that one might feel encountering a robot who looks almost human.

In the nascent age of AI, where we see computergenerated images and text daily, the uncanny valley is very much in the air, so much so that when I showed my wife my ideas for a new composition for two prepared pianos, she described the sounds as an uncanny valley – not quite piano because of the timbral transformation, but also not not a piano. I took her notion and ran with it, imagining a piece that thinks of the uncanny valley in three ways.

The first movement, Birch Copse, takes its title from a drawing of Leonardo Da Vinci’s in red chalk. This drawing gives the impression of a hyperrealistic copse, or small group, of trees. But a single stroke is hard to detect in the dense web of crosshatching. Similarly, the two pianos in this movement play quick, gestural chords on strings muted with poster board putty; sounds that are almost together, though no single note can be traced from the other instrument. Against these gestural chords are a series of bell-like harmonics elicited from the low strings, sounds that are almost in tune, in the uncanny valley of intonation. The second movement, Void Pattern, is a concept from forensics, wherein a physical object like a hand or shoe blocks a blood stain from forming properly. The scientists have to use everything else to figure out what’s missing. Similarly, in my piece, the two pianos play overlapping riffs of harmonics, muted notes, plucked notes, and traditionally struck ones where the perceived “pattern” is never played, but only emerges by implication between the two instruments.

The last movement, Silicon Estuary, draws its title from the ubiquitous AI chatbot known as ChatGPT. When I asked the bot to tell me about some works of art that make use of the uncanny valley, it suggested a piece called Silicon Estuary, by the artist-provocateur Jordan Wolfson. This was useful to me, as Wolfson is an artist I’m interested in, and whose work often has uncanny aspects.

That is, until I realized the piece doesn’t exist—it is a phantom invention of the program. I decided to keep the title as I loved how it described the flowing, 8thnote rhythms that move the music in the movement, like a river opening to a wide, weird sea.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

/ARR. MIKHAIL PLETNEV

Selections from Cinderella, Op. 87

Composed 1940-44

“What I wished to express above all in the music of Cinderella was the poetic love of Cinderella and the Prince, the birth and flowering of that love, the obstacles in its path, and finally the dream fulfilled,” Prokofiev reported. He had begun the ballet in 1940, as a follow-up to Romeo and Juliet (1938), which had been a great success. When Prokofiev and other writers, artists, and musicians were evacuated from Moscow for their safety during the war, he turned his attention to other works: the three great “War Sonatas” for piano and the opera War and Peace. Yet Cinderella stayed on his mind.

Back in Moscow, Prokofiev completed the ballet in 1944, turning some of the music into an orchestral suite and arranging the dances for piano solo. When the war ended, Cinderella was premiered in Moscow on November 21, 1945. Considered a musical symbol of the country’s triumph, it won the Stalin Prize. In 2002 Russian pianistcomposer Mikhail Pletnev created his own Cinderella Suite for two pianos, written for Martha Algerich. They gave the first performance at the Lugano Festival that same year.

“Cinderella’s Waltz” begins when she arrives at the ball, transformed from a kitchen maid into a beautiful woman, and joins the Prince in a grand waltz whose sometimes dissonant harmonies hint at troubles to come. Prokofiev here is at his most melodic and appealing, but still with his unmistakable unpredictability: the angular melodies, the rhythmic bounce, and the piquant harmonies, dissonant yet tonal.

The Galop sets the scene of the prince and his minions searching the world for the mysterious woman whose foot will fit the glass slipper that Cinderella left behind in her hurry to flee the ball. The dance is the perfect realization of its name, which comes from the galloping of horses. Such were the physical demands on the dancers that no galop would last for more than a few minutes. Along with the waltz, it was one of the most popular ballroom dances in the nineteenth century, set for every combination of instruments from solo piano to full orchestra. Prokofiev sets it as a non-stop toccata, then provides a brief respite, as the riders slow down to survey the terrain before resuming their wild chase. All comes to a joyful end, as Cinderella and her Prince live happily ever after.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)

Selections from Slavonic Dances for piano four hands

Op. 72, No. 2

Composed 1886

Op. 46, No. 5

Composed 1878

Until the end of his life Dvořák would refer to himself as “a simple Czech musician,” expressing his deep love of his native country. His biographer John Clapham believes he achieved the “fullest reconciliation of a national idiom with the symphonic tradition, absorbing folk influences, and finding effective ways of using them in orchestral, choral, and chamber music and opera.”

Johannes Brahms first encountered Dvořák’s music in 1877 and quickly became his mentor and friend. Dvořák “possesses the best a musician can have,” Brahms told his Berlin publisher Johann Simrock, sending along some of his music for consideration.

Simrock agreed and commissioned some piano duets, along with an orchestral version: the result was eight Slavonic Dances, Op. 46, completed in spring, 1878. Brahms was right. The work made a splash. A review in the Berlin Nationalzeitung in November 1878 compared it to Brahms’ wildly successful Hungarian Dances. It is “a work that will make its way round the world,” the reviewer predicted: “A heavenly naturalness flows through the music.” And make its way it did. The four-hand version, ideal for domestic music-making, quickly sold out. The orchestral setting became the hit of the 1879-80 musical season in Europe and the United States. It made Dvořák famous.

When in 1886 Simrock asked for a second set of Slavonic Dances, since the first had been such a colossal success, Dvořák demurred: “Doing the same thing twice over is damnably difficult,” he wrote. Simrock

unsympathetically replied: “Whoever has as many tunes in his head as you only needs a few days to shake two books of Slavonic Dances out of his sleeve.” Dvořák’s second set of dances (Op. 72) was just as successful as the first. A dance from this second set comes first on today’s program. Full of nostalgia and longing, its melodies soar above a gentle accompaniment and sometimes make their way into the inner voices. The peppiness and zing of the next dance, the fifth of the first set, make a perfect pairing with this soulful waltz.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

Westward Gabriela Montero, piano

Wednesday, May 1 • 7:30 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU, Kalamazoo

Concert Preview • 6:30 pm

Dr. Beau Bothwell, Dalton Lecture Hall

S. PROKOFIEV

S. RACHMANINOFF

: INTERMISSION :

I. STRAVINSKY

C. CHAPLIN

Sarcasms, Op. 17

I. Tempestoso

II. Allegro rubato

III. Allegro precipitato

IV. Smanioso

V. Precipitosissimo

Sonata No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 14

I. Allegro ma non troppo

II. Scherzo. Allegro marcato

III. Andante

IV. Vivace

Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 36

I. Allegro agitato

II. Non allegro – Lento

III. L'istesso tempo – Allegro molto

Sonata, K. 043

The Immigrant, film with improvised piano score by Gabriela Montero*

*Restored by Lobster Films and Cinetica di Bologna under the aegis of Association Chaplin

© Film Preservation Associates Inc. 2012 © Lobster Films

SPONSORS

PATTI AND BOB HUISKAMP

GABRIELA MONTERO

The visionary interpretations and compositional gifts of Gabriela Montero have garnered her critical acclaim and a devoted following. The New York Times has noted, “Montero’s playing had everything: crackling rhythmic brio, subtle shadings, steely power…soulful lyricism…unsentimental expressivity.”

Recipient of the prestigious 2018 Heidelberger Frühling Music Prize, Ms. Montero’s performance highlights include debuts with the San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony in Tokyo, Orquesta de Valencia, and the Bournemouth Symphony, which featured her as artist-in-residence for the 2019-20 season. Montero also performed her own “Latin” Concerto with the Orchestra of the Americas at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie and Edinburgh Festival, as well as at Carnegie Hall and the New World Center with the NYO2.

Born in Venezuela, Ms. Montero made her concerto debut at age eight in her hometown of Caracas. This led to a scholarship from the government to study privately in the U.S. and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Celebrated for her exceptional musicality and ability to improvise, Ms. Montero is a graduate and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her most recent album, on the Orchid Classics label, features her own “Latin” Concerto and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major, recorded with the Orchestra of the Americas in Frutillar, Chile. In 2008, she received a Grammy® nomination for her album Baroque, and in 2010 she released Solatino, a recording devoted to works by Latin American composers.

© Anders Brogard

SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1952)

Sarcasms, Op. 17

Composed 1912-14

In the second decade of the last century, the set of pieces Prokofiev called Sarcasms was “modern music” to its core. He began composing the work while a student at the St. Peterburg’s Conservatory of Music, the first two in 1912, the last in 1914. When he played a sample for friends, Prokofiev recalled, some would “clutch at their heads: one so as to cover the ears, another to express delight, a third so as to pity the poor author, once so promising.” He was at the perfect age to startle his elders, among them Rachmaninoff, who would later listen to Prokofiev’s Moscow performance of this work in stony silence.

Some called Prokofiev a barbarian, others an enfant terrible, and others a “raging futurist.” In 1925 a leading Moscow critic described him as “something of a wild brawny fellow – a mustang grazing on pastures.” A contemporary described Sarcasms as taunting, terrifying and powerful. When he played it at New York City’s Aeolian Hall in 1920, The New York Times critic wrote, “Mr. Prokofiev juggles with jangling combinations of notes with considerable skill.” It was a time of exploration: Bartók wrote his Allegro Barbaro for piano in 1911, Stravinsky his Rite of Spring in 1913. Prokofiev added an epigraph to Sarcasms: “We sometimes laugh cruelly at someone, but when we take a closer look, we see how pitiful and unhappy the chosen one we laughed at. So, we start to feel uncomfortable; the laughter rings in our ears, but someone is laughing at us.“ Perhaps this is why he would turn to a more accessible style in his Classical Symphony of 1917.

The work is a set of five miniatures that juxtapose violently opposing moods, rapid fire register changes, dynamics, and textures that are frequently set in jarring dissonances.

The first piece, Tempestoso, begins with a tritone pounding away in the bass, an interval so dissonant that it is sometimes called “the devil in music.” A dreamlike interlude precedes the return of the storm. The music of the second, Allegro rubato, is off-beat, tripping over itself, even clownish, traveling off on an unpredictable journey. In the third, “barbaric” outbursts return. This time, an insistent bass rhythm surrounds an introspective middle section, taking us on a wild ride so dissonant that two key signatures are required, one for each hand.

The fourth is marked Smanioso, a term variously interpreted as “yearning” or “raving,” but here with an element of mania, even delirium, expressed in pounding, dissonant triads like those in Stravinsky’s Rite. In the last, Precipitosissimo (as fast as humanly possible), its middle section, marked “irresolute,” begins with a tiptoeing two-note motive, which continues in bass staccato pattern over a furtive right hand. Prokofiev ends with galumphing chords marked lugubre and instructs the pianist to hold the pedal down for the entire last section. Finally, the set slips away as pianissimo bass notes disappear into the lowest register.

Sonata No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 14

Composed 1912

Prokofiev wrote his second sonata in the summer of 1912, at the same time the set of pieces that would become Sarcasms was underway. In both works, the young composer’s distinctive voice rings loud and clear. He continued to compose sonatas throughout his career, from very early works like this one to the three great “War Sonatas” of the early 1940s. With Scriabin’s ten, Prokofiev’s nine sonatas are considered the most significant cycle since Beethoven’s.

In this second sonata, the only one of the nine in four movements, each movement is sharply delineated in style and purpose. The choice of movement types and their placement is traditional, but the musical content is not.

The first movement is both lyrical and dramatic, full of pianistic colors and lyrical melodies juxtaposed to percussive pyrotechnics and drama. It gives a nod to sonata form, with an urgent first theme and lyrical second theme, each explored and developed, and clearly brought back in the recapitulation. Next comes a marchlike, athletic scherzo, whose rapid hand-crossing and leaps make it an Olympian test for the pianist. The clearly differentiated middle section is built on pivoting octaves, like a gymnast on a balance beam. Pianist Barbara Nissman points out that Prokofiev “makes the pianist jump through acrobatic hoops. You can’t just sit still and play. You can’t behave yourself.” The third movement is considered one of the composer's most significant in its depth and meaning. A plaintive melody sings throughout, supported by perpetually murmuring inner voices. Near the end, otherworldly parallel chords appear, a la Debussy, and the movement concludes with a pensive adagio.

Prokofiev ends the sonata with a tarantella, an Italian folk dance whose wild twirling was said to cure a tarantula’s bite. The bustling opening theme reappears regularly, separated by episodes contrasting in meter, keys and tempo. Shifting time signatures throw us off balance, from 6/8 to 2/4 to 7/8; at one point the right and left hands sport contrasting meters. Suddenly, with music marked dolcissimo e molto espressivo, Prokofiev abruptly stops the action. The lyricism of the first movement returns, only to be interrupted by music marked giocoso (joking); sforzando C-sharps are pounded out in shockingly unpredictable intervals. Then off we go into the relentless perpetual motion of the tarantella theme, and this dazzling sonata comes to a rambunctious end.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)

Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor Op. 36 Composed 1913; revised 1931

The last great representative of Russian late Romanticism and inheritor of its tradition of big, virtuosic pianism, Rachmaninoff was a formidable, sensitive performer. His biographer Geoffrey Norris notes that “his playing (like his conducting) was marked by precision, rhythmic drive, a refined legato and an ability for complete clarity in complex textures.” Like Liszt, Rachmaninoff could cut through a forest of notes to find the lush melodies within. Recordings made before his death in 1943 reveal extraordinary artistry. He was central to Russian musical life: an internationally touring pianist, a gifted conductor, a celebrated composer.

Rachmaninoff began his second sonata in Rome in January 1913, completed it at his beloved summer home, Ivanovka, that August, and premiered it in Moscow in December.

Four years later, his world erupted in turmoil: Czar Nicholas was assassinated in July 1917, and the October Revolution took place three months later. Looters were already ransacking Ivanovka and would soon burn it to the ground. His situation was untenable. Seizing an invitation to perform in Stockholm, Rachmaninoff left Russia with his wife and two daughters in December 1917. At age 44, he would begin to build a new life, leaving everything behind.

Rather than trying to reconstruct his career as it had been – composing, conducting, concertizing – “hunting three hares at once,” as Rachmaninoff put it, ”I’m sticking to one.” And that one would be performing, for which he professed “a powerful craving.”

From then on, he maintained an exhausting schedule of concerts, touring in the U.S. and abroad. A week after his arrival in New York in November 1918, Frederick Steinway gave him a piano. A grateful Rachmaninoff wrote, “Dear Mr. Steinway, I am very happy to have the opportunity of using your pianos for my concerts, because I consider them to be perfect in every way.” Among the many places he visited was Kalamazoo. In March 1925 the Philharmonic Concerts, an organization that sponsored a potpourri of traveling performers, brought him to Chenery Auditorium, one year after it opened.

Rachmaninoff set this sonata in the same key as one of his favorites, Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat Minor, with its famous Funeral March. It is a big work for a big pianist, its difficulties equal to those of his concertos (by 1913 he had written three of the four). His approach to piano writing – orchestral, symphonic – echoes that of Schumann, Liszt and Brahms. In the summer of 1931 Rachmaninoff revisited the sonata, substantially rewriting it and taking out 120 bars he considered extraneous. “So many voices moving simultaneously,” he said. It was published as “the new version, revised and reduced by the author” and is the one most frequently played today. (With the composer’s blessing, Horowitz played his own combination of both.)

A tumbling octave-spanning scale announces the scope of the work to come, a gesture entirely fitting to begin a concerto. The tender second theme takes us into another, quieter world. Shifting harmonies, fluid rhythms, and more scales mark the development. The recapitulation is signaled by an exact return to the opening bars, and a coda, at first agitated, slowly dies away. Rachmaninoff’s “lyrical inspiration is matchless,” Norris points out, and perfectly exemplified by the yearning theme of the second movement.

In its middle section, a new melody rings out like a bell, as high repeated notes soar over a murmuring accompaniment. The fiery finale’s wild, surging opening is interrupted midway by a soaring melody, and a bravura coda brings the sonata to a close.

In 1912, one year before this brilliant work was composed, Prokofiev brought out his own second sonata, and in 1914 his Sarcasms. Rachmaninoff’s sonata could not have been more contrasting. Prokofiev, a promising upstart eighteen years his junior, pointed to the future. Rachmaninoff kept true to his north star: the deeply moving, romantic music of his inheritance. We are all in his debt.

IGOR STRAVINSKY (1881-1971)

Sonata, K. 043

Composed 1924

The 1925 Festival of the International Society of Composers of Music, a gathering of Stravinsky’s most significant fellow composers, hosted the premiere of tonight’s sonata, with the composer at the piano. Present at the performance were the sonata’s dedicatee, the Princesse de Polignac (patron of Debussy and Ravel), Serge Diaghilev, Leoš Janáček, Arturo Toscanini, Cole Porter, and Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg walked out. Others shared that disappointment, complaining that Stravinsky, composer of the monumental Rite of Spring (1913), was no longer “serious,” that he had become a pasticheur, one who merely copies from others.

How could it be, they must have wondered, that Stravinsky had written this little piano sonata that had more than a whiff of the music of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart? Yet, despite the work’s wit and elements of parody, Stravinsky was indeed deeply serious.

He was searching for new ways to express himself – as were they all, recoiling from the horrors of the Great War and the hyper-emotionalism of late Romanticism. In what The New Yorker critic Alex Ross calls a pan-historic conversation across two centuries, Stravinsky was borrowing from the past and flipping it into something completely new. This approach came to be called neo-classicism, sometimes dubbed ‘Back to Bach.’ “It offered a clean slate to a shell-shocked world,” Ross writes.

“I have used the term sonata in its original sense, deriving from the word sonare (to sound),” Stravinsky reported. He explained in his 1936 autobiography that “in borrowing a form already established and consecrated [the sonata], the creative artist is not in the least restricting manifestation of his own personality. On the contrary, it...stands out better when it moves within the definite limits of a convention.”

Throughout his long career, Stravinsky was able to adapt other idioms for his own purposes without ever losing his own identity or particular voice. A “special kind of kleptomania,” he called it, and a highly unusual one.

Although Stravinsky employs the three-movement format preferred by Haydn and Mozart, he gives the first and last movements no “Allegro” or “Vivace” headings, no vague suggestion of a tempo. Instead they are both assigned a metronome marking: Quarter note = 112 [beats per minute]. Absolute precision, supreme objectivity.

The first movement is almost entirely in two voices, just like much of Bach’s keyboard music. The hands move against each other with complete independence, rhythmically unpredictable, traveling briskly along. Although the movement begins and ends with a snatch of C major, dissonance supersedes tonality.

The Adagietto’s highly decorated, cantabile melody could be straight out of a Bach suite, uncannily reminiscent of movements often called “Aria.”

It soon meanders far afield, sometimes going completely off the rails. If this is neoBach, he surely has lost his way. A series of left-hand hiccups, treble trills, and even more decoration bring us back home. The relentless motoric rhythm of the finale suggests machines in action (a favorite device of the time). With a tip of the hat to tonality, flavored with a heavy dose of irony, Stravinsky ends the sonata with the most basic of triads: C major.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN (1889-1977)

The Immigrant Released 1917

Ms. Montero will complete this performance with an exhibit of her remarkable talent in real-time improvisation, applying this unusual skill to a thirty-minute screening of Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 film The Immigrant.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

SCHUBERT SONATA SERIES II

Paul Lewis, piano

Thursday, May 2 • 2 pm

Wellspring Theater, Kalamazoo

F. SCHUBERT

Sonata No. 15 in C Major, D. 840

I. Moderato

II. Andante

III. Menuetto. Allegretto — Trio

IV. Rondo. Allegro

Sonata No. 13 in A Major, D. 664

I. Allegro moderato

II. Andante

III. Allegro

Sonata No. 16 in A Minor, D. 845

I. Moderato

II. Andante poco mosso

III. Scherzo. Allegro vivace — Trio. Un poco più lento

IV. Rondo. Allegro vivace

SPONSORS

ELIZABETH BURNS AND ROGER ZINSER

JOANNA AND SCOTT DALES

ALFRED GARCIA AND SANDRA EDWARDS

Please see Mr. Lewis’s biography on page 77.

Mr. Lewis will also play Schubert sonatas on April 30, and May 4 and 6.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

Sonata No. 15 in C Major D. 840 Composed 1825

Although Schubert never owned a piano himself, in the spring of 1825 he gained access to a good one. It belonged to his friend, the painter and composer Wilhelm August Rieder. Made by the Viennese builder Anton Walter, it was a fine instrument with six octaves and two pedals (sustaining and una corda, the soft pedal). The two friends worked out a happy arrangement for using it: if the curtains to Rieder's apartment were open, then Schubert could enter freely, but if they were not, then Rieder needed his privacy, either for painting or composing. A set of Rieder's preludes and fugues published the next year by the eminent Viennese firm Diabelli were “respectfully dedicated to the esteemed composer Franz Schubert.” It was the only such inscription he would receive in his lifetime.

Since Schubert used the piano to compose, he seized the moment. In April, he began to write a sonata in C major. He completed the first two movements, ambitious in their scope. He also finished the Minuet and Trio, except for the last phrases. But he abandoned the Rondo finale halfway through – and thus the sonata. Even though incomplete, the C major sonata is a remarkable work. Schubert’s biographer Brian Newbould believes that it came from a “wellspring of super-confident invention,” already bubbling up. He calls it a “spacious, visionary, epic, and daredevil harbinger of the new thinking” in sonata design.

Why would the composer set it aside? Perhaps it was because of the new ground that this sonata was breaking. Each of its four movements challenges expectations and makes major changes to the sonata form concept, including a wayward and unconventional approach to tonal schemes.

Musicologist Christopher Gibbs suggests that since Schubert was taking such an untraditional approach to sonata form and the sonata genre, he simply didn’t know what to do next. Or, perhaps with his debilitating illness now in remission, Schubert believed he had time to come back to this sonata should he wish to. Besides, he had a better idea: composing a new sonata in A minor which ends today’s program. Perhaps the “Reliquie,” for all its merits, and problems, served as the launching pad for that work.

The first movement of the “Reliquie” begins with a four-measure phrase outlining a C major triad, followed by four measures of soft chords. This central theme is immediately followed by bass octaves in a distinctive rhythm pattern (long-long-short-long), which leads into the second theme, marked by long phrases. Thus Schubert lays out the elements of the first movement quickly and efficiently. In the development section, the hands exchange versions of the opening bars, contrasted with emphatic chords and octaves. Toying with expectations, he offers two false recapitulations in the “wrong” keys, first presenting the main theme in B major, then in F major, and finally, with an emphatic, accented statement, in the “proper” key of C major. Presenting the central theme in such faraway keys – in major, in minor – gives the music a feeling of spaciousness, like opening a door into a new room.

The C-minor second movement is a rondo (the main theme keeps coming back around, separated by contrasting episodes) in an A-B-A-B-A pattern. The opening theme is a little piece all on its own, in two repeated parts, first chordal, then with octave leaps. The first episode spins along in triplets, interrupted by bass octaves before the spinning returns.

The main theme returns, clearly stated but more agitated. The second episode is an expanded, complex version of the first. Finally “A” comes back in an abbreviated version and brings this elaborate slow movement, packed with melodic and rhythmic ideas to a close.

Schubert’s innovative spirit shows itself clearly in the Minuet and Trio, whose traditional structure had long been honored – but, for the minuet, not in this sonata. Normally, a minuet would be in two parts, each repeated exactly, and in the home key of the sonata. But here, Schubert chooses the “wrong” keys and varies the repeats: Instead of C major, he chooses A-flat major, then A major, then G-flat major, and finally E major, writing out each of the repeats in these separate keys. Finally, at the end, he simply gives up. The Trio, on the other hand, although in G-sharp major, is straightforward and charming, setting the Minuet’s experiments in high relief.

The finale presents the knottiest problem. It simply “lacks the weight to clinch the matter,” John Reed believes. Perhaps this was not the best material to build on – a theme built of repetitive triplet scales and loud percussive chords.

Although Schubert calls the finale a rondo, it is not totally clear where he was heading – perhaps into a sonata form? Midway through, the manuscript stops without revealing an answer.

In 1839, eleven years after Schubert’s death, his brother Ferdinand gave Robert Schumann the autograph manuscript of this sonata. Schumann, a great admirer of Schubert, dubbed it “Reliquie” – Schubert’s “relic.” In 1861 F. Whistler of Leipzig brought it out as Schubert’s “last sonata,” and also called it “Reliquie.” The last of his sonatas it was not, but the name stuck.

Sonata No. 13 in A Major, D. 664

Composed 1819

In the summer of 1819, the 22-year-old Franz Schubert and his friend, baritone Johann Michael Vogl, took an eight-week holiday to the ancient town of Steyr in Upper Austria. Schubert was transfixed, reporting that “the country is heavenly.“ Indeed his circumstances were nearly perfect. He had access to a piano and time to compose, enjoy the surroundings, spend time with friends, and make music. Among the enthusiastic amateur musicians of the town was eighteen-year-old Josefine von Koller. Schubert wrote to a friend that she is “very pretty, plays the pianoforte well and is going to sing several of my songs.” At the end of his retreat Schubert presented her with a new piano sonata, today’s beautiful work, which perfectly reflects those peaceful, idyllic days. As musicologist John Bourman observes, this sonata “breathes the mountain air” and gives voice to Schubert’s youthful contentment. That same summer he composed the “Trout” Quintet, which shares the sonata’s amiable key of A major and is based on one of his most beloved songs, Die Forelle. Sir András Schiff believes that to understand Schubert’s piano music, you must start with his songs. This sonata is directly linked to one of them, Hänflings Liebeswerbung (The Linnet’s Serenade), D. 552 (1817).

Despite the work’s sunny disposition, its ease cannot be achieved without mastery of its subtle technical challenges. Josefine must have played the pianoforte very well indeed. The first movement is in a straightforward sonata form, beginning with an easy-going tune over a burbling accompaniment, shaped in a succession of perfectly balanced phrases and dipping from time to time into meditative minor chords.

Triplets lead into the second theme, which starts in the home key of A and soon migrates to E major. After a short development section in which Schubert leads us into delicious faraway harmonic paths, the main theme takes us back home.

The nearly monothematic second movement captures the hush of the forest. Its soft opening chords topped by a simple melody create a kind of conversation. The theme makes a lovely reappearance in G major, now accompanied by triplets, and the music meanders back to a tranquil reprise of the beginning. The last movement suggests a sprightly country dance, complete with an eight-measure bagpipe drone. A measure of silence sets up both appearances of the second theme, as if, pianist Phyllis Rappeport observed, the music runs into a wall, and then Schubert says, “Let’s dance again.” The coda adds a splash of minor, one of the touches that makes Schubert’s music so unforgettable. The song that prefigured this movement, “The Linnet’s Serenade,” is also in A major and 6/8 meter, with the same rippling accompaniment. Marked Lieblich (lovely), the song’s opening lines, “Softly smiles the sun, mildly blow the western winds,” perfectly capture the delightful mood of this sonata as it celebrates a summer in the Austrian Alps.

Sonata No. 16 in A Minor, D. 845

Composed 1825

Schubert began his Sonata in A Minor, D. 845, in April 1825, less than a month after he abandoned the “Reliquie,” and completed it by the end of May. It would be the first of his piano sonatas to be published, brought out as his Premiere grand sonate by Pennauer in Vienna in March 1826. It received a warm welcome. One of the most important reviews it received appeared in the prestigious Leipzig journal Allegmeine musikalische Zeitung (General Musical Magazine). This the first extended public notice of any of Schubert’s instrumental works.

The reviewer gave a detailed account of the sonata, praising its “freedom and originality” and describing its tone as “suppressed but sometimes violently erupting in somber passion, alternating with melancholy seriousness.” He believed that the sonata could “probably be compared only with the greatest and freest of Beethoven sonatas.”

High praise indeed. The reviewer added, “We are indebted for this uncommonly attractive also significant work to Herr Franz Schubert, who is, we hear, a still quite young artist of and in Vienna.” Aiming high, Schubert had dedicated it to Archduke Rudolph, a significant patron of music in Vienna, especially that of Beethoven.

Upon the work’s completion, Schubert and his friend J. M. Vogl set off on another holiday in Upper Austria. Bowled over by the magnificent scenery and mountain air, with his disease in remission and delighted to find that his music was becoming known, Schubert had what Brian Newbould calls the vacation of a lifetime. The two friends spent their final three weeks in Bad Gastein, one of Austria’s premiere spas, where Schubert was inspired to write yet another sonata, this one the joyous work in D major, D. 850, that we heard on the first program.

On the way home Schubert and Vogl visited Kremsmünster, a Benedictine monastery, where they played some of his music for (and with) the monks. Schubert described the occasion in a letter home to his parents:

“In Upper Austria...I played [the variations from my new two-hand sonata] myself, and apparently not without an angel over my shoulder, because a few people assured me that under my hands the keys became like voices.

If this is true I am really pleased, because I can’t stand this damnable chopping that even quite advanced pianists indulge in. It pleases neither the ear nor the spirit.”

The first movement is full of contrasts, unexpected turns, and surprising key changes. The unmistakable opening theme, in octaves that outline an A minor triad, is made piquant by a small ornament followed by soft chords. Robert Schumann described it as “so still, so dreamlike, it could move [one] to tears.” Uncharacteristically, Schubert never puts this theme into major, knowing that this would destroy its character. It is followed by a distinctive rhythmic motif in octaves and brisk chords. These two ideas form the basis of the movement. Christopher Gibbs points out that whenever the main theme reappears it stops the action: it is itself “an object of contemplation.” In the development section, antiphonal treatment between the hands, trading statements of the theme with emphatic chords, suggests a symphonic approach. One of Schubert’s biographers, Elizabeth McKay, suggests that we imagine a conversation between strings and woodwinds.

The Allegmeine musikalische Zeitung reviewer compared the slow movement in C major to those of the late, revered composer Franz Joseph Haydn. It begins with a chordal theme, in symmetrical phrases and in two parts, each repeated. An ideal vehicle for what is to come: five ingenious variations with an “increasing efflorescence of short notes,” as Newbould puts it.

In the first, the theme floats above an active left hand. In the second, it becomes an ebullient melody accompanied by a simple bass. In the third, the change to darker C minor is highlighted by stern octaves and passionate chords.

In the fourth, whirling triplets surround the theme. C major returns in the final variation, and the serene, repeated chords so beloved by Schubert fade away into a soft coda.

In the Scherzo, a quick, darting rhythmic motif provides exactly the right bite after the lengthy slow movement. The second half moves from the home key of A minor into wild chromaticism. Next, the friendly, comforting trio gently swings along in serene F major, the picture of rustic simplicity. Schubert instructs that it be played mit Verschiebung (una corda: with the soft pedal). Then back, da capo, to the Scherzo, exactly as it first appeared. The sonata concludes with a restless rondo built on a perpetually moving theme marked pp and ligato (light but still connected). The music travels from key to key and from texture to texture, moving from the main theme to emphatic octaves and chords to melody with accompaniment and back to the bustling first theme. The work ends as dramatically as it began.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

Gerald Clayton Trio

Gerald Clayton, piano

Jermaine Paul, bass

Justin Brown, drums

Thursday, May 2 • 6 & 9 pm

Bell’s Eccentric Café, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

SPONSORS

ALLKINS FAMILY FOUNDATION

GERALD CLAYTON

Six-time Grammy®-nominated pianist-composer and Blue Note recording artist Gerald Clayton’s innovative approach to jazz has charmed audiences and critics everywhere. Son of bass player and composer John Clayton, he earned a BA in piano performance at University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music under the instruction of Billy Childs, following a year of intensive study with NEA Jazz Master Kenny Barron at The Manhattan School of Music. In 2006, Mr. Clayton won second place in the Monk Institute of Jazz Piano Competition. Since then, he has collaborated with artists including Diana Krall, Roy Hargrove, Dianne Reeves, Terence Blanchard, John Scofield, Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Bernstein, Ambrose Akinmusire, Gretchen Parlato, Ben Wendel, the Clayton Brothers Quintet and bandleader Charles Lloyd. Mr. Clayton is Director of Next Generation Jazz Orchestra and has served as Musical Director for Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour. The New York Times has said of him, “A remarkable player, he seems to understand what our ear wants.”

JERMAINE PAUL

A performing bassist, educator, producer and composer from Compton, California, Jermaine Paul studied violin, cello, and voice before finding the double bass in elementary school under the tutelage of Harvey Estrada. As a jazz studies major at California State University-Northridge, he studied with Gary Pratt. He has played, toured, and recorded with MC Hammer, Macy Gray, Barbara Morrison, Lido, ¿Téo?, Jaden Smith, Munyongo Jackson, Redveil, Julius Rodriguez, and Diane Reeves. Jermaine has performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall (LA), Giovanni Arvedi Auditorium (Cremona, Italy), Nice Jazz Festival (Nice, France), and North Sea Jazz Festival (Rotterdam, Netherlands).

JUSTIN BROWN

Born to a gospel musician mother, Justin Brown started drumming at age two in church and began formal education at ten with the Young Musicians Program at the University of California and later Berkeley High School. He moved to New York in 2004 to attend Juilliard on full scholarship, withdrawing on the first day of classes to pursue career experience over education. Mr. Brown has been learning from and playing with musicians including Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride, Stefon Harris, Esperanza Spaulding, Terence Blanchard, Josh Roseman, Gretchen Parlato, Eldar, Yosvany Terry, Gonazalo Rubalcaba, Bilal, Ledisi, Ambrose Akinmusire, Thundercat and Vijay Iyer. In 2018 Brown released his debut album as a bandleader for his group NYEUSI.

© Ogata

© Courtesy of the Artist

© Courtesy of the Artist

SOLO PIANO RECITAL

Olga Kern, piano

Friday, May 3 • 7:30 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU, Kalamazoo

Concert Preview • 6:30 pm

Dr. Lia Jensen-Abbott, Dalton Lecture Hall

L.v. BEETHOVEN

Variations on a Theme by Salieri, WoO 73

R. SCHUMANN Carnaval, Op. 9

Préambule — Pierrot — Arlequin —

Valse noble — Eusebius — Florestan —

Coquette — Réplique — (Sphinxes) —

Papillons — Lettres dansantes —

Chiarina — Chopin — Estrella —

Reconnaissance — Pantalon et Columbine —

Valse allemande — Intermezzo: Paganini —

Aveu — Promenade — Pause —

Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistins

G. GERSHWIN

E. WILD

: INTERMISSION :

Three Preludes

I. Allegro ben ritmato e deciso

II. Andante con moto e poco rubato

III. Allegro ben ritmato e deciso

Virtuoso Etude No. 7, based on Gershwin’s “Fascinatin’ Rhythm”

S. RACHMANINOFF Moment musicaux in E Minor, Op. 16, No. 4: Presto

Étude-Tableaux in G Minor, Op. 33, No. 8 (1914 ed.)

Morceaux de fantaisie, Op. 3, No. 4: Polichinelle

Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42

Two Transcriptions

I. Lilacs by Sergei Rachmaninoff

II. Hopak by Modest Mussorgsky

M. BALAKIREV Islamey, Op. 18

SPONSOR

FAYE LUSCOMBE IN MEMORY OF ROBERT LUSCOMBE

OLGA KERN

Known for a vivid onstage presence, dazzling technique, and keen musicality, pianist Olga Kern launched her U.S. career by winning a Gold Medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2021 – the only woman in the 50 years to do so. She has performed steadily across the U.S. ever since, last season appearing with the Baltimore, Colorado, and Dallas symphonies, Minnesota Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Filarmónica de Gran Canaria, and Ireland’s National Symphony Orchestra. Engagements in the 2023–24 season include performances of Rachmaninoff’s monumental four concertos and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the Austin Symphony and with Virginia Symphony Orchestra, a nationally broadcast New Year’s concert with the Czech Philharmonic, and tours of South Africa and Asia.

Ms. Kern has served as a jury chair of several high-profile competitions, including her own, the Olga Kern International Piano Competition, of which she is Artistic Director. A dedicated educator, she has been on the piano faculty of the Manhattan School of Music since 2017, and in 2019, she was appointed the Connie and Marc Jacobson Director of Chamber Music at the Virginia Arts Festival. She also established Aspiration, a foundation that provides financial assistance to musicians around the world.

© Ludek Smerda

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Variations on a Theme by Salieri, WoO 73 Composed 1799

The illustrious Viennese publishing firm Artaria & Company knew a good thing when they saw it: a new Theme with Ten Variations by the up and coming Ludwig van Beethoven, built on a comic opera by one of the city’s most popular composers, Antonio Salieri. The opera, Falstaff, premiered in January 1799; Beethoven’s variations were published a few months later. Vienna, the “city of pianos,” provided just the right market of amateur performers eager to purchase the latest works. For Beethoven, this was an important source of his income, and he made this set as appealing as possible. It was dedicated to one of his pupils, the Countess Babette de Keglevics, a fine pianist and the dedicatee of his first piano concerto, written the year before.

For the theme Beethoven chose a comic duet: La stessa, la stessissima (The same, the very same). Its balanced structure – two equal halves, the first repeated, four symmetrical phrases – provides the perfect framework. Except for the last variation, Beethoven keeps to that format. He begins with a clear statement of the theme, in cheerful B-flat major. Then come the variations: chromatic scales; pattering sixteenth-notes; staccato chords in one hand, the other a half-beat behind; minor mode, slow and soft; bright and bouncy in major; sweeping scales; delicate ornamentation; saucy grace notes. The last variation, ranging far afield, features hand crossings, cadenza-like scales, and trills, and then the theme takes a final bow.

Beethoven was a renowned improvisor, often using a familiar theme as a springboard for variations that his contemporaries considered astonishing. In one improvisation contest (a favorite entertainment), he so vanquished a rival pianist, Joseph Steibelt, that he left the city, to return only when Beethoven was elsewhere.

This set is without an opus number (WoO), which Beethoven reserved for more serious works.

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Carnaval, Op. 9

Composed 1834-35

At the time Carnaval was begun in 1834, Schumann was balancing two relationships. One was with the talented Ernestine von Fricken, a promising pianist who had come to Leipzig to study with Friedrich Wieck. The other was with Wieck’s daughter Clara, a virtuoso at age fifteen and beginning to think that Robert might be more than just a friend. Ernestine, nineteen, was a charming young woman. They soon became unofficially engaged, but it would not last. Robert and Clara would marry six years later, despite her father’s implacable opposition. In Carnaval, completed a year later, both women are celebrated.

Carnaval is made up of twenty miniature portraits set in a kaleidoscopic sequence of moods, tempos, and keys. Schumann gives each a title, some clear, others ambiguous. In addition to Ernestine and Clara, Schumann conjures up Chopin and Paganini, as well as his alter egos Eusebius and Florestan. He calls on characters from commedia dell’arte, developed in Italy in the seventeenth century, improvised by stock characters wearing masks. As he began this extended work, Schumann realized that some of the letters in his name matched those of Ernestine’s hometown: Asch. To turn these letters into music, Schumann used German nomenclature: for the letter “A,” the pitch

A natural; for “S” (Es in German), E-flat; for “C,” C-natural; and for “H,” B-natural. Some version of these pitches is heard in every section of Carnaval but the first.

(Bach frequently used this same device with his own name: B-A-C-H.)

Schumann begins with a “Praeludium,” its emphatic rhythms heralding important things to come, its lightheartedness introducing a party.

Two characters from Commedia dell’Arte next appear: Pierrot, the sad clown, with drooping music that seems to go nowhere, and Harlequin, the acrobat, who can’t quite get his balance, despite his tricks. A lilting “Valse Noble” follows.  Next come characters from Schumann’s own imagination, representing the two sides of his character: the wise Eusebius, and the unruly Florestan. In tinkling music full of beckoning gestures, a flirtatious Coquette enters the scene. Commenting on her charms is a coda-like reply (“Réplique”). Schumann inserts a section called “Sphinxes” (rarely played), in which the pitches A-S-C-H appear in three configurations, set in double whole notes.

Next the impetuous “Papillons” (butterflies; revelers in this instance) whirl into view.

Schumann makes his foundational device crystal clear in “Dancing Letters” by adding “A.S.C.H.S.C.H.A.” to the title.  Now comes “Chiarina,” a deeply felt portrayal of young Clara marked passionata. The lyrical melody and sprawling bass of the next vignette, “Chopin,” reflect Schumann’s admiration of that composer. “Estrella” (Ernestine again) returns for a last yearning glance, marked molto espressivo. A “Reconnaissance” allows a chance to consider this diverse band of characters.

Next comes Pantalone, the crotchety old husband chasing his young wife Columbine in non-stop sixteenth notes. A “Valse Allemande” (German waltz), is interrupted by music conjuring up the violin virtuoso Paganini, leaping arpeggios depicting his devilish skill on the instrument.

An “Aveu” (confession) prepares us for the “Promenade,” described by Schumann as an armin-arm walk with one's partner at a ball.

A "Pause" prepares the triumphant Finale, a victorious “March of the Davidsbündler” (the League of David, introduced in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the journal he founded). A fanciful group of his invention, it represents the true art of music, united against the Philistines. Among those in the League were Mendelssohn, Clara Wieck, and of course Schumann himself, representing the legacy of Beethoven and Schubert; among the Philistines were Rossini and Wagner. The March gets faster and faster, the League triumphs, and Schumann’s Carnaval comes to a brilliant end.

Clara immediately took to the work, performing it in her recitals as early as 1836.  Carnaval remained one of her favorites. When Schumann was dying, she played it to comfort herself. Liszt called it “one of the greatest works I know.”

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1899-1937)

Three Preludes Composed 1926

In February, 1924, Paul Whiteman and his Jazz Orchestra put on a ground-breaking concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music.” It was intended to demonstrate that jazz (and its sister, the blues) could be combined with classical music to make an exciting new style perfectly suited to the times. The star of the show was George Gershwin at the piano playing Rhapsody in Blue, which had been billed as a jazz concerto and composed for the occasion. These Three Preludes, written two years later, made exactly that same point.

Gershwin premiered his “Jazz Preludes” (as they were first called) in a December 1926 concert at New York City’s Roosevelt Hotel.

Kay Swift, fellow Broadway composer and friend, was there and reported, “They were swell pieces, and he played them beautifully, with a lot of spirit and determination.” They were published the next year, the only ones of his piano concert pieces to come out during his lifetime. Gershwin loved them, Swift said, and would play them at every opportunity, never happier than when at the piano. The first, marked “fast, rhythmic and decisive,” opens with a melody straight out of the blues, soon joined by chords in what a critic at the concert called “vigorous, syncopated jazz rhythms.” In a 1930’s radio interview, Gershwin described the second prelude as “a sort of blues lullaby.” Its expressive vocal line, supported by a spare, chordal bass and abounding in “blue notes,” finds itself completely at home within the twelve-bar blues framework. The third prelude swings along in bustling urban rhythms that are irresistible.

Few events were more shocking to the musical world than Gershwin’s sudden death from a brain tumor in 1937. His biographer Richard Crawford writes that his “unique outlook and talent…made Gershwin irreplaceable when death claimed him before his 39th birthday.” He was “still considered ‘young’ and ‘promising’ by his contemporaries and destined by fate to remain ever so.”

EARL WILD (1915-2010)

Virtuoso Etude No. 7, based on Gershwin’s “Fascinatin’ Rhythm”

Arranged 1973

While still in his twenties, George Gershwin had already become a leading songwriter and soughtafter composer of Broadway shows. His 1924 show “Lady Be Good!” starring Fred and Adele Astaire put his name in lights. “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” its hit song, celebrated the new, popping rhythms –distinctly American – that Gershwin captured so well. Wildly popular, it quickly became a standard of the American song repertory.

George frequently played it as a solo piano piece. The tune, with its “fascinatin’ rhythm,” was immediately recognizable, even without his brother Ira’s ingenious lyrics. The virtuoso pianist-composer Earl Wild added runs, quick register changes, and other frills and flourishes to make it a pianistic showpiece. His version appeared in his second book of “Virtuoso Etudes” based on Gershwin songs (the first in 1954). The last line of the song says it all: “Fascinating rhythm, oh, won’t you stop picking on me?” You can’t get that rhythm out of your head, which, of course, was the Gershwin brothers’ intention.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)

Three Pieces

Moment musicaux in E Minor, Op. 16, No. 4: Presto

Étude-Tableau in G Minor, Op. 33, No. 8 (1914 ed.)

Morceaux de fantaisie, Op. 3, No. 4: Polichinelle

Composed 1892-1911

Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42

Composed 1931

Two Transcriptions

Lilacs by Sergei Rachmaninoff

Composed 1913-1914

Hopak by Modest Mussorgsky

Composed 1924

By the 1890s Rachmaninoff had become central to Russian musical life: a composer praised by Tchaikovsky, a gifted conductor, and an internationally-known pianist. And what a pianist he was! New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg believes that with his “marvelous, infallible hands,” he had one of the most impressive techniques in pianistic history and a musical elegance that “ennobled everything he played.”

Only the greatest of singers could shape a phrase as beautifully, Schonberg writes.

The six Moments musicaux, Op. 16 were composed at Ivanovka, the Rachmaninoffs’ beloved summer home. The fourth, marked Presto, fast and impassioned, calls up the music of Chopin, its bravura left hand driving forward in insistent scales with the same intensity as his “Revolutionary” etude.

By adding the word Tableau to the title of his Op. 33 Études (composed summer 1911, again at Ivanovka), Rachmaninoff indicates that they are far more than simple pedagogical exercises. Rather, they can be considered “study-pictures,” or, more accurately, “mood paintings.” He refused to give them programmatic titles, instead advising pianists to “paint for themselves what the music most suggests.” In the eighth, an elegiac Chopinesque nocturne, a nostalgic melody floats above a sprawling bass. Music should be “unendingly obedient in trying to create beauty,” Rachmaninoff believed. Here we have a perfect example of his luxuriant lyricism.

Polichinelle was one of Rachmaninoff’s first published piano pieces, written when he was just nineteen. A well-known character popular across Europe, beginning with 16th-century commedia dell’arte, Polichinelle (the French version) goes under many names: in England, Punch; in Italy, Pulcinella; in Russia, Petrushka. Rachmaninoff expresses Polichinelle’s volatile character with extremes: clashing chords, abrupt gestures, octave-spanning scales. He is the “the immortal and unhappy hero of all the fairs in all countries,” as Igor Stravinsky put it, who surely knew this piece. In his own Petrushka ballet (1911), he portrays the puppet with the same cascading triads marching up and down the keyboard that Rachmaninoff uses here.

MILY BALAKIREV

1836-1910

Islamey, Op. 18

Composed 1869

In the summer of 1869 Mily Balakirev –pianist, composer, conductor, teacher – deliberately set out to write the most difficult piano piece ever, one that would surpass even those of the ultimate piano virtuoso Franz Liszt, a composer he greatly admired. Although as a pianist Balakirev was skilled enough to play Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, Islamey was far beyond even his own abilities, by his own admission – and indeed those of many pianists. (Scriabin would later injure his right hand practicing the work.) Islamey was quickly taken up by Liszt, probably the greatest pianist ever, who must have mastered it with ease. It became the first Russian piano piece to enter the mainstream concert repertoire.

Islamey is subtitled “An Oriental Fantasy,” exploring as it does the folk tunes and dances from the far reaches of the expanding Russian Empire. The opening theme, discovered by the composer on a trip to the Caucasus Mountains in the 1860s, gave the work its title. “It must have been the originality of the first theme, and my deep impressions of the Caucasus reflected therein,” Balakirev later recalled, “that lent my composition its distinctive flavor and drew upon it the attention of the great Liszt. This probably explains why, as I hear, it is so popular abroad.”

The furiously-paced outer sections feature rapid-fire repeated chords and octaves, set in thick textures that seem to call for more than ten fingers.

The luxuriant middle section was inspired by a love song Balakirev heard at Tchaikovsky’s home that summer of 1869, sung by Armenian baritone Konstantin de Lazari. It would provide exactly the right complement to the percussive tune and rhythms he had in mind for his new piano piece.

In December 1869 the virtuoso pianist Nikolai Rubinstein premiered Islamey in Moscow. In 1902 Balakirev added ossia passages to the work, alternatives to its most challenging sections. In 1908 Ravel set out to surpass the original, declaring that he would write a piece even harder than Islamey. The result was Scarbo, the last movement of his ground-breaking Gaspard de la Nuit. Whether Ravel’s terrifying piece or Balakirev’s “oriental” adventure is more difficult is a matter of debate. What is crystal clear is that such feats of pianistic virtuosity continue to amaze and entertain us and to challenge the most accomplished of pianists.

© 2024 Zaide Pixley

2024 STULBERG COMPETITION MAY 17 & 18, 2024 | KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN A STEP TO GREATNESS

2024 STULBERG COMPETITION JUDGES THE GRYPHON TRIO

WWW.STULBERG.ORG

SCHUBERT SONATA SERIES III

Paul Lewis, piano

Saturday, May 4 • 2 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU, Kalamazoo

F. SCHUBERT

Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, D. 537

I. Allegro ma non troppo

II. Allegretto quasi Andantino

III. Allegro vivace

Sonata No. 9 in B Major, D. 575

I. Allegro ma non troppo

II. Andante

III. Scherzo. Allegretto – Trio

IV. Allegro giusto

: INTERMISSION :

Sonata No. 18 in G Major, D. 894

I. Molto moderato e cantabile

II. Andante

III. Menuetto. Allegro moderato – Trio

IV. Allegretto

CONCERT SPONSOR

ROSEMARY WILLEY

Please see Mr. Lewis’s biography on page 77.

Mr. Lewis will also play Schubert sonatas on April 30, and May 2 and 6.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, D. 537

Composed March 1817

Sonata No. 9 in B Major, D. 575

Composed August 1817

Sonata No. 18 in G Major, D. 894

Composed 1826

When the two early sonatas on today’s program were written, Schubert considered himself fully prepared as a composer. Chosen as a chorister at age nine at the Imperial Court Chapel of the Habsburg family – he had a fine singing voice – he was able to attend the Imperial and Royal City College, tuition waived, room and board provided. His years there provided him with the finest education Vienna could offer, save that reserved for aristocrats. He was first violinist and sometime conductor of the student orchestra, which played Haydn, Mozart, and early Beethoven symphonies. He played quartets (sometimes his own) with his music-loving family. He was a chorister and soloist, singing the finest sacred music of the time in Vienna’s best churches. He was a habitué of Vienna’s four opera houses. And he was able to arrange private study in composition with Antonio Salieri, Kapellmeister at the royal court.

Although his compositional output had been astounding to this point, Schubert had yet to complete a single piano sonata. By 1817 Beethoven, a generation older, had turned that genre into a vehicle for his most profound thoughts and had completed twenty-seven of his thirtytwo sonatas: ground-breaking, powerful works. Schubert, who spent his life in Beethoven’s shadow and admired him greatly, honored that marvelous heritage. Yet he had to find his own voice and express himself in his own particular way. It was not for lack of trying, as the manuscript fragments of individual movements and incomplete sonatas attest. He was feeling his way carefully.

In her recent biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley notes that Schubert’s struggle to formulate his piano sonata principles is evident in these attempts. Musicologist Alfred Einstein believes that Schubert’s determination “to wrestle with the sonata” marked his coming of age.

A turning point came in fall 1816, when Schubert was able to free himself from his duties as assistant teacher at his father’s school and move into the spacious apartment of the mother of Franz von Schober, a lifelong friend and supporter, where he had the leisure to compose a much as he wished. He stayed for a year. And he had unlimited access to their piano, a full six octaves. This was a prized opportunity, since Schubert never had an instrument of his own. In 1817 a trio of completed sonatas appeared: in March, the Sonata in A Minor, D. 537; in June, the Sonata in E-flat Major, D. 568; and in August, the Sonata in B Major, D. 575. (We heard the second of these on the first program. We hear the first and third on today’s.) None was published in his lifetime. In fact, at that point, Winter notes, Schubert “had not yet received a single public performance in Vienna, a single public notice in a newspaper, or enjoyed a single publication.” That would only gradually change.

Throughout his short life, Schubert was repeatedly compared to Beethoven, often unfavorably. Yet if in 1802 the 32-year-old Beethoven had gone ahead with the suicide he had contemplated when he realized his deafness would become permanent, we would have no “Appassionata,” “Waldstein,” or “Hammerklavier” sonatas, no Fifth Symphony, no late quartets, no Missa Solemnis, works that are indispensable staples of the repertoire.

Schubert expert Christopher Gibbs points out that at the time of his death, Schubert, not yet thirty-two, left a legacy of works (Deutsch lists nearly 1000) that would ultimately put him alongside Beethoven. Indeed, the graves of those two great composers are now next to one another in Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof, each marked simply with their names.

Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, D. 537 Composed 1817

Schubert’s Sonata in A Minor is the first of his completed sonatas and the first of three in A minor, all of them contrasting in mood and purpose. Its first movement combines power with poetry, his recent biographer Brian Newbould believes, with “an abundance of imaginative detail, and an impetus that never fades.” The emphatic opening establishes the work’s authority. Then a restless rhythmic motive takes us to the second theme, where mysterious bass repeated notes support changing harmonies above, a device that would become even more important in sonatas to come. The capricious development section, full of dynamic contrasts, breathless pauses, and harmonic surprises. The recapitulation comes in D minor instead of A minor – the “wrong” key for a return to the opening material, a formal twist Schubert enjoyed. At the very end, he takes the main theme back home to A minor in a terse coda. Schubert, the quintessential songwriter and dramatist, creates a small comedy in the Allegretto second movement. It is set as a rondo with a theme that keeps coming back around, juxtaposed to two contrasting sections.

At first, the main theme is set as a simple tune. After an episode built on arpeggios, the tune returns, now a legato melody supported by a perpetually moving bass. Then comes a mockserious march in D minor, the left hand creeping furtively along. Finally, the theme comes back, now a lovely song in right-hand octaves.

(But its possibilities are not exhausted: eleven years later Schubert will bring it back in the last movement of his Sonata in A Major, D. 959, which we will hear on the final program.) The last movement, a spirited rondo full of surprises, provides a vibrant ending to this engaging work.

Although this sonata, along with its cousins in E-flat major, D. 568 and B major, D. 575, would have been perfect for Vienna’s many enthusiastic amateur pianists to play, none of the three were published in Schubert’s lifetime.

Sonata No. 9 in B Major, D. 575

Composed 1817

Schubert’s Sonata in B Major is the last of the three completed in the piano-rich year of 1817. He has once again adapted the form to his own idiom. It is buoyant and light-hearted, as befits a young composer with great hopes. The first movement’s heroic beginning sets the tone with emphatic dotted rhythms (long-short-long). The exposition travels through four keys in rapid succession: from B major to G major, to E major, then settling in F-sharp major with a second, skipping theme. In the development, jagged leaps, sudden contrasts of forte and piano, and harmonic shocks add to the drama. As with its predecessor, the A-minor sonata, the recapitulation here too begins in the “wrong” key – in this case E major – before Schubert eases us back home.

Alfred Einstein describes the slow movements of these early sonatas (here an Andante in E major) as “extended songs, in which melody, harmony and sound spring from a state of spiritual happiness.” Schubert begins this one conversationally, speaking in symmetrical phrases separated by breaths.

Expanded and varied, these rich musical sentences are made richer through what musicologist Einstein terms “harmonic exuberance.” A punchy, quickly moving Scherzo in G major follows. A close cousin to the ländler, a lively German dance that had moved from the country into town, it couldn’t be more cheerful. Next comes the trio, murmuring like a little brook, one of the nature pictures that Schubert painted so vividly. The finale, marked Allegro giusto (fast, in strict meter), is another country dance, playful, entertaining, and what Einstein calls “engagingly undignified.” Musicologist John Reed thinks it likely that Schubert revised this sonata for possible publication in 1828, keeping its fresh, effervescent style, unaware that his death would come before the year was over. The sonata was not published until 1846, brought out by Diabelli in Vienna and taking its place among the many other Schubert works that remained unknown until decades after his untimely death.

Sonata No. 18 in G Major, D. 894

Composed 1826

When asked by a reporter in London’s Guardian newspaper (March 12, 2012) to choose the piece by Schubert that meant the most to him, Paul Lewis replied: “Just one? I'd probably go for the G Major Piano Sonata. He wrote a great deal of dark music, particularly during the last two years of his life, and although there's always some hope and light, this is unusual.

It's more optimistic, lighter than the other works written in that period...Schubert always has a real intimacy and tenderness, but there is something very personal about this – even that first chord. If I could have only one note, I'd pick that first chord.” The chord in question – a G major triad – was undoubtedly familiar to Schubert’s contemporaries. It is almost identical to the one that opens Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (1804): the same key, the same register, the same intense stillness.

To begin a sonata this way is a bold gesture and marks a self-confident composer sure of his powers, secure in his own voice. Alfred Einstein called it Schubert’s most perfect and most individual sonata. Yet such individuality was not always understood.

When considering some of Schubert’s music, Leipzig publisher Heinrich Probst explained to him that “the public does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious procedures of your mind’s creations.” But in Vienna Tobias Haslinger, a discerning composer-publisher who also brought out Beethoven’s works, accepted the challenge. Concerned that the G Major Sonata was too long to be sold in its entirety, Haslinger released its four movements as separate items, calling the first movement a “Fantasie,” and labeling the next three individually in hopes of increasing their popularity. The choice of “Fantasie” was apt: it was a genre beloved of the Romantics, a free form, carrying no expectations that it be a sonata movement or anything else.

Haslinger published these four “pieces” in April 1827, seven months after their completion. It was not until later that they were finally brought together as the Sonata in G Major, D. 894. One of only three works published in his lifetime, it caught the attention of the press. A Leipzig critic praised it: “The composer, who has made for himself a numerous following by not a few excellent songs, is capable of doing the same by means of piano pieces.”

Yet the review also warned: “Beethoven appears to us to be in a class by himself alone...so in truth he should not be chosen as an absolute model, since anyone who desired to be successful in that master’s own line could only be himself.”

In other words, tread lightly. Schubert scholar Christopher Gibbs points out that in other reviews of Schubert’s works, two words appear frequently: “original” and “Beethoven.” He “was praised for the former and repeatedly compared to the latter,” Gibbs notes, a comparison he had to live with all his life. He was also “gently chastised” for his harmonic adventures (one of the things that makes him so beloved) and his “excesses.” (The piano accompaniments for his songs, which fully capture the mood of the text rather than simply supporting the singer, were regularly criticized in that way.)

The Sonata in G Major was dedicated to Josef von Spaun, a lifelong friend, supporter, and frequent host of Schubertiades. Those who heard this expansive sonata on those magical evenings would have had time to savor every aspect of a chord, a gesture, leisurely explored by the composer himself at the piano. “In order to move freely, Schubert needs space,” Gilmore Piano Master Alfred Brendel declares, taking issue with Robert Schumann’s tongue-in-cheek remark about Schubert’s “heavenly length.”

Two ideas dominate the opening movement: the first, the chordal theme that opens it so memorably; the second, a dancing melody with accompaniment. These two ideas are gradually transformed, not by thematic development, but in conversation. The first slips magically from major to minor, then major again; the second provides a cheerful distraction. Suddenly in the development section Schubert opens the veil of fear and sadness, and then, as the movement ends, quietly closes it back again. There is careful craftsmanship under all this poetry. Schubert’s autograph manuscript at Vienna’s Royal College of Music reveals that the slow movement, a D-major Andante, was rewritten at least once, and in the revised version a theme once central was then rejected.

Here gentle sections are juxtaposed with vehement, haunting music that inhabits another world, its stark contrasts and forceful percussive chords completely unexpected. Brendel describes this exactly: “Haydn springs surprises, while Schubert, I think, allows himself to be surprised.”

The B-minor third movement, although called a minuet, seems more an Austrian ländler than that stately eighteenth-century dance. Schubert, a native Viennese, excelled at writing dances and composed at least 400, in styles that readily found their way into his sonatas and other instrumental music. In the trio, now in sunny B major, a peaceful melody creates the most beautiful simplicity.

In this rustic finale, as in all good rondos, the cheerful main theme is unforgettable. It is set against two contrasting episodes. The second, much longer than the first, traverses new harmonic landscapes. In this last movement, just as he had done in the sonata’s opening bars, Schubert takes us back to Beethoven. Its opening theme is a conscious reference to that of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 31, also in G major: in the same register, with the same kind of decorations. The sonata ends with five repeated G-major chords, reminding us of its opening bars. However present the echoes of Beethoven have been, this great sonata stands fully on its own. Robert Schumann considered it to be “Schubert’s most perfect work, in form and conception.”

When this work was completed in 1826, only the miraculous last three sonatas, written shortly before Schubert’s death two years later, remained to be written. Despite their glory, they would not be published until 1839, eleven years after their composition, and they comprise the final program in this series.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

Kenny Barron Trio

Kenny Barron, piano

Endea Owens, bass

Savannah Harris, drums

Saturday, May 4 • 6 & 9 pm

Shaw Theatre, WMU, Kalamazoo

Artist Conversation • 5 pm

Kenny Barron & Gilmore Director of Jazz Seth Abramson, Gilmore Theatre Complex Atrium

Program will be announced. There will be no intermission.

SPONSOR

KENNY BARRON

National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Kenny Barron has released over 40 albums and performed with legends including Chet Baker, Stan Getz, and Buddy Rich. He was a music professor at Rutgers University for more than 25 years, and inducted into the American Jazz Hall of Fame in 2009. His ability to mesmerize audiences with his elegant playing, sensitive melodies and infectious rhythms may be why the Los Angeles Times named him "one of the top jazz pianists in the world.” The Philadelphia native started playing professionally as a teen, moving to New York City at 19, where he freelanced with Roy Haynes, Lee Morgan and James Moody, upon whose recommendation Dizzy Gillespie hired Barron in 1962 without hearing him play a note. After five years with Dizzy, Mr. Barron played with Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine, Milt Jackson, and Buddy Rich. The early 1970s found him working with Yusef Lateef, who Mr. Barron credits as a key influence in his improvisation skills. His duo album with Stan Getz during the late 1980s, People Time, led to the first of 13 Grammy® nominations. He consistently wins jazz critics and readers polls, and was inducted into the American Jazz Hall of Fame in 2005. He is a seven-time recipient of Best Pianist by the Jazz Journalists Association.

© Philippe Levy Stab

ENDEA OWENS

Composer and bassist Endea Owens has been mentored by Marcus Belgrave, Rodney Whitaker, and Ron Carter, and has toured and performed with artists including Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Holliday, Diana Ross, Rhonda Ross, Solange, Jon Batiste, Jazzmeia Horn, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Steve Turre. A 2018 Juilliard graduate, she plays with Stay Human, the house band for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She is an Emmy, Grammy®, and Peabody award-winner, and her work can be heard on Jon Batiste’s album We Are. She founded The Community Cookout initiative, which brings hot meals and free music to communities in need, and served as the 2023 MAC Music Innovator with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. She is the curator for the National Arts Club and also a fellow for “Jazz is Now!” with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. Ms. Owens’s debut album Feel Good Music was released in 2023.

SAVANNAH HARRIS

Drummer, composer and producer Savannah Harris was raised by musician parents, gravitating towards the drums at an early age. She has toured with jazz luminaries Cecile McLorin Salvant, Christian McBride, and Kenny Barron, and worked with artists including Georgia Anne Muldrow, Helado Negro, Nick Hakim, KeiyaA, and Standing on the Corner. Most recently, she collaborated with Angelika Niescier and Tomeka Reid on Beyond Dragons, released on INTAKT Records. Her newest project is ØKSE, a collective with Mette Rasmussen, Petter Eldh, and sound artist Val Jeanty. Her solo drum performance piece, With Inner Sound, Truth, was commissioned by Issue Project Room as a tribute to composer Ruth Anderson. She cites her work with Geri Allen, Jason Moran, Ambrose Akinmusire, Immanuel Wilkins, Joel Ross, and Or Bareket as defining and central to the development of her voice on the drums.

© All Arts

© Courtesy of the Artist

CHAMBER MUSIC

Gabriela Montero and the Calidore String Quartet

Gabriela Montero, piano

Jeffrey Myers, violin

Ryan Meehan, violin

Jeremy Berry, viola

Estelle Choi, cello

Sunday, May 5 • 2 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU, Kalamazoo

Concert Preview • 6:30 pm

Dr. Beau Bothwell, Dalton Lecture Hall

L.v. BEETHOVEN String Quartet Op. 18, No. 5

I. Allegro

II. Minuet – Trio

III. Andante cantabile con variazioni

IV. Allegro

GABRIELA MONTERO Canaima: A Quintet for Piano and Strings WORLD PREMIERE, Gilmore commission for Gabriela Montero

: INTERMISSION :

A. DVOŘÁK

CONCERT SPONSORS

Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81

I. Allegro ma non tanto

II. Dumka. Andante con moto

III. Scherzo (Furiant). Molto vivace — Poco tranquillo

IV. Finale. Allegro

WILLIAM AND MELINDA SCOTT

LIVESTREAM SPONSORS

THREE RIVERS MANHATTAN CLUB

COMMISSION SPONSOR

GABRIELA MONTERO

Please see Ms. Montero's biography on page 93.

CALIDORE STRING QUARTET

The Los Angeles Times has described the Calidore String Quartet as “astonishing,” their playing “shockingly deep,” approaching “the kind of sublimity other quartets spend a lifetime searching.” The New York Times noted the Quartet’s “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct.”

Highlights of the 2023-24 season include return appearances at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, People’s Symphony in New York, and a collaboration with violist and Stulberg Competition Gold Medalist Matthew Lipman and harpist Bridget Kibbey to premiere a new work by Sebastian Currier. Last season, they joined the Emerson String Quartet on their farewell tour in the Mendelssohn Octet and performed at Carnegie Hall alongside Anne-Sophie Mutter in a memorial concert honoring André Previn.

Founded at the Colburn School in Los Angeles in 2010, the Quartet first made international headlines as the winner of the $100,000 Grand Prize of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition. It was the first and only North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship.

© Marco Borgrevve

LUDWIG

VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

String Quartet Op. 18, No. 5

Composed 1798-1800

An article in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (General Music Magazine) of May 1810 declares, “It is impossible to hate someone with whom you have once seriously made music; and those who have…joined together in playing quartets are good friends for the rest of their lives.” Perhaps this is why in fall 1798 Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven’s most important patrons, gave him a commission for a set of quartets. For Beethoven, a freelancer in Vienna, the support from this influential, wealthy nobleman was of critical importance. The Prince, a violinist and cellist, may have hoped to play the quartets himself. Certainly they would have been heard at his imposing palace, where he had created a salon grand enough for private concerts (even accommodating a small orchestra). Beethoven would later dedicate the “Eroica” Symphony, the Triple Concerto, the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, and other works to this generous benefactor. At the same time, the Prince had also commissioned six quartets from Franz Joseph Haydn, the most famous composer in Europe, more than a generation older than Beethoven, and for a time his teacher. The quartets of Haydn and of his dear friend Mozart had transformed the genre from accessible music for amateurs into compositions of remarkable craftsmanship and deep expression. Because of their work, Beethoven biographer Maynard Solomon writes, the string quartet had come to be “the most elevated, expressive, and learned genre of the Classical style.” Musicologist Lewis Lockwood notes that writing quartets had become “a test of compositional ability for young composers, a way of showing their skill in writing idiomatically for four equally important parts.”

In such a transparent texture, he adds, a composer cannot use “fillers or patchwork to hide deficiencies of imagination or dull material.” Maybe that was why Beethoven had put off writing his own quartets until his late twenties. The stakes were high.

Beethoven gained his hard-won virtuosity as a quartet composer through very hard work, Lockwood writes. The multiple drafts in his sketchbooks reveal that it “cost Beethoven intense effort...[and] confirms the exceptionally high standards he associated with this genre.” Beethoven knew that his inaugural quartets would need to stand up to close scrutiny. At first they had a mixed reception. A contemporary wrote that the quartets of Op. 18 “must be played often and very well, as they are very difficult to perform and not at all popular.” Yet they soon joined the works of Haydn and Mozart in the canon they had established.

The fifth quartet of Op. 18 was inspired by Mozart’s String Quartet No. 18, K. 464, one of six dedicated to Haydn, which Beethoven had painstakingly copied out for his own study. He chose the same key, A major, and, like Mozart, made the minuet the second rather than the third movement, reversing the more typical order. The first movement, light-hearted and buoyant, trips along in a lively 6/8 meter. Its short, punchy theme is well suited to “development,” easily broken down into its component parts, as Beethoven loved to do. In the Menuetto, usually a stately dance, the emphasis is on counterpoint and imitation. It begins as a duet between the violins, which is then taken up by viola and cello. The offbeat sforzando accents in the robust Trio make it a sprightly country dance.

A set of variations comes next, its theme in two parts, each repeated. The initial gesture, six notes descending, then going right back up, becomes each variation’s calling card. In the first, the theme travels from cello to first violin. The second features elaborate treble coloratura. In the third, murmuring violins are punctuated by the two lower instruments. The fourth variation, in the contrasting key of F-sharp minor and chordal rather than imitative, provides a lovely moment of introspection. The galloping fifth variation leads into an elaborate coda. The quartet ends as enthusiastically as it began with a hefty finale in sonata form.

Beethoven would go on to write more quartets: the magisterial “Razumovsky” Quartets of Op. 59, Op. 74 (“Harp”), Op. 95 (“Serioso”); and the five late quartets, still regarded as among the greatest works in the genre.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

GABRIELA MONTERO (B. 1970)

Canaima: A Quintet for Piano and Strings

Composed 2023-24

In environmental news emanating from South America, the Brazilian rainforest tends to take the lion’s share of headlines. Right-wing governments are perceived as the flouters of global ecology targets, while the left claims environmentalism as a core concern.

But Amazonia traverses Brazil’s northern border into Venezuela, a country whose “leftist” dictatorship shows scant regard for the ecological concerns of progressive movements in the northern hemisphere. In short, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has presided over the criminal destruction of large tranches of the Canaima National Park - a World Heritage Site that includes the Angel Falls - and the catastrophic, chemical poisoning of its waterways.

Many indigenous people, whom Chavismo swore to represent, have lost their lives and livelihoods in the savage pursuit and trading of Canaima’s vast mineral wealth.

The first movement of ‘Canaima; A Quintet for Piano and Strings” opens with a quotation from an indigenous Jivi song recorded by the Venezuelan explorer Charles Brewer-Carías in 1970. The song provides the leitmotif for an elegiac homage to the region and its indigenous people, as it winds its way, river-like, throughout the work. A light, but ambiguous second movement Scherzo suggests both innocence - a people as-yet undisturbed by the outside world, untouched by dark forces - and the ritual, repetitive processes of cooperative work necessary for group survival.

The contemplative third movement evokes the timelessness of the majestic Tepuihouse of the Gods to the indigenous Pemón people - a table-top mountain formation that dominates the geological character of the Gran Sabana, and Canaima National Park in particular. We are reminded of the sacred dominion and permanence of nature in one of the world’s most ancient landscapes.

Human encroachment dominates the chaotic and violent fourth movement ostinato, as order is disrupted and brutalized. It serves as a clarion call for both acknowledgment and action in one of the planet’s most bio-diverse regions, a remote region that has fallen victim to the politically-expedient prioritization of other, competing ecological and political crises.

©

2024 Gabriela Montero

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1842-1904)

Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81 Composed 1887

“Beethoven is grand,” wrote Czech composer Antonín Dvořák in the New York Herald (January 14, 1884). “His works are always sublime in conception and sublime in working out.” But his favorite composer was Mozart. Beethoven inspired awe, Dvořák wrote, but “Mozart touches my heart. His melodies are so lovable, are so inspired and so inspiring, that only to hear them is the greatest enjoyment that exists in the world for me.” Next in Dvořák’s pantheon was Schubert, who had “somewhat of Mozart’s qualities so far as impressing me is concerned.” It is Schubert’s voice we hear most clearly in this Quintet, along with that of Johannes Brahms, who would become Dvořák’s mentor, promoter, and friend. Both were inheritors of the tradition that Mozart and Beethoven had so nobly established and had carried into new directions, as Dvořák himself was doing.

In 1874 Dvořák applied for the Austrian State Stipendium, intended to help young, poor and gifted artists. Music critic Eduard Hanslick and Brahms were among the judges. In 1877, after Dvořák had been awarded the stipend for the third time, Hanslick wrote to him, “The sympathy of an artist as important and famous as Brahms should not only be pleasant, but also useful to you, and I think you should write to him and perhaps send him some of your music. He has kept the vocal duets [that year’s award-winning work] in order to show them to his publisher and to recommend them to him. After all, it would be advantageous for your things to become known beyond your narrow Czech fatherland, which in any case does not do much for you.”

Dvořák followed this advice – and Brahms did secure publication of his compositions – but he was hurt by Hanslick’s disparagement of his beloved country.

He had grown up with its music (his father played the zither) and was interested in all kinds of Slavonic songs and dances, whose spirit and style found their way into his own compositions. Although until the end of his life Dvořák liked to refer to himself as “a simple Czech musician,” his biographer John Clapham believes that he was much more. Dvořák achieved “the fullest reconciliation of a national idiom with the symphonic tradition, absorbing folk influences, and finding effective ways of using them in orchestral, choral, and chamber music and opera,” Clapham writes.

The Quintet was completed in October 1887 and premiered in January 1888 at a concert of the Umělecká beseda (the Artistic Circle, a Czech forum for writers, musicians and artists). When the renowned Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky visited Prague the next month, he heard it played again. Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary, “Dvořák is very dear to me, and I like his Quintet.” He was right. As a violist, surefooted in chamber music performance and composition, Dvořák had hit the mark. The first movement begins with a soulful cello melody, quickly changing from bright A major to introspective A minor, in the modal mixture so quintessentially Schubertian. Lovely melodies contrast to lively passages. Full of vitality, the music bubbles along as it does in the great Schubert Quintet nicknamed the “Trout,” also in A major. The second movement, in F-sharp minor, is one of the most moving in the chamber music repertoire. It is a Dumka, a Czech-Ukrainian lament, which features a heart-rending melody beginning in the darktoned viola (Dvořák’s instrument), traded between the players and supported by sparkling comments from the piano.

In music built on repeated sections of everincreasing beauty, joy and sorrow are inextricably mixed. Lively dances provide a diversion, but the haunting, somber tune always returns.

Next comes a vigorous Scherzo, Brahmsian in its rhythmic power and buoyancy and subtitled “Furiant,” the name of the Czech dance that would traditionally follow a dumka. Although this “Furiant” does not have the characteristic rhythmic groups of twos and threes of its model, it captures its fiery mood; perhaps this is the reason for the title.

The slow middle section, marked Poco tranquillo, provides yet another burst of beautiful melody, again begun by the viola. The irrepressible rhythmic vitality of the finale, a joyous rondo, carries us along. Its bouncing theme travels through the instruments in imitation, ebullience reigns, and this magnificent work comes to a triumphant close.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio

Delvon Lamarr, Hammond organ

Josh Perdue, guitar

Sam Groveman, drums

Sunday, May 5 • 4 & 7 pm

Bell’s Eccentric Café, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

SPONSORS

DELVON LAMARR

Originally a drummer and trumpet player, Delvon Lamarr switched to organ at age 22, and is now a self-taught multi-instrumentalist.

Founded in 2015, his Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio specializes in the art of feel good music, delivering booty-shaking performances with infectious rhythms that include sprinkles of Motown, Stax Records, soul, jazz, and blues, led by his soulful Hammond organ. The trio has released several Billboard-charting albums and toured the world to sold-out venues, performing in the Detroit and the Monterey jazz festivals. Their debut album, Close But No Cigar, charted at number one on the U.S. Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. In 2018, the band’s live album Live at KEXP! reached number 10 on the Jazz Albums chart. Mr. Lamarr curates each show based on the vibe and feel of the audience, drawing on the 1960s organ jazz stylings of Jimmy Smith and Baby Face Willette, some of the snappy soul strut of Booker T. & The M.G.’s, and The Meters. It’s a combination that creates an emotional connection with audiences, leaving them with unforgettable memories.

JOSH PERDUE

Josh Perdue is based in Austin, TX, and is well versed in soul, blues, funk, and boogaloo. Mr. Perdue has played with acts such as Golden Dawn Arkestra, The Lost Counts, Robert Walter's 20th Congress and many more.

SAM GROVEMAN

Starting at age 13, Sam Groveman discovered his love for drums by playing Guitar Hero and then transitioning to his cousin's drum kit, which sparked a passion to take lessons and eventually tour with a band in college. After five years with the band, he started posting drum videos on TikTok, catching the attention of The Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio. He enjoys playing a variety of genres, with funk and hip-hop being his personal favorites.

© Amy Novo

© Courtesy of the Artist

© Courtesy of the Artist

JAZZ

Helen Sung Trio

Helen Sung, piano

Reuben Rogers, bass

Adam Cruz, drums

Monday, May 6 • 12 pm

Kool Family Community Center, Battle Creek

Wednesday, May 8 • 12 pm

Civic Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

BATTLE CREEK SPONSORS

SERIES FUNDER VENUE SPONSORS CONCERT SPONSOR

KALAMAZOO SPONSORS

ANNE AND DOUG PETERSEN

ROBERT AND ELEANOR DEVRIES

HELEN SUNG

Steinway Artist Helen Sung has worked with luminaries including Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis, MacArthur Fellows Regina Carter and Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Terri Lyne Carrington on her Grammy®-winning Mosaic Project. She has performed at the Newport and Monterey jazz festivals, and venues including SFJAZZ, Disney Hall, and Carnegie Hall. Internationally, she has toured southern Africa as a U.S. State Department Jazz Ambassador, and performed debuts at the London Jazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai, Blue Note Beijing, and the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival. Ms. Sung also performs with the Mingus Big Band and McLorin Salvant’s Ogresse. She graduated from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music. She has served on jazz faculties at the Berklee College of Music, The Juilliard School, and Columbia University, where she was the inaugural jazz artist-in-residence at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute in 2019.

REUBEN ROGERS

Reuben Rogers’ unique jazz voice is informed by gospel and the calypso and reggae rhythms of his native Virgin Islands. He has worked with artists including Charles Lloyd, Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Tomasz Stanko, Marcus Roberts, Nicholas Payton, Mulgrew Miller, Jackie McLean and Dianne Reeves. Over the last 20 years, he’s been featured on more than 100 recordings – including his sole release as a leader, the 2006 all-star session The Things I Am and countless international tours. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Mr. Rogers gives back with numerous workshops, clinics, and master classes around the world.

ADAM CRUZ

Known for his work with Danilo Perez, Tom Harrell, The Mingus Big Band, Steve Wilson and Edward Simon, Adam Cruz spent his formative years with saxophonist David Sanchez and the Mingus Big Band. He toured and recorded with Chick Corea and Origin, culminating in the recordings Origin and A Week at the Blue Note. His teachers have included his father, percussionist Ray Cruz, Frank Malabe, Victor Lewis, Keith Copeland, Kenny Washington, Portinho, Lewis Nash, and Joe Chambers. He has worked in groups led by Chris Potter, McCoy Tyner, John Patitucci, Pharoah Sanders, Joey Calderazzo, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Eddie Palmieri, Charlie Hunter and Paquito D’Rivera. His work has been lauded by the Los Angeles Times, Downbeat Magazine, Jazz Times, Modern Drummer Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

© Kat Villacorta

© Lauren Desberg © Aceves

Isaiah J. Thompson Trio

Isaiah J. Thompson, piano

Matthew Lee, drums

Barry Stephenson, bass

Monday, May 6 • 12 pm

Civic Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Tuesday, May 7 • 12 pm

Kool Family Community Center, Battle Creek

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

KALAMAZOO SPONSORS

BILL AND JEANNETTE MAXEY

JACOB & NAOMI STUCKI FUND

AT THE KALAMAZOO COMMUNITY FOUNDATION

BATTLE CREEK SPONSORS

ROBERT AND ELEANOR DEVRIES SERIES

ISAIAH J. THOMPSON

Winner of the 2023 American Pianists Awards and the Cole Porter Fellowship in Jazz of the American Pianists Association, Isaiah J. Thompson earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School, and has performed with artists including Ron Carter, John Pizzarelli, Christian McBride, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Steve Turre and Buster Williams. His recording debut was featured on Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Blue Engine Records’ Handful of Keys album with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, and he has since released multiple recordings as a leader. He worked on the Golden Globe nominated soundtrack for Motherless Brooklyn, was named a Steinway Artist, and has been awarded other accolades including the 2018 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award. National Public Radio called him "A young musician and composer with a mature touch and rare combination of talent, creativity, humility and honesty."

MATTHEW LEE

A senior at The Juilliard School, Matthew Lee came up around the New Jersey jazz scene, learning from his father, Mike Lee, a gigging tenor saxophonist, who helped expose him to a lot of music at a young age. He has learned from greats like Bruce Williams, Billy Drummond, Billy Hart, Christian McBride, and Alvester Garnett. Mr. Lee most frequently plays with Russell Hall’s Quintet at Smalls Jazz Club.

BARRY STEPHENSON

Barry Stephenson has performed and toured with bandleader Jon Batiste, including appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and has performed at the Monterey, Montreaux, Montreal, Newport, North Sea, Umbria, and Playboy jazz festivals. His 2020 album The Iconoclast was nominated for the NAACP Image Award® for Outstanding Jazz Album (Instrumental). Mr. Stephenson has performed with artists including Nicholas Payton, David Sanborn, Seal, Freddie Cole, Diane Schuur, Marc Cary, Jamison Ross, Sullivan Fortner, Jazzmeia Horn, Herlin Riley, Henry Butler, Mark Whitfield, Tim Warfield, Russell Gunn, Christian Sands, Cyrille Aimee, Etienne Charles, Marcus Printup, Davell Crawford, Rodney Green, and Theo Croker.

© Daniel McCullough

© Julian Lee © Lauren Desberg

SCHUBERT SONATA SERIES IV

Paul Lewis, piano

Monday, May 6 • 7:30 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU, Kalamazoo

F. SCHUBERT

Sonata No. 19 in C Minor, D. 958

I. Allegro

II. Adagio

III. Menuetto. Allegro – Trio

IV. Allegro

Sonata No. 20 in A Major, D. 959

I. Allegro

II. Andantino

III. Scherzo. Allegro vivace – Trio. Un poco più lento

IV. Rondo. Allegretto

: INTERMISSION :

Sonata No. 21 in B-flat Major, D. 960

I. Molto moderato

II. Andante sostenuto

III. Scherzo. Allegro vivace con delicatezza — Trio

IV. Allegro ma non troppo

SPONSORS

CAROL AND TOM BEECH

JUDY JOLLIFFE

ANN AND DON PARFET

LIVESTREAM SPONSOR

THREE RIVERS MANHATTAN CLUB

Please see Mr. Lewis’s biography on page 77.

Mr. Lewis will also play Schubert sonatas on April 30, and May 2 and 4.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

Sonata No. 19 in C Minor, D. 958

Sonata No. 20 in A Major, D. 959

Sonata No. 21 in B-flat Major, D. 960

Composed 1828

On September 26, 1828, Schubert completed a clean copy of three sonatas: the first in C minor, the second in A-flat major, and the last in B-flat major. As was his custom, he dated the 94-page manuscript, preparing to send it off for publication. It was clear that he intended the three works to make up a set, carefully labeling them “Sonata I, Sonata II, and Sonata III.” Surviving sketches, with painstaking revisions, suggest that his creative process had begun in May of that year and continued into September.

During this time Schubert had been actively trying to get his music published, particularly his instrumental works. On October 2, 1828, he wrote to Leipzig publisher Heinrich Probst, impatiently inquiring about when the piano trio in E-flat major he had sent the previous May would appear. He added, “I have composed, among other things, three sonatas for piano solo which I should like to dedicate to [the virtuoso pianist Johann Nepomuk] Hummel. I have played the sonatas in several places with great success.” Although Probst published the trio in November, it is unlikely that Schubert, who died on November 19, ever saw it in print. As for the three sonatas: Probst moved on to other projects. In 1839, noted Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli brought them out, dedicated not to Hummel but to another Schubert admirer, Robert Schumann.

Alfred Brendel – Gilmore Piano Master, poet, essayist, renowned interpreter of Schubert, and teacher of Paul Lewis – calls them a family of sonatas.

Greatly contrasting but complementary, he reports, they present “a thesis of menace and destructive energy in the C minor Sonata, followed by an antithesis of positive, luminous activity in the A major Sonata, [which] is then concluded by a synthesis of resigned composure in the B flat.” Together they make a perfect set, each with its own interior world and communication style. All three are big works. Impeccable musical architecture is coupled with deep emotional expression, the perfect pairing of imagination and craftsmanship. In these expansive works Schubert’s brilliant musical ideas are given the ample treatment they deserve. As Brendel notes, “Schubert needs a lot of space in order to move freely.”

Sonata No. 19 in C Minor, D. 958

Brendel, who has written extensively on Schubert’s sonatas, says of this one that it is “predominantly somber, passionate and icy.” He adds that “behind its classicist façade, [it is] the most neurotic sonata Schubert wrote.” The first movement begins with a deliberate reference to the theme of the Thirty-two Variations in C Minor (1806) of Beethoven, who had died twenty months earlier. Schubert’s choice of that same key makes the connection explicit and also ties the sonata to two other C-minor iconic works of Beethoven: the Piano Sonata, Op. 13 (“Pathétique”) and the great Fifth Symphony, Op. 55. Passionate chords, dramatic gestures, and an impetuous melody characterize the first movement opening theme, followed by its opposite: a gentle theme in E-flat major. In the development section, a chromatic, snaky scale in the bass makes an appearance – a new character in the drama – and returns again in the coda to close this fearless work.

The second movement is a sublime adagio. Like so many of Schubert’s slow movements, it starts with a simple chordal theme, which is contrasted to elaborate passages and triplet repeated chords, growing in intensity, then dying away with a final statement of the first, tender theme. In the third movement, a minuet and trio, Schubert abandons its traditional stately poise for a restless dance with shifting accents. It becomes, Brendel writes, an “anti-minuet, nervous and determined, without firm ground under its feet.”

Brendel describes the final movement as a “dancing dervish, or death gallop, with Cerberus barking” (the Hound of Hell). In a rushing 6/8 meter, triplets race on like terrified horses. Gilmore Piano Master Sir András Schiff calls it a dance of death. Frenzied episodes of terror are broken up by soothing passages that vanish into the ether. That Schubert can make such a sprawling last movement hold together so convincingly – and keep surprising us throughout – is a mark of his hard-won technical mastery.

Sonata No. 20 in A Major, D. 959

In this penultimate sonata, Brendel writes, “the brightest of worlds faces its darkest counterpart.” It opens with emphatic A-major chords that proclaim its spaciousness and are quickly followed by catapulting scales and triplet arpeggios. The quiet chordal second theme provides the perfect response to the extroverted opening. Both themes, leisurely expanded and transformed, lead into an impassioned development. In the recapitulation, the unmistakable opening chords come back exactly as the sonata began. In the coda, preceded by a pause, the same chords return again in a whisper, this time allowing us to relish all that has gone before.

The F-sharp minor second movement begins with a solemn melody over a funereal, trudging bass line, whose top notes ring like a tolling bell.

Brendel writes that its mood of bleak melancholy creates a desolate grace. Yet, underneath, “madness lies, from which it erupts, into which it sinks back, quivering.”

The music of this madness (the middle section of the movement) “comes as close to a nervous breakdown as anything in Schubert’s output,” musicologist Robert Winter believes. Brendel notes that “even today this eruption of the irrational must count among the most daring and terrifying pages in all music.”

High spirited and sparkling, the Scherzo could not be more contrasting. For the moment, the nightmare has passed. “I hear laughter and see hats being thrown in the air,” Brendel writes. The trio, a palette cleanser, concentrates on the simplest elements: a simple, accented rhythm, hands crossing, a spare texture. Brendel describes the final movement, generous in spirit and scale, as a “big daydream of bliss.” It borrows its gracious first theme from the slow movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A Minor, D. 537, composed nine years earlier (and heard in the first concert of this series). Set within a complex form – an extended rondo – the main theme and contrasting episodes are ingeniously varied and expanded. At the end, the opening chords make one last appearance, taking us back to the chords we heard at the beginning of the journey.

“In his larger forms, Schubert is a wanderer,” Brendel writes. “He likes to move at the edge of the precipice, and does so with the assurance of a sleepwalker. To wander is the Romantic condition: one yields to it enraptured (as in the finale of the A Major Sonata), or is driven and plagued by the terror of finding no escape (as in the C Minor Sonata).” And in his last sonata Schubert takes us with him on a transcendent journey, deeper than all the rest.

Sonata No. 21 in B Flat Major, D. 960

Schubert’s final sonata – and his very last piece for the piano – inhabits a sacred space. For Brendel, among the three last sonatas, this one casts the strongest spell. It is “the most beautiful and moving, the most resigned and harmoniously balanced, tallying most easily with the concept of a gentle melancholic Schubert.” It speaks to us directly.

Brendel finds that the long-breathed theme that begins the sonata, “in its gentle serenity, has moved so close that we might say we felt it inside ourselves.” Ghostly pianissimo trills in the deep bass disturb its stillness like distant thunder, resonating in the long pauses that follow, allowing the tones to disappear into infinity. A second theme in edgy F-sharp minor (a key far away from B-flat), accompanied by triplets, leads us to a set of luminous arpeggios in F major before a searching theme in soft chords ends the exposition. The development takes us into new worlds of contemplation, almost suspending time. When the main theme returns, preceded by a mysterious trill stated ever so softly in the low bass, it is as if from a great distance, in an uncanny suspension of time and space.

In the contemplative second movement, in C-sharp minor, a somber melody is set above a repeated bass rhythm. A middle section, now in A major, gives glorious comfort. The opening music reappears, still sorrowful, but more at peace. The soaring, playful Scherzo, marked Allegro vivace con delicatezza, provides exactly the right touch of joyous extroversion and sets the other movements in high relief.

Its trio, now in contrasting minor mode, features accented off beats. Schubert finds the perfect ending in a finale that is playful and joyous, a joy frequently interrupted by tumult, but returning in even greater exuberance to bring this magnificent work to a triumphant conclusion.

Six years earlier Schubert had written, “Whenever I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of sorrow, it turned to love.” There could not be a work that exemplifies these words more completely than this transcendent sonata.

Epilogue

Thus does Schubert reach the pinnacle of his sonata writing. On his original gravestone, his friend Franz Grillparzer wrote, “The art of music here interred a rich possession, but even fairer hopes.” Robert Schumann took issue with this sentiment, pointing to Schubert’s many accomplishments, as more and more of his music was discovered and performed every year. Yet, having traced Schubert’s progression on this journey through the sonatas, having witnessed his growing mastery of the form and his deepening understanding of the piano itself, it is inevitable that we wonder about all that might have been and heartbreaking to realize that it will never be.

Throughout his life and beyond, Schubert’s music, particularly his sonatas, have been compared to Beethoven’s. In these three works he fulfilled a long-held ambition to create a set of sonatas that would rival those of Beethoven. They could not have existed without Beethoven’s, but they are unquestionably Schubert’s own.

A century later, composer Arnold Schoenberg emphasized Schubert’s “inconceivably great originality down to the last detail, next to a crushing figure like Beethoven.” He added, “Close to such crushing genius, Schubert does not feel the need to deny its greatness in order somehow to endure. What a degree of self-confidence, what truly aristocratic awareness of one’s own rank with respecting the equal in the other!”

In March 1828, a review of Schubert’s late song cycle Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey) reads: “Schubert’s mind shows a bold sweep everywhere, whereby he carries everyone away who approaches him and takes them through the immeasurable depth of the human heart into the far distance.” Another contemporary wrote, “Schubert knows how to touch and stir all hearts.” This awareness of Schubert’s depth has endured for two centuries. Paul Lewis, who has devoted himself to Schubert’s music, has observed: “I’ve always been struck by his lack of answers. With Beethoven, there are questions, but he almost always creates some sense of resolution. That’s rarely the case with Schubert. And yet there’s also a sense of hope. For me, that makes him the most human of all composers.”

Let Schubert’s friend, lawyer and musician Leopold von Sonnleithner, have the last word: “Thus lived Schubert, and so he was. His earthly pilgrimage was brief; but the spirit that comes from his music lives on.”

©2024 Zaide Pixley

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Shai Maestro Quartet

Shai Maestro, piano

Philip Dizack, trumpet

Ofri Nehemya, drums

Jorge Roeder, double bass

Tuesday, May 7 • 12 pm

Civic Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Wednesday, May 8 • 12 pm

Kool Family Community Center, Battle Creek

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

KALAMAZOO SPONSORS

TOM AND DONNA LAMBERT

BATTLE CREEK SPONSORS

SERIES

ROBERT AND ELEANOR DEVRIES

SHAI MAESTRO

Pianist and composer Shai Maestro is known for imaginative compositions and sonic exploration. His most recent album, Human, was largely created and recorded with his quartet. Along with extensive worldwide touring, Mr. Maestro has scored music for films, writes and arranges his music for large orchestras, producing, and writing for renowned contemporary pop and electronica artists. Highlights include performing a commissioned program with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In the summer of 2022 Shai presented his new full scale orchestral work, Alice, written for the national Orquestra de Câmara Portuguesa and his quartet. “Hearing Shai Maestro is like awakening to a new world,” writes All About Jazz, while The Guardian says, “A formidable composer and performer who frequently fashions sounds into the stuff of improvised fantasias.”

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FUNDER VENUE SPONSORS CONCERT SPONSOR

PHILIP DIZACK

Philip Dizack has toured as a member of the Stan Getz/Clifford Brown All Stars performing in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. He attended the Manhattan School of Music, and following the release of his debut recording, Beyond a Dream, joined Greg Tardy, playing in some of New York City's famed jazz clubs. He has performed at the Barcelona Jazz Fest, and performed and recorded with artists including Roy Haynes, Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Harvie S, Terrell Stafford, Ingred Jensen, Willie Jones III, Brian Lynch, Sean Conly, John Riley, Marcus Gilmore, and Aaron Goldberg.

OFRI NEHEMYA

Ofri Nehemya has shared the stage with jazz artists including Avishai Cohen, Omer Avital, Rickie Lee Jones, Shai Maestro, Eli Degibri, Aaron Goldberg, Reuben Rogers, Gilad Hekselman, and Yotam Silberstein. As a teen, he began playing with musicians including Erez Barnoy, Daniel Zamir, Ofer Ganor, Omri Mor, Amit Friedman, Amos Hoffman, Eli Degibri, Aaron Goldberg, and Reuben Rogers. Mr. Nehemya studied at Berklee School of Music, and toured with bass player Avishai Cohen, on whose album Almah he plays. He has recently been touring and recording with bassist and composer Omer Avital.

JORGE ROEDER

Originally from Peru, Jorge Roeder combines a symphonic imagination with the lyricism of a folk musician; the aggressive energy of a raw rocker with the buoyant sensibilities of his Afro-Peruvian roots. At the New England Conservatory of Music, he studied with jazz greats Danilo Pérez, Jerry Bergonzi, Bob Moses, Cecil McBee, and Oscar Stagnaro. He has enjoyed partnerships with Julian Lage and Sofia Rei, and has shared stages with Gary Burton, Nels Cline and John Zorn. He earned a Grammy® Award nomination for Sounding Point, the debut album by the Julian Lage Group.

© Aaron Lacy

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© Courtesy of the Artist

Undersong Simone Dinnerstein, piano

Tuesday, May 7 • 7:30 pm

Stetson Chapel, Kalamazoo College

F. COUPERIN Les baricades mistérieuses from Second livre de piéces de clavecin

R. SCHUMANN Arabesque, Op. 18

PHILIP GLASS Mad Rush

: INTERMISSION :

E. SATIE Gnossienne, No. 3

R. SCHUMANN Kreisleriana, Op. 16

Äußerst bewegt (extremely animated)

Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch (very intimate and not too fast)

Sehr aufgeregt (very agitated)

Sehr langsam (very slow)

Sehr lebhaft (very lively)

Sehr langsam (very lively)

Sehr rasch (very fast)

Schnell und spielend (fast and playful)

SPONSORS

KEVIN AND GINA PAUL

JULIE AND KEITH PETERSON

MICHAEL AND LINDY STORMS

SIMONE DINNERSTEIN

American pianist Simone Dinnerstein came to wide attention in 2007 with her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. She has recorded thirteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard charts, and during the pandemic she recorded three albums which form a trilogy: A Character of Quiet, An American Mosaic (nominated for a Grammy® award), and Undersong. In recent years, she has created The Eye Is the First Circle, a multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, using her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting, The Fulbright Triptych, and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera. Their collaboration also included a notable performance presented by the Cleveland Orchestra, marking their final appearance together before the Emerson String Quartet disbanded. Ms. Dinnerstein has also created her own ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs. The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.”

Simone Dinnerstein appears by arrangement with IMG Artists, 7 West 54th Street, New York, NY 10019, 212-994-3500

For more information visit simonedinnerstein.com.

© Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

FRANÇOIS COUPERIN (1668-1733)

Les baricades mistérieuses from Second livre de piéces de clavecin

Composed 1717

The Couperin family was one of the great dynasties of music, active in and around Paris as professional musicians from the late sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, and comparable only to the generations-long stream of Bachs that inundated musical life in Germany at about the same time. Over an unbroken span of 170 years, from 1656 to 1826, there was always someone named Couperin serving as organist at St. Gervais Church in Paris. François, the most important in this illustrious family and rightly dubbed “le grand,” held the post throughout his life. At age twentyfour he was named “Organist of the King” and served at the court of both Louis XIV and Louis XV.

A renowned harpsichordist and teacher, in 1716 Couperin brought out L’art de toucher le clavecin (The Art of Playing the Harpsichord). Pianist Angela Hewitt considers it one of the most valuable keyboard guides ever written. Couperin gave special attention to the interpretation of ornaments and cautions his readers in the preface that not following his precise directions would be “an unpardonable negligence.” Any player who fails to do so “will never make a certain impression on persons of true taste.” Ignore his instructions at your peril, Hewitt believes.

Couperin published four indispensable collections of music for harpsichord, the first in 1713, the last in 1730. They contain 234 pieces, a great many with descriptive titles. Some are portraits of his friends, pupils, and fellow courtiers; others depict natural scenes, events, and experiences.

In a preface for the first volume, he wrote, “In composing these pieces, I have always had an object in view, furnished by various occasions. Thus the titles reflect my ideas. I may be forgiven for not explaining them all.”

Les baricades mistérieuse, one of his most popular works, is rightly called “mysterious.” Speculation abounds. Does the word “barricades” refer to such physical things as masks, eyelashes, and veils, or something more metaphorical, perhaps the divider between past and present? One thing is certain. The magnificent French harpsichords Couperin so loved, the Steinways of their day, had particularly resonant basses. He makes the most of them, “barricading” both hands to the lower register all the way through, using bass clef for both. Like so many of Couperin’s harpsichord pieces, this one is a rondeau: the main theme keeps coming back around, its appearances separated by clearly marked couplets (contrasting episodes).

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Arabesque, Op. 18

Composed 1838-39

At the end of his manuscript of the Arabesque, Schumann added a postscript – “for C” – and closed the piece with a descending C-major arpeggio, one of the musical signatures he had devised for his beloved Clara Wieck. The piece was exactly what Clara, already a celebrated pianist, had been requesting for her concerts: not too long, not too short, with an appealing rather than a puzzling title, musically satisfying, but not as “difficult” as much of Schumann’s music was thought to be. The Arabesque, marked “light and sweet,” demonstrated his desire to cultivate a larger market for his music and was clearly intended for the army of music-buying pianists both in Vienna, where he was living at the time, and back home in Leipzig.

While in Vienna Schumann had made it a point to visit Ferdinand Schubert, the composer’s brother, who possessed a number of his unpublished manuscripts. Among them Schumann discovered a masterpiece: Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C Major. Recognizing its quality, he quickly sent a copy to Felix Mendelssohn, who conducted the premiere at the famed Leipzig Gewandhaus, eleven years after Schubert’s death. Perhaps it was Schumann’s joy at finding this magnificent work that inspired the Arabesque, with its melodic charm, harmonic subtleties, and intimate, personal tone.

Like Couperin’s Baricades and Tic-Toc-Chock, the Arabesque is a rondo. Its captivating main theme – the “undersong” – keeps coming back around, its appearances separated by contrasting episodes. The cheerful melody, skipping along and adorned with grace notes, couldn’t be more enchanting. The first episode, slower and in minor, ranges far afield. Full of Schubertian harmonic surprises, it takes its time ushering the first idea back in.

The second episode, again in minor, is a forceful march. Then the main theme makes its final appearance, followed by an extended tender coda. Schumann’s title suggests a linking of music to the ornamental curlicues and decorations of the visual arts, a concept he found particularly compelling. The revered poet Johann von Goethe had described architecture as “frozen music” –“frozen” the Arabesque is not. Always fresh and new, it remains enduringly lovely.

PHILIP GLASS (B. 1937)

Mad Rush

Composed 1979

When the audience of nearly 2,000 gathered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City on September 9, 1979 to hear the Dalai Lama speak, it was music by Philip Glass they heard as they entered. He recalled that the sponsors

of the event “asked me if I would play some music before he came. They weren’t sure how timely his arrival would be, and they knew the place would be full of people.” Composing it on the cathedral’s magnificent organ, Glass produced a piece that could stretch for an indefinite period of time without the audience realizing any delay. Later he arranged the music for piano and called it Mad Rush, with a clearly marked conclusion. Thoroughly grounded in the western classical tradition, impeccably trained at The Juilliard School in New York and the Sorbonne in Paris, Glass had known from an early age that he wanted to be a composer. But of what? Not for him were the lush chromaticism of Wagner or the powerful developmental strategies of Beethoven—and especially not the abstract atonal expressionism and serialism of composers in the academy. Glass looked elsewhere for inspiration. When he worked with sitarist Ravi Shankar on the hallucinogenic film Chappaqua, he began to think of recurring cycles of tones and rhythms, patterns of additive and reductive principles. And he studied the minimalist paintings in Soho galleries, canvases of red or yellow with all their subtle gradations, geometric shapes, and juxtaposed simple forms. He heard the music of his contemporaries Terry Riley and Steve Reich, already heading in a new direction in music so radical it was shocking. NYU professor Michael Beckerman captured the ethos, noting that “trying to write tonal music at a place like Columbia University in the 1960s and ‘70s was like being a dissident in Prague in the same period, with similar professional consequences.”

Out of these experiences grew a new style of music that came to be known as minimalism, a style perfectly exemplified in Mad Rush. It is focused not on development and complexity, but on repetition and simplicity, concentrating on the basic elements of music. The harmony: aggressively tonal. Mad Rush has as its musical alphabet the notes in the F major scale with an occasional D-flat thrown in, and focuses on three chords: F major, A minor and G minor. The rhythm: the utmost simplicity, in which a change from triplets to duplets and back, or triplets over duplets can take on enormous significance. The texture: two voices in counterpoint, point against point, note against note, voice against voice. The form: three clearly marked sections, each beginning with the minimal gesture of a minor third (the most basic of intervals) standing out within a thin texture. All repeats must be observed, the composer writes in the score. With the rich sonority of the pianos, pitches are repeated until their meaning sinks in, and subtle changes make the addition of a single note a singular event.

With an expansion of the register up and down, or the ringing sound of a single pitch deep in the bass, new worlds open up. Finally, a coda brings the piece to a quiet close.

ERIK SATIE (1866-1925)

Gnossienne, No. 3

Composed 1890

In his 1918 essay “Cock and Harlequin,” Jean Cocteau advocated a revolutionary new approach to music. He rejected “Wagnerian fog,” Debussian “mist,” and the “theatrical mysticisms” of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with all their “convolutions, dodges and tricks,” claiming that such music was too long, too rich, too hard to digest.

“Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water spirits, and nocturnal scents,” he wrote.

“What we need is a music of the earth, every-day music,” music that draws from the circus, the music hall, the café concert, and jazz, music suitable to a “child’s clairvoyance.” Cocteau could have been talking about the Trois Gnossiennes, written 28 years earlier, which perfectly exemplifies Satie’s painstaking quest for perfection in simplicity. As New Yorker critic Alex Ross notes, Satie discarded “centuries of knotted-brow complexity in favor of a language at once simple and new.”

This simplicity is perfectly expressed in Satie’s third Gnossienne, a term he invented that may or may not refer to gnosis (learning) or a Grecian mythological ritual dance. It has no bar lines, no key signature, no time signature. The note values themselves – quarter notes, half notes, whole notes –keep time. Its “undersong” is an ostinato, a rhythmic pattern: a low note, followed by two deliberate chords, and a rest. The pattern repeats, and then repeats again. The nearly static chords, set in a circular pattern, set the melody in high relief.

Above this “obstinate” bass floats a melody, sprinkled with plentiful grace notes, “oriental” in its tritones and augmented seconds. It doesn’t “develop,” it just exists, speaking inquisitively, but providing no answers. “Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline, as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work,” Satie wrote in 1917. The harmony, he explained, “is an illumination, an exhibition of the object [the melody], its reflection.”

Satie’s performance directions are his own: “arm yourself with perspicacity,” “open your head,” “achieve absolutely nothing,” pointed comments in reaction against the excesses of late Romanticism, with its espressivos, accelerandos, and agitatos.

In a 1923 interview in Vanity Fair, Satie recalled that when he first met Debussy, he advised him that “we French needed to break away from the Wagnerian adventure, which did not correspond with our natural aspirations. And I told him that what we needed was a music of our own – preferably without sauerkraut.” With this Gnossienne, Satie succeeded admirably. It is as fresh today as when it was composed well over a century ago.

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Kreisleriana, Op. 16

Composed 1838

Passionate, mercurial, brilliant but misunderstood – such was the fictional Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, whose fantastical exploits are chronicled by German writer and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). This “eccentric, wild, witty” character (as Schumann described him) so captured his imagination that in 1838 he composed his portrait in music: Kreisleriana. Both misunderstood musicians struggling to find their way, both unpredictably alternating between joy and despair, both ardent admirers of Bach: the imaginary Kreisler and the real Schumann had much in common.

Clara Wieck, then just nineteen, was the clear inspiration for Kreisleriana, as Robert told her in a letter: “There is a very wild love in some movements, and your life and mine and many of your glances.” In hopeful anticipation of their being able to marry, he pronounced himself to be composing in a “state of enchantment.” Clara had given him a secret “yes” to his proposal, although her father remained implacably opposed.

Schumann had intended to dedicate his new piece to her, but she warned him against it, anticipating her father’s furious objections. Instead Schumann chose “my friend Chopin,” who privately observed that it was not music as he understood music. (Indeed, although there are Chopinesque sections, Kreisleriana isn’t anything Chopin would have written.)

Clara performed Robert’s music in public as often as her father would permit, but in private she informed him that Kreisleriana was too complicated for the concert hall and too virtuosic for amateurs to play at home. On tour, she wrote from Paris: “Listen, Robert, couldn’t you just once compose something brilliant, easily understandable…not too long and not too short? I’d so much like to have something of yours to play that’s specifically intended for the public. Obviously a genius will find this degrading, but politics demand it every now and again.” As an internationally known concert pianist, she knew what she was talking about. Even Liszt said that Op. 16 was “too difficult for the public to digest.”

The music captures the spirit of Kreisler himself. Each of the eight movements has its own individual pattern, frequently conjuring up abruptly changing moods, tempos, and dynamics. “I’m playing with forms,” Robert told Clara. The moods of Schumann’s two alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius are evoked – the first exuberant, the second introspective.

Kreisleriana overflows with musical ideas and abounds in beautiful melodies, placed sometimes in the top voice, sometimes the middle, and frequently in the bass, which grows far beyond a simple accompaniment into an equal voice, a partner, and a support.

In the agitated first movement, ardent scales frame a softer, even coquettish interlude. In the second movement, the ascending and descending scales of what Schumann calls the “Clara theme” pay her homage.

Off-beat rhythms fill the scherzo-like third movement. In the fourth movement Schumann borrows a little “turn” (ornament) from Clara’s piano piece Notturno and makes it into a proud, accented flourish. The fifth movement, sparkling and lively, contrasts with the serene sixth.

The seventh movement’s fugato section demonstrates the influence of Bach, whose Well-Tempered Clavier Schumann was assiduously studying. The last movement serves as a passionate, presto coda.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

Yuja Wang, piano

Wednesday, May 8 • 7:30 pm

Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be a 15-minute intermission.

SPONSOR

YUJA WANG

Celebrated for her charismatic artistry, emotional honesty and captivating stage presence, Yuja Wang has performed with the world’s most venerated conductors, musicians and ensembles, and is renowned for her virtuosity and spontaneous and lively performances, once telling The New York Times, “I firmly believe every program should have its own life, and be a representation of how I feel at the moment.” Born into a musical family in Beijing, she received advanced training in Canada and at the Curtis Institute of Music under Gary Graffman. Named a Gilmore Young Artist in 2006, her international breakthrough came in 2007, when she replaced Martha Argerich as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She has since established her place among the world’s leading artists, with a succession of critically acclaimed performances and recordings (she records exclusively with Deutsche Grammophon). In 2021 she received an Opus Klassik Award for her world-premiere recording of John Adams’s Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel. As a chamber musician, Yuja has developed long lasting partnerships with several leading artists, notably violinist Leonidas Kavakos, with whom she has recorded the complete Brahms violin sonatas. She performs in world-class venues across North America, Europe, and Asia, astounding audiences once more with her flair, technical ability and exceptional artistry in wide-ranging programs.

© Norbert Kniat

Paul Cornish Trio

Paul Cornish, piano

Emma Dayhuff, bass

Jonathan Pinson, drums

Thursday, May 9 • 12 pm

Kool Family Community Center, Battle Creek

Friday, May 10 • 12 pm

Civic Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

BATTLE CREEK SPONSORS

KALAMAZOO SPONSORS

LINDA AND GEORGE DUNN

DOREEN AND ED THOMAS

PAUL CORNISH

Los Angeles-based pianist and composer Paul Cornish earned a master’s degree on fellowship from the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz at UCLA, where he studied and performed with artists including Herbie Hancock, Billy Childs, Robert Hurst, Chris Potter, and Walter Smith III. Mr. Cornish was awarded the Grand Prize in the 2018 American Jazz Piano Competition, the Los Angeles Jazz Society’s 2020 New Note Commission, first place in the Jacksonville Jazz Piano Competition, and the 18th Street Arts Center’s 2021 Make Jazz Fellowship. Currently residing in Los Angeles, Cornish has performed extensively across the globe with such notable artists as Joshua Redman, Louis Cole, Theo Croker, Snoh Aalegra, Terrace Martin, Thumpasaurus and HAIM.

EMMA DAYHUFF

Bassist Emma Dayhuff has followed her musical passions to places beyond what she imagined from her childhood home on Sourdough Canyon Road in Bozeman, Montana. She is a graduate of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance in Los Angeles and is a nationally and internationally touring artist. She has shared the stage with Herbie Hancock, Cécile McLorin Salvant, David Murray, Kahil El’Zabar, Helen Sung, Jeff Parker, Dee Alexander, Isaiah Collier, Corey Wilkes, Victor Goines, Gretchen Parlato, and Patricia Barber.

JONATHAN PINSON

American drummer Jonathan Pinson has appeared at the Newport, Montreal, Jakarta, and So What’s Next jazz festivals, the Hollywood Bowl, Village Vanguard, Blue Note, Dizzy’s Club CocaCola, Yoshi’s, and Ronnie Scott’s. Most recently he was an artistin-residence at Black Cat in San Francisco. Mr. Pinson earned degrees from the Thelonious Monk Institute at UCLA (MM) and Berklee College of Music (BA). He has performed or collaborated with Herbie Hancock, Kamasi Washington, Seal, Wanye Shorter, Braxton Cook, Gerald Clayton, Terrace Martin, Kiefer, Marquis Hill, Mark Turner, Gilad Hekselman, Moses Sumney, Christian Kuria, and Ben Williams. He leads his own ensemble, Boom Clap.

© Jati Lindsay

© Harvey Tillis

© Lauren Desberg

Benito Gonzalez Trio

Benito Gonzalez, piano

Jaylen K. Petinaud, drums

Will Slater, bass

Thursday, May 9 • 12 pm

Civic Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Friday, May 10 • 12 pm

Kool Family Community Center, Battle Creek

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

KALAMAZOO SPONSORS

HUGH AND MARIAN BEATTIE FAMILY FUND OF THE KALAMAZOO COMMUNITY FOUNDATION

BATTLE CREEK SPONSORS

SERIES FUNDER

VENUE SPONSORS CONCERT SPONSOR

ROBERT AND ELEANOR DEVRIES

BENITO GONZALEZ

Grammy® nominee and Steinway Artist Benito Gonzalez combines traditional jazz with rhythms from around the world. The Venezuela-born artist grew up playing traditional folk music, before being inspired by Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett, whose quartet he later joined. He joined Kenny Garrett’s quartet for seven years, and then saxophonist Azar Lawrence’s band. In 2019 he became pianist and musical director for Pharoah Sanders. Mr. Gonzalez has performed and recorded with Bobby Hutcherson, Dave Liebman, Gary Bartz, Curtis Fuller, Al Foster, Lenny White, Billy Hart, Ignacio Berroa, Buster Williams, Rene McLean, Steve Turre, Delfeayo Marsalis, Hamiet Bluiett, Ron Blake, Antonio Sanchez, Mark Gross, and T.K. Blue. His albums include Starting Point, Circles, and 2021’s Sing to the World

JAYLEN K. PETINAUD

Instrumentalist Jaylen K. Petinaud regularly tours with Herbie Hancock, Kenny Garrett, Theo Croker, and Keyon Harrold, and has studied with Jon Faddis, Kenny Washington, and Matt Wilson. Mr Petinaud made his Broadway debut as an arranger, composer, and the drummer of the Tony-nominated revival, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. He has worked on Terence Blanchard's Champion at The Metropolitan Opera, and the Public Theater’s The Harder They Come, about reggae star Jimmy Cliff. He has played live on PBS network with Brandon Victor-Dixon, performed for vocalist and comedian Wayne Brady live on The View, Good Morning America, and Sirius XM Radio. He is on the faculty at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Dance and SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance.

WILL SLATER

A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, Will Slater has performed at the Blue Note, Birdland, 55 Bar, Smalls, Minton's, Scullers, Regatta Bar, Wally’s, Jordan Hall, and the Lily Pad. He has recorded with Jerry Bergonzi, the Kim Thompson Quartet, the Phil Grenadier trio, the Yoko Miwa trio, and the Joe Delaney trio; appeared at the Panama, Romania, and Aspen jazz festivals; and has toured in France, Italy, Japan, Colombia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Mr. Slater has performed with artists including Jerry Bergonzi, George Garzone, Gary Thomas, Peter Bernstein, Anthony Wonsey, Bruce Barth, Kenny Werner, Terri Lyne Carrington, Dayna Stephens, Ari Hoenig, Jeb Patton, and Tommy Campbell.

© Regis Lawson

© Paul Mardy

© MH Studios

SOLO PIANO RECITAL

2002 GILMORE ARTIST

Piotr Anderszewski, piano

Thursday, May 9 • 7:30 pm

Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU, Kalamazoo

Concert Preview • 6:30 pm

Dr. Zaide Pixley, Dalton Lecture Hall

J.S. BACH Overture in French style, BWV 831

I. Overture

II. Courante

III. Gavotte I/II

IV. Passepied I/II

V. Sarabande

VI. Bourrée I/II

VII. Gigue

VIII. Echo

K. SZYMANOWSKI Selected Mazurkas, Op. 50

No. 2 Moderato (non troppo)

No. 7 Poco vivace (tempo Oberka)

No. 8 Moderato (non troppo)

No. 5 Moderato

No. 4 Allegramente, risoluto

: INTERMISSION :

B. BARTÓK Fourteen Bagatelles, Op. 6

I. Molto sostenuto

II. Allegro giocoso

III. Andante

IV. Grave

V. Vivo

VI. Lento

VII. Allegretto molto capriccioso

J.S. BACH French Suite No. 5, BWV 816

I. Allemande

II. Courante

III. Sarabande

IV. Gavotte

V. Bourree

VI. Loure

VII. Gigue

SPONSOR

DIANE S. ROBERTSON

VIII. Andante sostenuto

IX. Allegretto grazioso

X. Allegro

XI. Allegretto molto rubato

XII. Rubato

XIII. Elle est morte. Lento funebre

XIV. Valse: Ma mie qui danse. Presto

PIOTR ANDERSZEWSKI, 2002 GILMORE ARTIST

Regarded as one of the most prominent pianists of his generation, Piotr Anderszewski is performing this season in Warsaw, Cologne, Hamburg, London, Berlin, Prague, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Geneva, Lisbon, Paris, and Tokyo, and with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, as well as play-lead projects with the Sinfonia Varsovia and the Israel Camerata, with whom he will tour. Past collaborations with orchestra have included appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic, the London and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which he also conducted from the piano. Recitals have taken him to the Barbican Center in London and the Royal Festival Hall, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Carnegie Hall and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.

Mr. Anderszewski’s recordings include Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, which received the Choc du Monde de la Musique; the Grammy®-nominated Bach Partitas 1, 3 and 6; and a recording with works by his countryman Szymanowski. His album with solo works by Schumann received two BBC Music Magazine Awards in 2012, including the Recording of the Year. His recording of Bach's English Suites 1, 3 and 5 received the Gramophone Award for best instrumental album in 2015. After the solo album Fantaisies with works by Mozart and Schumann in 2017, the Mozart Piano Concertos No. 25 & 27 with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe was recorded in 2018. In 2021, his interpretation of J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2 was awarded the Gramophone Classical Music Award.

© Simon Fowler

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)

Overture in the French Style, BWV 831 Composed 1735

In 1723 Bach was appointed Cantor at the two biggest churches in Leipzig, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, to serve as composer, organist, choirmaster, and Latin teacher. By 1735 he was looking around for other possibilities, perhaps seeking a Kapellmeister position (Music Director) at the court of a duke or prince, where his opportunities would be broader and his duties less consuming. Getting his music to print, even at his own expense, was an obvious way to enhance his prospects. In 1731 he brought out what he called his Opus 1, the first part of his magisterial Clavierübung, described as “Clavier Practice, consisting of Preludes, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gigues, Minuets and other Galanteries composed for the pleasurable diversion of music lovers.” Part II appeared four years later and included two dramatically contrasting pieces: the Overture in the French Style and the Italian Concerto, BWV 971. One represented “French suavity,” the other “Italian vigor,” musicologist Harold Schulenberg suggests. On the title page Bach identified himself as “Chapel Master to the Court of Saxe-Weisenfels” and “Conductor of the Leipzig Musical Choir.” Over the next decade the encyclopedic Bach would add a third and fourth part: in 1739 four duets and in 1741 the Goldberg Variations, an exhaustive study of the myriad ways in which a theme can be transformed.

The Overture in the French Style was intended to be a major work, befitting such an important publication, and exemplifies the Galant style associated with the court of Louis XIV (1643-1715): elegant, balanced, and charming; more melodic, less polyphonic; more graceful, less “learned.”

Although labeled an overture, the work is really a suite: a collection of venerable dances, all in the same key, each with its own distinctive traits.

To its core dances, as standardized by Bach – the Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue – were added such “Galanteries” as gavottes and bourrées A renowned harpsichordist and organist, Bach knew exactly what he was doing as he led keyboard players through some of the most important styles of the day. Because his contemporaries knew each type intimately, they would have been intrigued by Bach’s imaginative reworkings. The piece was intended, the title page tells us, for a two-manual harpsichord, the preferred keyboard instrument in the French court, which accounts for the unusual performance markings of “forte” and “piano” in the score. The work opens with a French Overture, a form linked to Louis’ court. It begins slowly, in music marked by the emphatic dotted rhythms (long-short-long) and elaborate ornamentation that celebrate his majesty. A fast section follows; in this case (since it’s Bach), a fugue in three voices. The regal opening music returns to round off the work.

The coquettish Courante (current, running), profusely decorated, sets the Galant tone so characteristic of the work. A sprightly dance, the Gavotte’s gracefully ornamented melody is supported by a well-shaped bass line. A more subdued middle section features the tenor range so popular in contemporary French style. The focus of the Passepied (pass-foot) was not on the elegance of steps, but on the formation of geometric patterns on the floor, perfectly captured by the symmetrical, balanced eight-bar phrases of Bach’s music. The Sarabande, thoughtful and introspective, provides a moment of repose. The buoyant Bourrée recalls the lively French folk dance from which it grew, its outer parts flanking a soft middle section.

The Gigue brings back the dotted rhythms of the opening overture, now tripping along in a lively 6/8. Instead of ending here, as was the custom, Bach adds an Echo, a piece intended to exploit the variations in sound between the two manuals of the harpsichord and featuring plentiful markings of forte and piano.

“Not just a Bach [a stream], but a Meer [an ocean],” Beethoven said of his illustrious predecessor. A lifetime was not enough to explore his genius, Robert Schumann believed. Tonight’s two works, both in the French style, illustrate the enormous range of his art.

KAROL SZYMANOWSKI (1882-1937)

Selected Mazurkas, Op. 50, Nos. 2, 7, 8, 5, 4 Composed 1924-25

In his 1853 biography of Chopin, Liszt observed that Chopin (who spent his career in France) had never been free from a feeling that formed “the soil of his heart” and that he knew of only one Polish word that could express this: “Żal.” Pianist Bryan Janis describes “Żal” as a bittersweet melancholy; others have called it an aching sadness, even despair. Liszt wrote: “Żal! It colors the whole of Chopin’s compositions.” For Polish pianist-composer Karol Szymanowski, “Żal” was also a vibrant presence in his own work, particularly in the mazurkas.

As a student at the Warsaw Conservatory, Szymanowski immersed himself in the music of Chopin, Liszt, and Scriabin. In Vienna, he spent much of the time between 1907 and 1914 writing music that pushed the boundaries of tonality or abandoned it entirely. Using dissonance for expressive ends, his compositions were inspired by the works of Schoenberg and Berg. He became a friend of Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who, on his own travels, played and promoted his music. Szymanowski spent the summer of 1914 in Paris and became enchanted by the music of Debussy and Ravel.

At the outbreak of World War I Szymanowski returned to the family’s estate in Ukraine where he had been born, just across the border from Poland. The next years were his most prolific, filled with compositions that drew together “the refined sonorities of Debussy, Ravel and late Scriabin and the impassioned late-Romanticism of the New German School,” his biographer Jim Samson writes. It was a “uniquely personal dialogue between these two worlds.”

When the war ended, a newly unified Poland beckoned Szymanowski back. For the first time he took up the mazurka, a genre inextricably linked to Chopin, who had written at least sixty. Samson believes that Szymanowski was the first Polish composer “to fully understand Chopin’s achievement and to build on it in a wholly new way.” With Chopin in mind, Szymanowski wrote, “I shall never cease in the conviction that a true and deep understanding of French music, of its content, its form and its further evolution, is one of the conditions for the development of our Polish music.” Although he pays homage to his revered predecessor, Syzmanowski’s mazurkas are distinctly his own – not an elegy to the past, but a clear way forward. They became a hallmark of Polish modernism, New Yorker critic Alex Ross declares, and made the composer the “standard bearer of patriotic feeling.”

Like Chopin’s, Syzmanowski’s mazurkas are remarkably varied – some delicate, others fierce; some lively, others wistful. Like the waltz, they are in triple meter, but with accents on the second or third beat rather than the first, abounding in internal changes of dynamics and tempo. “There is much that is new, but also something of a return to the old,” Szymanowski wrote of his violin concerto, words equally apt for his mazurkas.

Just as Chopin had done, he stamped his own voice on the centuries-old dance, expressing its essence in his own musical language.

Piotr Anderszewski has chosen five of Syzmanowski’s twenty mazurkas for tonight’s program. The first is plaintive and spare, its opening gesture appearing first as a solo line, then as a dissonantly sweet duet. Changes in tempo, mood, and dynamic keep the melody fresh, to be interpreted (as the composer directs) at times animated, at others, tranquil, and light. The second is designated a “Tempo Oberka,” in the folk tradition a whirling couple’s dance with stamping and kneeling figures. Bass drones recall the Polish bagpipes traditionally part of a mazurka band. The third is dark, somber, and sometimes agitated, exploring the low register of the piano. The fourth is “Żal” exemplified: pensive and introspective, sometimes agitated, sometimes resigned. A melody so copiously decorated would have been played by a shepherd’s flute or a violin. The fifth, buoyant and robust, is resolute indeed. The set ends in a vibrant celebration of dances from long ago, rediscovered and transformed.

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945)

Fourteen Bagatelles, Op. 6

Composed 1908

Virtuoso pianist, composer, ethnomusicologist, and inveterate traveler, Béla Bartók collected thousands of Eastern European folk songs and dances, which he recorded on Edison cylinders and meticulously transcribed. His travels took him around his native Hungary, and to Romania, Turkey, and North Africa. In an autobiographical sketch, Bartók wrote, “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys…the melodies were full of the freest and most varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi.”

One of the genres Bartók chose to express this new freedom was the bagatelle: a short piece, a trifle, in no predictable form, a blank slate for the composer's imagination. This is music written by a pianist for pianists, reveling in the resources of the instrument.

Published in 1908, the Fourteen Bagatelles were inspired by trips to Transylvania and Slovakia in 1906 and 1907. When they were finished, Bartók showed them to pianistcomposer Ferruccio Busoni, who pronounced them “at last something really new.” He invited Bartók to play them at his master class at the Vienna Conservatory and wrote a glowing letter of recommendation to the illustrious Leipzig publishing firm Breitkopf & Härtel, urging them to bring out this exciting new work. They declined, reporting that the music was so “extremely difficult and very modern” that it had no place in their catalog. A Budapest publisher quickly picked them up.

Bartók’s style was not to everyone’s taste. One reviewer wrote in 1910 that his music “exhausts, torments, and unnerves this listener, even triggering headaches.” A logical train of thought is supplanted by arbitrary juxtapositions. Tangled musical threads suddenly broken, interesting thoughts suppressed almost as soon as they are born, and continually mixed up with other themes in different keys and opposite moods. Thus might we characterize the latest works by Bartók, a genius gone awry.”

In this set of fourteen, each bagatelle has its own discrete sound world, each focusing on a particular musical device. Together they make up a rich potpourri of textures, tempos, rhythms, moods, and gestures.

The composer uses meticulous notation, sometimes with metronome markings, to indicate how the bagatelles should be played and in particular how the folk-like influences should be expressed. Bartók draws on traditional styles of the musicians he studied, using both parlandorubato (as if speaking, while stretching the tempo) and tempo giusto (the strict meter of the dance.)  Dissonance is used as an expressive device, at times jarring, at others sweet and pleasing.

Only the first bagatelle has a key signature. In fact, two: four sharps, four flats. According to the composer, this was a “half-serious, half-jesting procedure that was used to demonstrate the absurdity of key signatures in certain kinds of contemporary music.” Some of these bagatelles reflect not just Bartók’s research, but his own experiences. With its constant buzzing above a steady melody, the third bagatelle is “out-ofdoors” music mixed with Debussyian parallel chords. The fourth is a harmonization of a folk song collected near the Danube entitled “When I Was a Cowherd.” Its rueful text reads, “I went to sleep, and when I awoke, the cows were all gone.” In the fifth, a setting of a Slovakian folk song, soft chords float above a sprightly tune, bouncy and enthusiastic.

The last two bagatelles come out of Bartók’s infatuation with a nineteen-year-old violinist, Stefi Guyer. The thirteenth, written the day she broke off their relationship, is entitled, “She is dead. Slow and funereal.” Doleful chords, deep in the bass, pound out a steady heart-beat rhythm. The last, called “My dancing sweetheart,” is a mad, almost manic waltz, which Bartók labeled “grotesque” in a later orchestral setting. With that, he brings this marvelous set of miniatures to a close.

J.S. BACH (1685-1750)

French Suite No. 5, BWV 816 Composed 1722

By his own admission, Bach’s happiest years were those spent at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen (from 1717 to 1723), a talented violist who realized the value of his Kapellmeister and his work. Bach flourished under his patronage. What would come to be known as the French Suites first appeared in 1722 in the Clavier-Büchlein (Little Keyboard Book), compiled in Bach’s own hand for his second wife, Anna Magdalena, a gifted singer. Unlike Bach’s very public Clavierübung, the French Suites were not published. In addition to his autograph copy, they exist only in a number of manuscripts made by his students, each with distinctive ornaments supplied by their attentive teacher.

In his 1802 biography of Bach, Johann Nikolaus Forkel described Bach’s French Suites as pleasing and less complex than much of his other keyboard music, with a more predominant melody, characteristics often associated with the French style. Gilmore Piano Master Murray Perahia describes this suite as full of “inner joy, understated, the joy of the soul.” It begins with an Allemande (German Dance), its continuous sixteenth notes passing between the hands. The Courante bounces along in fast, rippling notes. It is “as much fun to play as to hear,” Perahia observes. The meditative Sarabande (Bach’s favorite among the Baroque dances) features a vocal line as beautiful as any he wrote. A Gavotte, one of the suite’s light-hearted Galanteries, follows. Its music captures the Galant style just coming into vogue: the melody dominates, the harmony is simple, the rhythm is straightforward, the phrases balanced.

Next comes a Bourrée, a dance described by theorist Johann Matheson in 1739 as “contented and self-composed,” no matter how fast the tempo. Then the Loure (described as a slow gigue) makes a rare appearance; it is one of only two Bach composed. Slow and embellished, its musical gestures are imitated between the hands; its strategic pauses lead gracefully back to a repeat of the Bourrée. The Gigue swings along at a gentle clip, triplets added to each main beat. It begins like a joyous fugue, the subject entering first in treble, then alto, then bass. Not just a jig, it is also a chase, as the voices careen after one another, ending the suite in what Perahia describes as a blur of joy.

In 1723 Prince Leopold married a woman unsympathetic to his love for music. Bach called her an “amusa” and began to look around for other work, a quest that would lead him to Leipzig, where he would compose the suite that opened tonight’s program.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

SOLO PIANO RECITAL

2010 GILMORE ARTIST

Kirill Gerstein, piano

Friday, May 10 • 2 pm

Stetson Chapel, Kalamazoo College

Concert Preview • 1 pm

Composer Matthew Aucoin, Olmsted Room, Mandelle Hall

F. CHOPIN

G. FAURÉ

Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat Major, Op. 61

Nocturne No. 13 in B Minor, Op. 119

F. POULENC Three Intermezzos

Premier Intermezzo, FP 71.I

Deuxième Intermezzo, FP 71.II

Troisième Intermezzo, FP 118

F. LISZT Polonaise in E Major, S. 223, No. 2

: INTERMISSION :

R. SCHUMANN

Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Op. 26

I. Allegro

II. Romanze

III. Scherzino

IV. Intermezzo

V. Finale

MATTHEW AUCOIN The tracks have vanished

U.S. PREMIERE, Gilmore Commission for Kirill Gerstein

L. GODOWSKY

Symphonische Metamorphosen Johann Strauss’scher Themen: No. 2 “Die Fledermaus”

SPONSOR

THE JOHN W. AND ROSEMARY K. BROWN FAMILY FOUNDATION

IN HONOR OF DANIEL GUSTIN

VENUE SPONSOR WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO

KIRILL GERSTEIN, 2010 GILMORE ARTIST

From Bach to Adès, Kirill Gerstein’s playing is distinguished by its clarity of expression, discerning intelligence, and energetic, imaginative musical presence. Born in the former Soviet Union in 1979, he is an American citizen currently based in Berlin. His career is similarly international, as he regularly performs in recital and in collaboration with leading orchestras in London, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, New York, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere.

As a boy, Mr. Gerstein attended one of the USSR’s special music schools for gifted children and taught himself to play jazz by listening to his parents’ record collection. Following a chance encounter with jazz legend Gary Burton in St. Petersburg when he was 14, Mr. Gerstein was invited as the youngest student to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied jazz and classical piano. At 16, he decided to focus on classical music, completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Manhattan School of Music in New York.

Mr. Gerstein was the sixth recipient of the Gilmore Artist Award, the First Prize winner at the 10th Arthur Rubinstein Competition, and a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant. He is currently on the faculty of Kronberg Academy and is a professor of piano at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin.

Mr. Gerstein’s decade-long artistic relationship with composer Thomas Adès has resulted in multiple Grammy®-nominated recordings, including a Deutsche Grammophon recording of Mr. Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which was written especially for Mr. Gerstein.

© Marco Borggreve

MATTHEW AUCOIN

A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, writer, and pianist. In 2021, his latest opera, Eurydice, received its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, and his critically acclaimed book, The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, was published. Mr. Aucoin has worked with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, American Repertory Theater, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Music Academy of the West, and was artist-in-residence with the Los Angeles Opera from 2016 to 2020. His music has been commissioned and performed by Yo-Yo Ma, the Brentano Quartet, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, tenor Paul Appleby, and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo.

Mr. Aucoin’s 2015 opera, Crossing, commissioned by the American Repertory Theater, received productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Los Angeles Opera. He is co-founder of the American Modern Opera Company, which acted as music director of the 2022 Ojai Music Festival. Aucoin describes it as “an opera company, a new-music ensemble, a rock band, and a touring theater troupe rolled into one.” The ensemble has an annual festival at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater and has been in residence at the Park Avenue Armory and Harvard University. He is a graduate of Harvard College, and earned a graduate diploma from Juilliard in composition.

PROGRAM NOTES

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)

Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat Major, Op. 61

Composed 1846

Many of Chopin’s greatest works for piano were written in Nohant, the country home of novelist George Sand (pen name of Aurore Dupin). In 1846, in what would be his last summer there, he struggled to complete the Polonaise-Fantaisie, begun the previous fall. “I am simply unable to produce anything worthwhile,” he wrote, leaving more drafts of this work than any other. His biographer Alan Walker has an explanation, calling Op. 61 a “valedictory utterance” that emerged from Chopin’s “harvest of sorrows.” His relationship with Sand was coming to an unhappy end, and his tuberculosis was only worsening.

Yet Chopin persevered. The previous December he had written to his family in Warsaw, “Now I’d like to complete a sonata with cello, a Barcarolle, and something else. I don’t know what I’ll call it.” He named the “something else” a fantasy, suggesting that the music fits no fixed, predictable form and is instead an extended narrative improvisation.

Written on an epic scale, the PolonaiseFantaisie is among Chopin’s most complex piano works. A hybrid form, it is a “fantasy in search of a polonaise,” in the words of musicologist Jim Samson. (Chopin added “Polonaise” to the title later on.)

© Vincent Trullo

With the improvisatory scales and tonal ambiguity of the fantasia-like opening, Chopin “releases the genie from the bottle,” Walker writes. Martial octaves introduce the polonaise rhythm, then a self-confident melody emerges. The languorous mood of the middle section takes us into the world of the nocturne. When the polonaise theme returns, it becomes explosive, even raging. Gradually the energy spends itself, and the piece dies quietly away.

The Polonaise-Fantaisie had a mixed reception. Liszt said that it “brings the mind to a pitch of irritability bordering on delirium” and made him feel “ambushed on all sides.” Liszt, the composer of the Mephisto Waltz and Mazeppa Transcendental Etude, was one to talk. Many years later he admitted he had been wrong.

GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845-1924)

Nocturne No. 13 in B Minor, Op. 119 Composed 1921

Teacher, organist, and pianist, Gabriel Fauré was born when Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Berlioz were still active and died in the age of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Messiaen. His long life “links the end of Romanticism with the second quarter of the twentieth century,” his biographer JeanMichel Nectoux observes. Initially steeped in the French tradition of graceful, tender lyricism and restraint, in his late works Fauré “pursued a solitary and confident course,” Nectoux notes, his music featuring increasing economy of expression, expressive dissonance, highly chromatic harmony, and tonal ambiguity.

The thirteenth nocturne was written when the composer was 76, just three years before his death. Retired as Director of the Paris Conservatoire (where his pupils included Ravel and Nadia Boulanger), Fauré could devote himself entirely to composition.

Although he suffered from hearing loss that resulted in “a cacophony of sound,” he said, and from periods of depression he called “spleen,” in those last years Fauré produced a series of sublime works: a cello sonata, a piano quintet, a song cycle, and the thirteenth nocturne, the last work he wrote for piano. Nectoux believes it represents the summit of his piano writing, the perfect balance of simplicity and passionate expression.

In this nocturne Fauré pays homage to Chopin, whose own nocturnes crown the genre. The work opens in music that is introspective, plaintive, yearning, searching, questioning. In the agitated middle section, phrases pile on top of each other, pushing forward. Not a peaceful night. The tension grows. The opening theme returns. The agitation is quieted but not resolved, the ending austere and resigned.

FRANCIS POULENC (1899-1963)

Three Intermezzos

Premier Intermezzo, FP 71.I

Composed 1934

Deuxième Intermezzo, FP 71.II

Composed 1934

Troisième Intermezzo, FP 118

Composed 1943

Musicologist Roger Nichols places Francis Poulenc securely within the family tree of Massenet, Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, for whom “grace, elegance, humor, lightness of touch and sense of proportion are key ingredients, but all of whom also have the power to move us, and often beyond our expectations.”

Yet Poulenc was of a new generation, a fan of the music hall and le jazz, a Stravinsky-ite, an exact contemporary of George Gershwin.For Poulenc melodies were central, Nichols notes: they “flowed with every exhalation of breath.”

As for harmony, in a letter of 1942 Poulenc observed, “I know perfectly well that I’m not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy, but I think there’s room for new music which doesn’t mind using other people’s chords. Wasn’t that the case with Mozart-Schubert?” In today’s work he gives “other people’s chords” a fresh piquant touch, writing themes built on triads and scales, yet spiced liberally with dissonance.

The first two intermezzos were written to please his publisher and “boost his bank balance,” Nichols points out. The first is robust and assertive, full of “calculated inelegances” and “deliberate infelicities,” as Nichols puts it, but always featuring the grace and charm described by the composer as “the French temperament.” Graceful and whimsical, the second intermezzo, composed in August 1934, was a particular favorite of the composer. Marked “a song sweet and out of doors,” the melody floats between the hands, sometimes in the alto, sometimes in the bass, accompanied in a kind of time lag in music just a half-beat behind. Towards the end comes a timeless suspension of motion and a delicate reprise of the opening ideas.

The final intermezzo was written in Paris in March 1943, in the midst of the Nazi occupation of France. Marked “sweet and melancholy,” the music pierces the heart, taking the listener away from chaos into a world of peace and tranquility. Make it “an outdoor song accompanied by a halo of pedals,” Poulenc tells the pianist. The music grows in intensity until stunningly beautiful treble harmonies provide a sweet benediction.

FRANZ LISZT (1811-1886)

Polonaise in E Major, S. 223, No. 2

Composed 1850-51

In 1851 when his two Polonaises were written, Liszt was under the patronage of the Duke of Weimar, who had named him Außerordentlicher Kapellmeister (Extraordinary Music Director) three years earlier. Happy with his appointment, the Duke observed that his new Kapellmeister was “what a prince should be.” Liszt now had the leisure to conduct the orchestra and opera, to teach, and to write some of his most profound music.

Having secured his reputation as the greatest pianist of the nineteenth century, Liszt had retired from his career as a traveling virtuoso.

His playing was astonishing. When Danish fabulist Hans Christian Andersen attended one of what Liszt called his monologues pianistiques, he recalled that when LIszt entered the room, “it was as if an electric shock passed through it.” British pianist Charles Hallé sat speechless, bowled over by Liszt’s “crystal-like clearness which never failed him for a moment, even in the most complicated and, for anybody else, impossible passages.” Next to Liszt, Hallé believed, “all other pianists were like children.” After hearing him play, Clara Schumann, not Liszt’s biggest fan, recalled, “I sobbed aloud, it overcame me so.” Robert Schumann agreed: “How extraordinarily he plays, boldly and wildly, and then again tenderly and ethereally!”

When the Polonaise was written, Liszt was working on his biography of Chopin. Although the relationship between the two composers was fraught – “a mixture of admiration and irritation,” musicologist Dolores Pesce notes – Liszt never lost sight of his friend’s genius.

Now that he was gone, Liszt could turn to the genres most closely associated with Chopin: the mazurka, the waltz, and the polonaise. In this music Chopin’s personality “seems to speak beyond the grave,” Alan Walker suggests.

Liszt particularly admired Chopin’s polonaises, which he believed to “harbor the noble sentiments and traditions of ancient Poland, mirroring the firm determination and purposefulness of great men of former times.” What could be more heroic than this extraordinary work? The two outer sections are replete with Liszt’s thumbprints: pounding octaves, dare-devil leaps, emphatic rhythmic gestures. The contrasting inner section is resplendent with Lisztian lacy filigree, including two cadenzas. In tandem with Liszt’s playing, by mid-century the piano itself had grown, its keyboard bigger, its strings more tightly strung. In this Polonaise Liszt highlights these increased sonorities: a booming, resonant bass; a delicate, celestial treble. He never played a piece the same way twice, Liszt’s students reported. Here we have a glimpse of his extraordinary improvisations.

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Op. 26

Composed 1839

In April 1839, Schumann’s fiancée Clara Wieck wrote to him from Paris with a request: “Listen, Robert, couldn’t you just once compose something brilliant, easily understandable...not too long and not too short? I’d so much like to have something of yours to play that’s specifically intended for the public. Obviously a genius will find this degrading, but politics demand it every now and again.” An internationally known concert pianist, she knew what she was talking about. Separated, anxious, and lonely, the two lovers were in the throes of a court case, petitioning the court to let them marry without her father Friedrich Wieck’s consent.

Violently opposed to their marriage, Wieck, who also served as Clara’s teacher and manager, had blocked them at every turn. That spring he had sent Clara alone to Paris to present a series of concerts without his guidance, hoping to teach her a lesson in dependency.

When Schumann received Clara’s letter, he had just left Vienna and had begun to ponder exactly how he would support a wife and perhaps a family. Faschingsschwank aus Wien was already germinating, with the five movements sketched out. Fasching (Shrove Tuesday) refers to the last day of celebration before the strictures of Lent begin.

Known elsewhere as Mardi Gras or Carnaval, it is a revel indeed, full of Schwanken (jests and pranks). Schumann had observed the Viennese version first-hand only a few months earlier.

In the true spirit of Fasching, the piece can be read as a sonata turned on its head. Schumann sets the first movement as a rondo (traditionally a jubilant finale), and the last in sonata form (usually the first, a thoughtful exposition of ideas). Instead of two middle movements, he gives us three. Calling the work Faschingsschwank was undoubtedly intended not just to indicate its nature, but also to entice potential buyers; labeling it a sonata would have implied a more serious work.

The opening rondo is marked Sehr lebhaft (very lively). Through a series of increasingly extended episodes, Schumann makes the returns of the emphatic main theme unmistakable. Each of these is individually profiled – one songful and melodic, another in minor mode, yet another marchlike – and set off to perfection.

Midway we hear a brief snatch of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, banned in Austria at the time. A Romanze follows. Only twenty-four measures long, it serves as an interlude rather than an independent movement. With its poignant melody, gentle accompaniment, spare texture, and yearning, introspective mood, it couldn’t be more appealing. Perhaps it paints a “fantasy picture” of a reveler taking time away from the rowdy celebration.

Then comes a graceful, Mendelssohnian Scherzino, the “ino” indicating that the expected middle section (the Trio) is missing. Its repeated sections, clear cadences, and leaps between high and low registers provide a delightful focal point between the movements that frame it. The Intermezzo, marked Mit grösster Energie (with the greatest energy), is quintessential Schumann.

Its surging, urgent melody sings out over an active bass accompaniment and intricate inner parts, the thicker texture contrasting dramatically with the crisp Scherzino and transparent Romanze.

Although Brahms was only six when Schumann wrote Faschingsschwank, he must have been deeply influenced by it, particularly the Intermezzo, which is so Brahmsian in its mood and style. The sonata-form last movement, marked Höchst lebhaft (extremely lively), provides a robust, satisfying ending to this sometimes sprawling work. And what of Robert and Clara? The court ruled in their favor, and they were married on September 12, 1840, the day before she turned twenty-one.

© 2024 Zaide Pixley

MATTHEW AUCOIN (B. 1990)

The tracks have vanished

Commissioned by Kirill Gerstein and The Gilmore in 2022

Plenty of composers have written transcriptions of operas for solo piano, whether their own operas or those by other composers: think of Liszt’s virtuosic fantasias on the works of Bellini, Verdi, and Wagner; or, in more recent years, Thomas Adès’s playful “paraphrases” on his own operas.

The tracks have vanished is something different: it is a transcription from an imaginary opera – or rather, a still-unwritten one. I have become fascinated in recent years by Dostoevsky’s prophetic novel Demons (which is still better known in English as The Possessed – an old and inaccurate translation of its title). Demons tells a story that feels all too relevant today: it’s a tale of the rise of nihilism within a complacent and unsuspecting society.

Specifically, it deals with the way that the spiritual malaise of young, privileged, bored, lost young men can have deadly consequences.

Normally, when I write instrumental music, I don’t think in explicitly dramatic terms; the musical materials themselves contain plenty of drama! But in this case, unusually, I did start from specific images and moments within the story. The work is cast in two movements. The first is inspired, broadly speaking, by the dynamic between the two tormented young nihilists at the novel’s center. There is also a hidden little setting of Pushkin’s poem “Demons,” which serves as the novel’s epigraph: “Upon my life the tracks have vanished / We’ve lost our way, what shall we do?”

The second movement was initially inspired by a chapter – suppressed by a censor in Dostoevsky’s lifetime – in which one of the protagonists visits a monk and confesses to having cruelly taken advantage of a young girl years earlier.

But here’s the thing: music is music, and none of these dramatic ideas served as more than an initiating impulse. Just as Beethoven once said that the metronome markings in his scores were only valid for the first few bars, the narrative inspiration for each of these movements only proved to be valid for the first few bars. After that, the music had its own ideas.

© Matthew Aucoin

LEOPOLD GODOWSKY (1870-1938)

Symphonische Metamorphosen Johann Strauss’scher Themen: No. 2 “Die Fledermaus" Composed 1912

Leopold Godowsky is “the superman of piano playing,” critic James Huneker, his contemporary, proclaimed. “Nothing like him, as far as I know, is to be found in the history of piano playing since Chopin…He is a pianist for pianists.” No less an authority than the legendary New York Times critic Harold Schonberg pronounced him one of the most remarkable pianists who ever lived.

Yet the public never heard Godowsky play as would have his friends at post-concert or other informal gatherings. By his own admission, he froze in public, in recitals or recording sessions.

This is the second of Godowsky’s three Symphonic Metamorphoses on themes by Johann Strauss. They are not transcriptions but new compositions, captivating variations on tunes everyone knew. Godowsky called them “free fantasies.” What could have been better known than the comic operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat)? Composed by the “Waltz King,” Johann Strauss, Jr., it premiered in Vienna in 1874. With its jaunty tunes, it was guaranteed to entertain.

The first performance direction in Godowsky’s score, Alla burla, captures the mood perfectly: “All for fun.”

As Liszt had done in his opera paraphrases, Godowsky refashioned the work according to his own conception, focusing on his impressions rather than recreating the plot. He selected several arias from two of the three acts of Die Fledermaus and wove them together as he pleased, delighting in Strauss’ love affair with the waltz. The irresistible aria Mein Herr Marquis (“The Laughing Song”) takes center stage. By calling his piece “Metamorphoses,” Godowsky signals that these familiar tunes would be transformed into something new. By “Symphonic,” he refers to the work’s dense, almost orchestral textures, requiring the performer to conquer a thicket of notes. This was something the fabled pianist Godowsky could do very well: “His ten digits are ten independent voices,” Huneker observed.

With its extreme technical difficulty, trills, octaves, rapid leaps, this work is truly Lisztian in its demands. Yet, Godowsky wrote in 1920, “Virtuosity as such is the least part of the Metamorphoses.” Instead, he added, “Everything in them is developed out of Strauss’s own music in an endeavor to build up a living, pulsing, colorful transformation of the simple original.” Schonberg agreed: “The Godowsky paraphrases are the piano pushed to its logical (or, if you wish illogical) extremes…And despite the enormous difficulties, the paraphrases were not intended to be played as bravura stunts. Godowsky had musical aims primarily in mind.”

©2024 Zaide Pixley

Pink Martini featuring China Forbes

Thomas M. Lauderdale, piano and bandleader

China Forbes, lead vocals

Edna Vazquez, guest vocals

Jimmie Herrod, guest vocals

Phil Baker, upright bass

Dan Faehnle, guitar

Pansy Chang, cello

Thomas Barber, trumpet

Timothy Nishimoto, vocals and percussion

Brian Davis, percussion

Miguel Bernal, percussion

Andrew Borger, drums and percussion

Friday May 10 • 8 pm

Miller Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Program to be announced. There will be no intermission.

CONCERT SPONSORS

ROBERT BOISTURE AND MARY MARGARET PIPKIN

LIVESTREAM SPONSORS

THREE RIVERS MANHATTAN CLUB

PINK MARTINI

Thirty years ago in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, Thomas Lauderdale was working in local politics, attending every political fundraiser under the sun, but was dismayed to find the music at these events underwhelming. Drawing inspiration from classical, jazz, and pop, and music from all over the world – and hoping to appeal to conservatives and liberals alike – he founded the “little orchestra” Pink Martini to provide more beautiful and inclusive musical soundtracks for political fundraisers for causes such as civil rights, affordable housing, the environment, libraries, public broadcasting, education and parks.

One year later, China Forbes, a Harvard classmate who was living in New York City, joined Pink Martini as the lead singer, and collaborator. Their first song “Sympathique (Je ne veux pas travailler)” became an overnight sensation in France, and is still the band’s number one song. “We’re very much an American band, but we spend a lot of time abroad and therefore have the incredible diplomatic opportunity to represent a broader, more inclusive America,” says Lauderdale. “The America which remains the most heterogeneously populated country in the world…composed of people of every country, every language, every religion.”

Featuring a dozen musicians and songs in 25 languages, Pink Martini performs on six continents. Since its European debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, the band has played with more than 50 orchestras around the world, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Boston Pops, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, the San Francisco Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the BBC Concert Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall. The group has released 11 studio albums on its own independent label Heinz Records (named after Lauderdale’s dog), selling over 3 million albums worldwide. The band is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024.

© Chris Hornbecker

Anderszewski play-conducts Beethoven with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra

2002 Gilmore Artist Piotr Anderszewski, piano and conductor

Andrew Grams, conductor

2022 Gilmore Young Artist Janice Carissa, piano

2022 Gilmore Young Artist Clayton Stephenson, piano

Saturday, May 11 • 7 pm

Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo

Concert Preview • 6 pm

Dr. Zaide Pixley, room #130

L. FARRENC Overture in E-flat Major, Op. 24

M. BRUCH Concerto for Two Pianos, Op. 88a

I. Andante sostenuto

II. Andante con moto – Allegro molto vivace

III. Adagio ma non troppo

IV. Andante – Allegro.

Janice Carissa & Clayton Stephenson, pianos

: INTERMISSION :

L.v. BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15

I. Allegro con brio

II. Largo

III. Rondo. Allegro scherzando

Piotr Anderszewski, piano & conductor

SPONSOR

ROGER GAUNTLETT IN HONOR OF UNCLE IRVING

PIOTR ANDERSZEWSKI 2002 GILMORE ARTIST

Please see Mr. Anderszewski’s biography on page 77.

ANDREW GRAMS

American conductor Andrew Grams has led orchestras in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Houston. He recently stepped down after eight seasons as music director of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Grams has worked extensively with orchestras abroad, including the symphony orchestras of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, the Orchestre National de France, Hong Kong Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra London, the symphony orchestras of Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide; the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. He has led multiple performances of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker® for the New York City Ballet and the first performances of the new production of The Nutcracker for the Norwegian National Ballet in Oslo. As an educator, Mr. Grams has worked with orchestras at institutions such as the Curtis Institute of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, Indiana University, Roosevelt University, the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland, and the Amsterdam Conservatorium.

© Simon Fowler

© Courtesy of the Artist

JANICE CARISSA

2022 GILMORE YOUNG ARTIST

Winner of Salon de Virtuosi, Janice Carissa has “the multicolored highlights of a mature pianist“ (Philadelphia Inquirer). She has garnered acclaim at concert halls including the Sydney Opera House, Carnegie Hall, United Nations, The Kennedy Center, Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation. A pupil of Gary Graffman and Robert McDonald, she earned a bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, and is pursuing a master’s degree at The Juilliard School. Following her Philadelphia Orchestra debut at age 16, Janice substituted for André Watts as soloist with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and performed with the Kansas City, Amarillo, Des Moines, John Hopkins, St. Peters by the Sea, Symphony in C, Eastern Wind, Bay Atlantic and Midwest Young Artist symphonies. She has appeared at The Gilmore, Marlboro, North Shore, Ravinia, Caramoor, and Kneisel Hall festivals, and in the last year, she was a featured soloist with Sacramento Philharmonic, Promusica Chamber Orchestra, Curtis Symphony Orchestra, and the Tacoma and Battle Creek symphonies.

CLAYTON STEPHENSON 2022 GILMORE YOUNG ARTIST

Pianist Clayton Stephenson is known for his charisma and natural ease at the instrument. He started lessons at age seven and at ten joined Juilliard’s pre-college program. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University and a master’s degree in performance from the New England Conservatory. Highlights of his career include appearances with the Calgary Philharmonic, Chicago Sinfonietta, and the Fort Worth, Louisville, Lansing, and North Carolina symphony orchestras; and recitals at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Foundation Louis Vuitton Auditorium in Paris, Bad Kissinger Sommer Festival and BeethovenFest in Germany, Colour of Music Festival, Ravinia Festival and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. He has been featured on NPR, WUOL, and WQXR, and appeared in the “Grammy® Salute to Classical Music” Concert at Carnegie’s Stern Auditorium. He was a 2017 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, a Young Scholar of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation, and won the $50,000 grand prize at the inaugural Nina Simone Piano Competition in 2023.

© Sienny Debora

© Chris McGuire

LOUISE FARRENC (1804-1875)

Overture in E-flat Major, Op. 24 Composed 1834

Nineteenth century French pianist-composer

Louise Farrenc is coming into her own. Noted conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin believes that her “symphonies and the overtures should hold a similar place as Schumann and Mendelssohn,” adding, “I do believe that she’s completely deserving of that.” French conductor Laurence Equilbey notes that her music has “great thematic and harmonic originality, both poetic and energetic, and [is] so solidly constructed.” French hornist James Sommerville heralds her as having “a great ear for melody, a great sense of structure.”

She was also heralded in her lifetime as far afield as the United States. An obituary in The New York Times described her as “a musician and composer of considerable distinction…[who] died at Paris yesterday, in her seventy-second year. She was born in Paris, May 31, 1804, and gave early indication of rare musical talent…Her early promises of excellence in her musical profession were richly fulfilled…She has published rondos, divertissements, and air variés, six fugues for the piano, several orchestral overtures, some concerted pieces, airs and variations for the piano and violin, and several airs and variations from the operas in vogue in her time.”

But the praise was often qualified. A critic wrote, with some surprise, of Farrenc’s First Symphony of 1845, “The dominant quality of this work, composed by a woman, is precisely what one would least expect to find. There is more power than delicacy.” Renowned composer Hector Berlioz described an overture in Gazette Musicale review as "well written and orchestrated with a talent rare among women." The conductor François-Joseph Fétis, one of her leading promoters, believed that she had transcended the perceived limitations of her sex. “With Mme. Farrenc,” he wrote, “the inspiration and the art of composing are of masculine proportions.”

Farrenc didn’t let such attitudes stop her. Unlike other women composers – Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann – she was actively encouraged by her family, both as a child and as a grown woman. Born into a family of artists (her father and brother each won the Prix de Rome for their sculptures), she began to study piano at age six. Her godmother, herself an accomplished musician, arranged for her to do further study of piano and composition (privately) at the Conservatoire. She was as fortunate in her husband as she had been in her family. At age seventeen she married Aristide Farrenc, who encouraged her in both composition and performance. Together they founded a publishing house, Éditions Farrenc. Both served as editors. Her music was among the many pieces that emerged from their press.

Her appointment as Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory in 1842 was a remarkable achievement – even though she could teach only female students and only piano, not composition. (Women weren’t allowed to study composition at the Conservatoire until 1870.) In 1850 she asked for – and received – equal pay to the men on the faculty.

According to musicologist Vivien Schweitzer, she was the only female professor in France during the nineteenth century and perhaps in Europe.

Farrenc’s works for piano were highly regarded. In 1836 Schumann reviewed a set of variations in his journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. They "are so sure in outline,” he wrote, “so logical in development…that one must fall under their charm, especially since a subtle aroma of romanticism hovers over them."

Her Thirty Etudes in all Major and Minor Keys, Op. 26, were adopted as required music for piano students at the Paris Conservatory, a collection that a music critic predicted would be used “not only to develop technique but also to mold taste.” She was twice awarded the Académie des BeauxArts’ Chartier Prize for chamber music.

It was a bold choice for Farrenc to tackle orchestral music, which her fellow Parisians regarded as too Germanic, preferring the opera. She was extremely fortunate to hear her overtures and symphonies performed. It was hard for composers without access to orchestras to write effectively for them. (Think of a director who can never see his new play in rehearsal.) Fortunately, due to her own initiative, Mme. Farrenc was not in that position. She arranged a performance of her Second Overture (composed 1834) at the Paris Conservatoire in 1840. A year later it was performed in Copenhagen, along with Berlioz's Waverly Overture. Both works were performed at the Danish court soon after, at the King’s request.

Farrenc’s Second Overture. begins with a slow introduction set in E-flat major, the same key as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony (1803) and with the same heroic quality. It begins in somber E-flat minor with resonant, forte chords, followed by an impassioned melody full of portent. Regal dotted rhythms (long-short-long) increase its power. The fast section that follows is in sonata form. The first theme, in scampering phrases (with more than a touch of Rossini), is followed by percussive, almost joking, chords. A cheerful second theme features a dialogue between strings and winds. The extended development section mixes elements of the introduction with the bustling motion of the fast themes. The recapitulation, further demonstrating Farrenc’s skill as a musical architect, leads to a triumphant coda.

MAX BRUCH (1838-1920)

Concerto for Two Pianos, Op. 88a Composed 1915

Max Bruch was born when Chopin, Liszt, and Berlioz were in their prime. He died two years after WWI ended, when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was seven years old and Schoenberg was inventing the twelve-tone system of composition. Highly regarded as a conductor in Germany and England, he also served as Music Director at the court of Koblenz and Professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where his pupils included Ottorino Respighi and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

Bruch was an ardent admirer of Johannes Brahms, five years his senior, and dedicated his first symphony to him in 1870. But he violently rejected the “new music” promoted by Richard Wagner, the other preeminent European composer of that era. He was resolutely faithful to the styles of Brahms, Schumann, and Mendelssohn. Stylistically, his Concerto for Two Pianos, Op. 82a (1915) is identical to that of his famous first Violin Concerto, Op. 26 (1868), a staple of the violinist’s repertoire. He was friends with the leading violinists of his day and once declared that a violin "can sing a melody better than a piano.

Bruch spent April 1904 on the resort island of Capri, recuperating from a bronchial infection. On Good Friday he witnessed a procession of musicians and children winding their way through the streets. He later wrote home about this scene's impact upon him. "Leading it was a message of sadness with a large tuba on which he played a kind of signal,” Bruch wrote. “It was not bad: One could make quite a good funeral march out of it! Next came several large, flowered crosses, one carried by a hermit from Mont Tiberio.

A few hundred children dressed in white and carrying large burning candles each of them also holding a small black cross. They sang in unison a kind of lamentation." Back home he worked up these ideas into a suite for orchestra, premiered at the London Proms in May 1909 with Sir Henry Wood conducting. Although he continued to tinker with the suite, he never published it.

Then into his quiet life walked the two Sutro sisters from Baltimore, Rose and Ottilie. They had studied at the Berlin Conservatory where Bruch was on the faculty, and in 1911 had performed his Fantasia for two Pianos (Op. 11), with the composer in the audience. They were making a career as duo-pianists and wanted something from him: a concerto for two pianos. Bruch readily agreed. His unpublished orchestral suite with the themes from Capri was ideal for such a purpose. The sisters premiered the concerto in 1916 with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Bruch was not in the audience – which was a very good thing, since he would not have recognized the work they played. The sisters had changed the structure, altered the orchestration, and reduced the technical demands to match their own abilities. A year later they performed it again, this time with the New York Philharmonic and with even more modifications, among these a collapsing of four movements into three. They went on to copyright their own version of Bruch’s piece – and they never played it in Europe.

That’s how things stood until 1970, when Ottilie died. Present at the estate sale was American pianist Nathan Twining, who bought a box of unidentified Sutro papers for $11 – a box that contained the simplified solo parts that the sisters had written for their earlier performances. In another box were the orchestral parts, presumably the Bruch originals. After two years of collaboration with another American pianist, Twining resurrected the concerto as closely as possible to the version that the composer intended – the one we hear today.

The first movement opens with a distinctive theme in the horns, based on the tuba fanfare that Bruch heard in Capri. It is followed by a solemn fugue, first in one piano, then another, then the orchestra, based on the tune from the children’s procession. The fanfare returns, even more powerfully, gradually subdued by the pianos, who end the movement quietly with low bass trills. The second movement begins serenely, but soon becomes a lively scherzo in the best Mendelssohnian fashion. A dialogue between soloists and orchestra leads into a rousing ending. A wistful melody begins the slow third movement. The pianos introduce a flowing main theme, accompanied by hushed strings and gradually becoming more and more impassioned, even operatic, until concluding peacefully. The finale begins with the horn motto theme in octaves, soon joined by the pianos in impassioned commentary. A Brahmsian melody, derived from the children’s tune, introduces a brief moment of calm. Cascading scales and emphatic chords in the piano, paired with the full orchestra, led to a fiery finale.

Near the end of the composer’s life the Sutro sisters communicated with Bruch once again, this time to suggest that they arrange the sale of the manuscript of his first violin concerto, the crown jewel of his works, an offer he accepted. The Sutros paid him in German marks which were, at the end of the Great War, nearly worthless. In 1949 the sisters sold the manuscript themselves –and pocketed the proceeds.

LUDWIG

VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15.

Composed 1797

English pianist J. B. Cramer told his pupils that no one had heard real improvisation until they heard Beethoven. His pupil Carl Czerny recalled that Beethoven’s improvisations were so brilliant that the eyes of his listeners would fill with tears. Some would sob audibly, Czerny wrote, “for apart from the beauty and originality of his ideas, and his ingenious manner of expressing them, there was something magical about his playing.” Another contemporary described his improvisations as “a cataract, elemental, a force of nature.”

In 1797, when the Concerto in C Major was completed, Beethoven was in full force as a virtuoso pianist, in demand to play his sonatas and chamber music at the palaces of his noble and aristocratic patrons, and to play his piano concertos at the public concerts that were growing in popularity in Vienna. Those concertos were his showcase, aimed to draw in ticket-buying music lovers. As a free-lancer, he needed the income. Beethoven would make the arrangements, feature himself as soloist, hire the hall, pay the musicians, and keep whatever profits remained.

In June 1801 (the same year this concerto was published), Beethoven wrote to a friend back home in Bonn: “You want to know something about my present situation. Well, on the whole it is not at all bad…My compositions bring in a good deal; and I may say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible for me to carry out. Moreover, for every composition I can count on six or seven publishers, and even more, if I want them. They no longer bargain with me. I state my price, and they pay.” The C-major concerto amply demonstrates why this was so. Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood writes that it is “shot through with dramatic oppositions of ideas, themes, and sonorities of piano and orchestra”

which dramatize all the basic elements “as if they were actors in a serious play.” His concertos combine “high artistry of design with demands for keyboard virtuosity,” Lockwood adds. It is Mozartian in its sound and constructions, yet distinctly Beethovenian at the same time. The composer dedicated this first concerto to his piano student Countess Babette von Keglevich, a fine pianist herself. (His Variations on a Theme of Salieri, heard earlier in this Festival, and an important early sonata, Op. 7, were also dedicated to her.)

The first movement’s robust orchestral introduction, which introduces the central themes, creates high expectations for the arrival of the soloist, who is intended “to hold us spellbound,” Beethoven’s biographer Sir Donald Tovey wrote a century ago.

Spotlighted by the orchestra’s temporary silence, the soloist introduces his own version of the theme, taken up once again by the orchestra. Mozart’s voice is heard in the magical sequences and rich harmony of the development section; emphatic descending scales take us back to the opening ideas. Then, at the penultimate spot, comes the cadenza: a section of solo improvisation that spins the movement’s motives into new shapes before ushering the full orchestra back in for a jubilant coda. Beethoven wrote three cadenzas as models for others, but undoubtedly would have improvised his own whenever he was billed as soloist.

The piano opens the second movement, now in A-flat major, with a gentle, lyrical theme. A conversation between soloist and orchestra continues the dialogue; the theme becomes more elaborately ornamented with each appearance. The movement ends as quietly as it began, providing a moment of repose between the two extroverted outer movements.

The finale, a high-spirited rondo, is the perfect vehicle for lively interplay between soloist and orchestra. The episodes that separate the appearances of the main theme are full of saucy syncopations. Sharp contrasts between tutti and solo exchanges enliven the texture.

Every piece of music is in search of an ending, pianist-composer Thomas Adès has observed. Beethoven takes his time finding one, inserting a little adagio right before the rambunctious conclusion, one last move to keep the audience guessing. It is a wild, exuberant ride. Beethoven had arrived.

©2024 Zaide Pixley

KALAMAZOO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Julian Kuerti, Music Director and Conductor

FIRST VIOLINS

Jun-Ching Lin

Stefan Hubenov

Emelyn Bashour

Mark Portolese

Marley Haller

Eleanor K. Pifer

Tigran Shiganyan

Oleg Bezuglov

Caroline Joyner

Janet Lyu

Yu Xin

Sofie Yang

Ying-Li Pan

SECOND VIOLINS

Lisa A. Williams

Nicholas Naegele

Hsin-Ju Yu

Benita Barber

Cori Somers

Tatiana Zueva

Yung-Hsuan “Sandy” Lo

Jean Watson Roberts

Norma-Jean Forshey

Dana Duncan-Davis

Fahad Awan

VIOLAS

Arturo Ziraldo

Nicholas Jeffery

Nora Frisk

Sara Churchill

Gerson Medina

Rebecca Boelzner

VIOLAS

David Beytas

Kathy Connor

Jasper Zientek

CELLOS

Igor Cetkovic

Jinhyun Kim

Carol Bullock Russell

Calin Muresan

Elizabeth Start

Brook Bennett

Jean Hatmaker

Allison Rich

Lisa Bressler

David Machavariani

DOUBLE BASSES

Charles Ingrassia

Victor Stahoviak

Matthew Boothe

Frank Tramp

Jason Niehoff

Noah Krzan

Dominic Azkoul

FLUTES

Yukie Ota

Nancy Rinaldi Williams

Jenny Robinson

OBOES

Gabriel Renteria-Elyea

Brad Smith

Maria Schneider

CLARINETS

Georgiy Borisov

Frank Silva

Garret Jones

BASSOONS

Alan Palider

Lauren Murphy

HORNS

Yicheng Gong

Margaret Hamilton

Tamara Kosinski

TRUMPET

Scott Thornburg

Mike Brozick

TROMBONE

Edward “Kip” Hickman

Jaewoo Lee

TUBAS

Robert Whaley

TIMPANI

Mark Guthrie

PERCUSSION

Kevin Kosnik

Judy Moonert

Greg Secor

HARP

Rachel Miller

PIANO

Reiko Yamada

MUSICAL THEATER

FESTIVAL FINALE

Patti LuPone: A Life In Notes

Sunday, May 12 • 4 pm

Miller Auditorium, Kalamazoo

A musical memoir of the Broadway star’s life on and off the stage.

Conceived and Directed by Scott Wittman

Strings, Brad Phillips

Music Director and Piano, Joseph Thalken

Written by Jeffrey Richman

Program to be announced. There will be a 15-minute intermission.

SPONSORS

PATTI LUPONE

Legendary performer Patti LuPone is a three-time Tony Award winner for her performances as Joanne in Marianne Elliott’s award-winning production of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical Company; Madame Rose in the most recent Broadway revival of the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents classic Gypsy; and the title role in the original Broadway production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita. Her New York stage credits include War Paint (Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations); Shows for Days; The Seven Deadly Sins (NY City Ballet); Company (NY Philharmonic); Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Tony, Drama Desk, OCC Award nominations); Sweeney Todd (Tony, Drama Desk, OCC nominations); Noises Off; The Old Neighborhood; Master Class; Anything Goes (Tony nomination, Drama Desk Award); Oliver!; Accidental Death of An Anarchist; The Water Engine; and The Robber Bridegroom (Tony and Drama Desk nominations)

London credits include Company (Olivier Award, WhatsOn Stage Award); Master Class; Sunset Boulevard (Olivier Award nomination); Les Miserables and The Cradle Will Rock (Olivier Award for her performances in both productions). Opera credits include The Ghosts of Versailles (LA Opera), To Hell and Back (SF Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra), The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (LA Opera-debut), Regina (The Kennedy Center). Film credits include The School for Good and Evil (Netflix), Last Christmas, Cliffs of Freedom, The Comedian, Parker, Union Square, Driving Miss Daisy, Witness. Streaming and TV credits include Marvel’s The Darkhold Diaries, Hollywood, Pose, Mom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Penny Dreadful (Critics Choice Award nomination), Girls, American Horror Story (“NYC” and “Coven”), 30 Rock, Glee, Frasier (Emmy nomination), and four seasons as Libby Thatcher on ABCs Life Goes On. She recently received critical acclaim for her performance opposite Joaquin Phoenix in Ari Aster’s latest film Beau is Afraid. She is a founding member of both the Drama Division of The Juilliard School and John Houseman’s The Acting Company and the author of best-seller Patti LuPone: A Memoir.

Pianos provided by Steinway & Sons.

© Douglas Freidman

Community and FamilyFriendly Events

© Chris McGuire

COMMUNITY AND FAMILY EVENTS

SATURDAY, APRIL 27

The 5 Browns Family Concert Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo • 2 pm

For full details, see the April 27 event earlier in this book.

Beaton, MacGillivray, and MacNeil: A Cape Breton Trio

Andrea Beaton, Troy MacGillivray, and Tracey MacNeil hail from the isolated beauty of Nova Scotia, Canada. Their joyful music is defined by instrument-switching, solo dancing, and inspiring harmonies, as they explore the traditional music of Ireland, Scotland, and Cape Breton. Their visit is presented in collaboration with Bell’s Eccentric Café, Education for the Arts, the Kalamazoo State Theatre and WMUK 102.1 FM.

THURSDAY, MAY 2

Richland Community Hall • 7 pm

The evening will be introduced by radio hosts Cara Lieurance and Dave Marlatt of The Pure Drop on WMUK 102.1 FM, celebrating its 20th anniversary of featuring music “from Ireland and beyond.”

FRIDAY, MAY 3

State on the Street • Kalamazoo State Theatre • 5 pm

Part of the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo’s downtown Art Hop. This free, family-friendly event will be outdoors, with concessions.

SATURDAY, MAY 4

Bell’s Eccentric Café • 7 pm

Enjoy the band in their natural “pub habitat” with room for dancing.

SUNDAY, MAY 5

Baby Grands Performance

Bell’s Eccentric Café • 11 am

No stage? No seats? No problem! Parents can relax while kids of any age can have fun checking out the piano, meeting the Cape Breton Trio, crawling or dancing around the room. Refreshments will be available for kids and adults at this free event.

MEDIA SPONSOR CAPE BRET ON SERIES SPONSORS A FRIEND OF THE GILMORE

© Chris McGuire

You can enjoy the Festival from anywhere with name-your-own-price access to the following livestreamed concerts, which will remain available for 30 days (excluding Olga Kern.) Check online for the latest information, as this schedule may change.

Sunday, April 28 • 2 pm

Conrad Tao and Caleb Teicher

Wednesday, May 1 • 2 pm

Kasey Shao and Harmony Zhu, 2024 Gilmore Young Artists

Friday, May 3 • 7:30 pm

Olga Kern

Saturday, May 4 • 2 pm

Paul Lewis Schubert Sonata Series III

Sunday, May 5 • 2 pm

Gabriela Montero and the Calidore String Quartet

Monday, May 6 • 12 pm

Isaiah J. Thompson Trio

LIVESTREAM SPONSORS

RUSSELL GABIER FUND

Monday, May 6 • 7:30 pm

Paul Lewis Schubert Sonata Series IV

Wednesday, May 8 • 12 pm

Helen Sung Trio

Thursday, May 9 • 12 pm

Benito Gonzalez Trio

Friday, May 10 • 12 pm

Paul Cornish Trio

Friday, May 10 • 2 pm

Kirill Gerstein, 2010 Gilmore Artist

Friday, May 10 • 8 pm

Pink Martini featuring China Forbes

THE CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS AND NANCY ZANNINI FAMILY FUND

THREE RIVERS MANHATTAN CLUB

Partner Events

© This Moment Photography

THURSDAY, MARCH 28

The Gilmore in Grand Rapids

Marcelo Lehninger, music director and conductor

Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano

DeVos Performance Hall, Grand Rapids • 7 pm

M. RAVEL Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess)

Piano Concerto in G Major

C. DEBUSSY La Cathédrale engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral) from Préludes, Livre 1

C. SAINT-SAËNS Piano Concerto No. 5 (“The Egyptian”)

GRS GUEST ARTIST SPONSOR

GILMORE SPONSORS

A FRIEND OF THE GILMORE

DR. GARY AND DR. CYNTHIA RUOFF

MARCELO LEHNINGER, CONDUCTOR

KEVIN AND GINA PAUL

GRS PIANO SPONSOR

MICHAEL AND LORI LEE CURLEY

GRS CONCERT SPONSOR

ZHANG FINANCIAL

Recently appointed Artistic Director of the Bellingham Festival of Music in addition to his duties as Music Director of the Grand Rapids Symphony, Marcelo Lehninger previously served as Music Director of the New West Symphony in Los Angeles, and as Assistant and then Associate Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As guest conductor, Lehninger has led orchestras across the U.S. and in Canada. European highlights include leading the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Lucerne Symphony, Prague Philharmonia, Slovak State Philharmonic, Slovenian Philharmonic, Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra assisting Mariss Jansons.

JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET

French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet has performed worldwide and recorded more than 50 albums. His professional friendships span the globe and have led to collaborations in film and fashion – his concert wardrobe has been designed by the late Dame Vivienne Westwood. He has soloed on many film scores and received two Grammy® nominations, the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, the Diapason d'Or, the Choc du Monde de la Musique, the Edison Prize, and Gramophone awards. Mr. Thibaudet is the first-ever Artist-in-Residence at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, where he selects awardees of the Jean-Yves Thibaudet Scholarships, funded by Colburn’s donor community. He is Co-Artistic Director, with Gautier Capuçon, of the Festival Musique & Vin au Clos Vougeot.

2024 GILMORE YOUNG ARTIST

Harmony Zhu, piano

Saturday, April 20

Gull Lake Center for the Fine Arts, Richland • 7 pm

Friday, April 26

First United Methodist Church, South Haven • 7:30 pm

Sunday, April 28

First Congregational Church, Battle Creek • 4 pm

R. SCHUMANN Fantasiestücke Op. 12

I. Des Abends (In the Evening)

II. Aufschwung (Soaring)

III. Warum? (Why?)

IV Grillen (Whims)

V. In der Nacht (In the Night)

VI. Fabel (Fable)

VII. Traumes Wirren (Dream’s Confusions)

VIII. Ende vom Lied (End of the Song)

A. SCRIABIN Sonata No. 2 in G-sharp Minor, Op. 19

I. Andante

II. Presto

F. J. HAYDN Sonata in D Major, Hob. XVI: 42

I. Andante con espressione

II. Vivace assai

F. CHOPIN Variations on “Là ci darem la mano”, Op. 2

RICHLAND SPONSOR SOUTH HAVEN SPONSOR

BETH MCINTYRE

B ATTLE CREEK SPONSOR

THE GUIDO A. & ELIZABETH H. BINDA FOUNDATION

Please see Ms. Zhu's biography on page 85.

PARTNER EVENTS

2024 GILMORE YOUNG ARTIST

Kasey Shao, piano

Sunday, April 21

Corewell Health, St. Joseph • 4 pm

Sunday, April 28

Saugatuck Center for the Arts, Saugatuck • 2 pm

Friday, May 3

Franke Center for the Arts, Marshall • 8 pm

W. BOLCOM

Nine Bagatelles (2006)

I. (“...and then what happened?”)

II. (...what happened)

III. (...a bird comments--to another bird?)

IV. (Lord Lovell's trunk)

V. (...a little story)

VI. (...take no prisoners)

VII. (...valse oubliable)

VIII. (...benediction)

IX. (...pavane for the dead / hope's feathers)

J.S. BACH Partita No. 5 in G Major, BWV 829

I. Praeambulum

II. Allemande

III. Corrente

IV. Sarabande

V. Tempo di Minuetto

VI. Passepied

VII. Gigue

F. CHOPIN Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante, Op. 22

CHEN YI Duo Ye

F. LISZT Réminiscences de Norma, S 394

ST. JOSEPH SPONSOR

SA UGATUCK SPONSORS

LAURIE MARSHALL LANCE AND LA URA TREXLER

MARSHALL SPONSOR

Please see Ms. Shao's biography on page 85.

KALAMAZOO • SUNDAY, APRIL 21

Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra

Andrew Koehler, music director and conductor

Harmony Zhu, 2024 Gilmore Young Artist, piano

Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo • 4 pm

A. DVORAK Symphony No. 9 in E Minor (“From the New World”), Op. 95

S. RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18 Harmony Zhu, piano

SPONSORS

JAN AND ED SACKLEY

ANDREW KOEHLER

Kalamazoo College music professor Andrew Koehler directs the Kalamazoo Philharmonia and the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra, and serves as cover conductor and recurring guest conductor of the West Michigan Symphony Orchestra. He organizes and conducts concerts with the Arcato Chamber Ensemble, which he founded. He has collaborated with artists including Danielle Belen, Aaron Dworkin, Alon Goldstein, Zlatomir Fung, Rachel Barton Pine, Amit Peled, and Midori. Mr. Koehler has appeared as a guest conductor with the Grand Rapids Symphony; Lyatoshynsky Chamber Orchestra in Kyiv, Ukraine; Ruse Philharmonic in Bulgaria; St. Cloud Symphony in Minnesota; Festival South Chamber Orchestra in Mississippi; and Moldovan National Youth Orchestra. His album of orchestral music by composer Steven Holochwost, recorded with the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra for the Albany label, is set to be released in 2024. Born in Philadelphia to Ukrainian parents, Andrew holds a B.A. in Music and German Studies from Yale College; a certificate in conducting from the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna, where he studied as a Fulbright scholar, and a master’s degree from Northwestern University.

PARTNER EVENTS

JACKSON • SATURDAY, APRIL 27

Jackson Symphony Orchestra

Matthew Aubin, music director and conductor Kasey Shao, piano

Sheffer Music Hall at the Potter Center, Jackson • 7:30 pm

GRAZYNA BACEWICZ Overture

C. SCHUMANN Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 7 Kasey Shao, piano

A. BRUCKNER Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major, WAB. 104

JSO SPONSORS

CONSUMERS ENERGY

SPRING ARBOR UNIVERSITY

MATTHEW AUBIN

Also Music Director of the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra, Dr. Matthew Aubin is also Artistic Director of New York’s Chelsea Symphony. He has collaborated with partners including actor John Lithgow, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle. He served as onstage conductor for the film Bel Canto with Julianne Moore and has been an artistic consultant for the television show Younger. Dr. Aubin is the foremost scholar on the French composer Fernande Breilh-Decruck, and works to promote her newly discovered music, organizing performances of Decruck’s music in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Aubin is active as a freelance horn player, performing regularly across the country. A devoted music educator, he has served as Assistant Professor of Music at Washington State University, adjunct faculty at The Hartt School, and Educational Programs Conductor for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra.

Please see Ms. Shao's biography on page 85.

LANSING • FRIDAY, MAY 10

Lansing Symphony Orchestra

Timothy Muffitt, music director and conductor

Harmony Zhu, 2024 Gilmore Young Artist, piano

Wharton Center, East Lansing • 7:30 pm

JARRED MILLER New Work TBD

W. A. MOZART Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488 Harmony Zhu, piano

S. RACHMANINOFF Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 44

LSO SPONSORS

MSU FEDERAL CREDIT UNION

KEN AND MARY WEST

TIMOTHY MUFFITT

A strong proponent of community arts education, Timothy Muffitt has appeared as a guest with leading orchestras throughout the country, including the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Virginia Symphony, the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra in Chicago, and the symphonies of Atlanta, Edmonton, Houston, Long Beach, Phoenix, San Francisco, Spokane, and St. Louis. He has worked with performers including Renée Fleming, Lang Lang, Yo-Yo Ma, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Alicia de Larrocha, Pinchas Zukerman, Van Cliburn, Lynn Harrell, and Itzhak Perlman. He is Artistic Director of the Chautauqua Institution’s School of Music, and conductor of its Music School Festival Orchestra. In 2019, Dr. Muffitt was named Music Director Laureate of the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra after 21 seasons as the organization’s Music Director. He has served as Associate Conductor of the Austin (TX) Symphony, and Artistic Director of the Louisiana Philharmonic’s Casual Classics Series. He holds a DMA from the Eastman School of Music, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Ohio State University.

Please see Ms. Zhu's biography on page 85.

PARTNER EVENTS

BENTON HARBOR • FRIDAY, MAY 10

Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra

Matthew Aubin, music director and conductor

Daniel Hsu, 2016 Gilmore Young Artist, piano

Mendel Center at Lake Michigan College, Benton Harbor • 7:30 pm

F. DECRUCK

G. BIZET

Suite Française

L’Arlésienne: Suite No. 2

E. “DUKE” ELLINGTON Black, Brown and Beige: Suite

G. GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue Daniel Hsu, piano

DANIEL HSU, 2016 GILMORE YOUNG ARTIST

Daniel Hsu made his concerto debut at age eight, and his recital debut at age nine before being accepted into the Curtis Institute of Music at age ten, along with his two older siblings. He has performed in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, Pittsburgh, and New York, and with the Tokyo, North Carolina, Grand Rapids, Anchorage, New Haven, and Fort Worth symphony orchestras. Mr. Hsu captured the prizes for best performance of commissioned work and chamber music at the 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He won first prize at the 2015 CAG Victor Elmaleh Competition. Decca Gold released his first album featuring live recordings from the Cliburn Competition of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 110.

Please see Mr. Aubin’s biography on page 194.

MUSICAL THEATER

THURSDAY, APRIL 25 - SUNDAY, MAY 12 Sondheim on Sondheim

Farmer’s Alley Theatre, Kalamazoo 7:30 pm, Sundays at 2 pm

CREATIVE TEAM

Kathy Mulay, Director

Chris Gray, Music Director

SPONSORS

CAROL AND TOM BEECH

CAROLYN H. AND SIDNEY B. WILLIAMS, JR.

DANIEL AND BARBARA GUSTIN

ZAIDE PIXLEY AND JOHN FINK

D. TERRY AND SHARON WILLIAMS

FARMERS ALLEY SPONSORS

NANCY FORD CHARLES

MORRISON JEWELERS

KATHY MULAY

THE PEREGRINE-HUFF FOUNDATION

THIS PRODUCTION IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MARY LITTLE TYLER, WHOSE GENEROSITY

ELEVATED THE ARTS IN KALAMAZOO.

CAST

Denene Mulay Koch

Jeremy Koch

Meredith Mancuso

Rowan McStay

Jason Long

Patrick Poole

Ciarra Stroud

Films are presented at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum's Stryker Theater.

Igor Levit: No Fear

Tuesday, April 30 • 12 noon

A fly-on-the-wall documentary about when 2018 Gilmore Artist Igor Levit gave a series of online concerts from his home in Berlin during the Covid lockdown. Run time 78 minutes.

Silenced: Composers in Revolutionary Russia

Thursday, May 2 • 12 noon

A look at early 20th century Russian composers, including Lourié, Roslavets, Mosolov, Prokofiev, and Theremin. Run time 55 minutes.

Through the Eyes of Yuja: A Road Movie

Friday, May 3 • 12 noon

The exciting lifestyle of a concert pianist – majestic venues, glitzy cities and couture clothing – also includes fatigue, jet lag, doubts, and loneliness. An intimate look at the superstar. Run time 89 minutes.

Warsaw is My Name

Tuesday, May 7 • 2 pm

2002 Gilmore Artist Piotr Anderszewski’s own look at his birthplace, a city that had been nearly annihilated during World War II. Run time 36 minutes.

Stay after for a conversation between Piotr Anderzewski and Pierre van der Westhuizen.

FILMS SERIES SPONSOR

Kalamazoo City Centre Branch

Choreographing a bright future by telling stories from her own perspective

Hayley Midea is taking her journey to an arts career one agile step at a time, and her on-point achievements have already earned acclaim. As a student in Western’s dance program, she won the coveted Maggie Allesee Choreography Award at the 2019 Michigan Dance Festival.

The support of faculty and fellow students at WMU has encouraged Hayley to grow in ways she didn’t think possible. “The professors care so much about us, our dance careers, about who we become.” Continuing to build on her own strengths and success, Hayley now feels prepared for anything.

Preparing you for a career and lifetime of purpose. That’s Rethink Smart.

Ticketing and House Rules

© Mark Bugnaski

TICKETS

BUY ONLINE at thegilmore.org

ORDER BY PHONE at 269.250.6984 Monday through Friday, 10 am to 1:30 pm & 2:30 to 6 pm

PURCHASE IN PERSON at the Community Box Office, 359 S. Kalamazoo Mall (Epic Center 1st floor)

PURCHASE AT THE VENUE BOX OFFICE , which opens at least 30 minutes before the event.

15% TICKET DISCOUNTS

Save 15% when you 1) purchase tickets to five or more events in the same order, 2) purchase six or more tickets to the same event in the same order or 3) are a current employee of Festival sponsors. Discount excludes the Opening Night Celebration After-party, The 5 Browns Family Concert, Pink Martini, and Patti LuPone.

CANCELLATIONS AND REFUNDS

All events are subject to change. The Gilmore Piano Festival is unable to refund tickets, however they can be exchanged for another 2024 Festival event. You may convert your tickets to a donation up to 24 hours before the scheduled performance. You will receive written acknowledgment of the donation for tax purposes.

CHILDREN AT THE FESTIVAL

With the exception of performances labeled “family-friendly,” children six years of age and under will not be admitted. Children under the age of 12 must be accompanied by an adult.

LATE SEATING

Patrons arriving late, and those who exit the venue during a performance, will be seated at the discretion of the house manager and at an appropriate interval. In certain circumstances, late admission will not be permitted.

PHOTO AND VIDEO RULES

Taking photographs without flash for purposes of social media sharing is permitted. Video or sound recording of any performance is prohibited.

ACCESSIBILITY AND ACCOMMODATION

All Gilmore venues offer wheelchair-accessible seating, tickets for which can be purchased online or by phone. Listening devices and large-print programs are available for each event with an advance request. Please contact info@thegilmore.org with advance requests or questions. Ushers are available to assist patrons. Please let them know how best to help you.

THE GILMORE STUDENT & COMMUNITY TICKET PROGRAM

STUDENT TICKETS may be purchased in advance to most Gilmore concerts for $7.

DISCOUNTED OR FREE STUDENT RUSH TICKETS , when available, will be offered one hour before concerts at the box office. Check online the day of show for full details.

GILMORE COMMUNITY PASS provides equitable community access to select Gilmore concerts, supported by unique and meaningful educational experiences. We offer our partner organizations an opportunity to collaborate on a customized Festival experience to help educate, welcome, and support those they serve. Past options have included Meet-the-Artist events, Behind-the-scenes tours, “listening lunches,” and even a knitting circle! To learn how your organization can participate, please contact Leslie Baron, Education and Community Engagement Manager, at 269-342-1166 x 130 or LBaron@thegilmore.org

SPONSOR

© Mark Bugnaski

FESTIVAL VENUES

BLACK ARTS & CULTURAL CENTER

359 S. Kalamazoo Mall, 1st floor

Ramp and street parking

BELL’S ECCENTRIC CAFÉ

355 E. Kalamazoo Ave.

Surface lot and street parking

CHENERY AUDITORIUM

714 S. Westnedge Ave.

Surface lot and street parking

DALTON CENTER RECITAL HALL

WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY

1300 Theatre Dr.

Ramp and surface lot parking

KALAMAZOO CIVIC THEATRE AUDITORIUM

329 S. Park St. (entrance on South St.)

Surface lot and street parking

KALAMAZOO VALLEY MUSEUM

STRYKER THEATER

230 N. Rose St., Kalamazoo

Ramp and street parking

MILLER AUDITORIUM

WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY

2200 Auditorium Dr.

Ramp and surface lot parking

SHAW THEATRE

WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY

1351 Theatre Dr.

Surface lot parking

STETSON CHAPEL

KALAMAZOO COLLEGE

1200 Academy St.

Surface lot and street parking

WELLSPRING THEATER

Epic Center

359 South Kalamazoo Mall

2nd floor

Ramp and street parking

D. TERRY WILLIAMS THEATRE

WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY

1351 Theatre Dr.

Surface lot parking

Many intermissions include complimentary coffee and Sarkozy cookies, thanks to:

STETSON CHAPEL SPONSOR

DALTON CENTER RECITAL HALL SPONSOR

CHENERY AUDITORIUM SPONSOR

SPECIAL THANKS TO

PARTNER VENUES

COREWELL HEALTH

1234 Napier Rd., St. Joseph

Surface lot parking behind building

DEVOS PERFORMANCE HALL

303 Monroe Ave., NW, Grand Rapids

Paid lot and street parking

FARMERS ALLEY THEATRE

221 Farmers Alley, Kalamazoo

Ramp and street parking

FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

145 Capital Ave., NE, Battle Creek

Surface lot and street parking

FIRST UNITED METHODIST CHURCH

429 Michigan Ave., South Haven

Surface lot and street parking

FRANKE CENTER FOR THE ARTS

214 East Mansion St., Marshall

Ramp and surface lot parking

GULL LAKE CENTER FOR THE FINE ARTS

7753 N. 34th St., Richland

Surface lot parking

HAROLD SHEFFER MUSIC HALL

POTTER CENTER

2111 Emmons Rd., Jackson

Surface lot and street parking

KALAMAZOO PUBLIC LIBRARY

315 S. Rose St., Kalamazoo

Downtown street and ramp parking

KALAMAZOO STATE THEATRE

404 S. Burdick St., Kalamazoo

Downtown street and ramp parking

W.K. KELLOGG AUDITORIUM

50 West Van Buren St., Battle Creek

Surface lot parking

KOOL FAMILY COMMUNITY CENTER

200 W Michigan Ave., #101, Battle Creek

Surface lot and street parking

MENDEL CENTER AT LAKE MICHIGAN COLLEGE

1100 Yore Ave., Benton Harbor

Surface lot parking available on north and south sides of the building (south lot is best for Mainstage events)

RICHLAND AREA COMMUNITY CENTER

9400 E CD Ave., Richland

Surface lot parking

SAUGATUCK CENTER FOR THE ARTS

400 Culver St., Saugatuck

Surface lot and street parking

WHARTON CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY, COBB GREAT HALL

750 East Shaw Ln., East Lansing

Ramp and surface lot parking

EVERY TUES - SAT FROM 4:01 - 6:01 PM

EXCLUSIVE EATS

$8 BACON CHEDDAR POPCORN

local Smoking Goose popcorn

$10

WAGYU BURGER

grilled wagyu burger, thick cut applewood smoked bacon, mushrooms, red rock cheddar, roasted garlic-dijon aioli, pickled onions, arugula, toasted pretzel bun, served with kettle chips

$12 SEASONAL FLATBREAD

enjoy chef’s flatbread creation!

EXCLUSIVE DRINKS

$3 DRAFT BEER

$5

SOMMELIER’S SELECT WINE GLASS

both red and white selections available

$6 OLD MULE

eastern kille barrel finished gin, lemon & cranberry juice, ginger beer

$7 MY TAI

coconut rum, orgeat, lime juice, cointreau

$7 PAIR ALL

vodka, aperol, lemon/lime juice, cointreau, pear thatchers

& HALF-OFF SELECT APPETIZERS!

Classes and Conversations

© Chris McGuire

FESTIVAL FELLOWS PROGRAM

When you attend a free public talk, master class, concert preview, or artist conversation, you may run into some of our Festival Fellows, a cohort of 27 pianists visiting Kalamazoo for a five-day immersive experience designed to boost their career-readiness. These college-level and early-career pianists will enjoy a five-day, tuition-free program to help them learn to navigate the industry, build their audience, and find their artistic voice.

SESSION I: APRIL 27-MAY 1

Artist-in-Residence Mūza Rubackytė

With a discography of more than 35 recordings and a career launched in childhood, Lithuanian pianist Mūza Rubackytė performs worldwide with renowned conductors and orchestras. Founder and artistic director of the Vilnius International Piano Festival, she was noted as “an intelligent and innately musical artist” by Classics Today, Ms. Rubackytė made her professional debut at age seven with the Lithuanian National Chamber Orchestra, and six years later, won first prize in the National Young Artists Competition. She studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory under Yakov Flier, Mikhail Voskressensky, and Bela Davidovitch, and was Grand Prize winner at the Budapest Liszt-Bartók International Piano Competition. A dedicated educator, Ms. Rubackytė holds teaching positions at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater in Vilnius, Conservatoire Rachmaninoff in Paris, Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, and Messiaen Academy of Music in the Netherlands. She has been a judge at the Lithuanian International Piano Competition, International F. Liszt Piano Competition (Utrecht and Weimar), and Venice Piano Competition. She has lived in Paris since 1991, and since 2017 has recorded for the Ligia label.

FESTIVAL FELLOWS

Hongbo “Marcel” Cai

In-Ae Ha

Oscar Jiang

YiQiao Li

Guoanni “Annie” Qin

Ramilia Saubanova

Charlotte Tang

Jialin Yao

Seulki Yoo

SESSION II: MAY 2-6

© Courtesy of the Artist

Artist-in-Residence Gabriela Montero

Please see Ms. Montero's biography on page 122.

FESTIVAL FELLOWS

Yoshiko Arahata

Jeanne Hourez

Bonhwi Kim

Klyde Ledamo

Pablo Molano

Dmitry Sin

Axel Trolese

Pablo Valladares

Joseph Vaz

SESSION III: MAY 6-11

Artist-in-Residence Piotr Anderszewski

Please see Mr. Anderszewski's biography on page 156.

FESTIVAL FELLOWS

Po-Hsiang Chang

Yan Fang

Artem Kuznetsov

Robert Levinger

Hao Wei Lin

Angeline Ma

Cristian Makhuli

Jiin Kim

Cindy Sang FUNDING PARTNER

© Anders Brogard

© Simon Fowler

MONDAY, APRIL 29

Aubrey Bergauer

Run it Like a Business: Strategies to Unleash the Full Power and Profit of the Arts

Kalamazoo Public Library Central Branch, VanDeusen Room • 11 am

The arts are a $763 billion sector whose 100,000+ organizations serve almost every county in the nation. Today they all seek to rebuild audiences, confront systemic discrimination, and increase relevance. And just because they are nonprofits, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make money. Data, research, and case studies from the for-profit sector show us a necessary and sustainable model, essential to revitalizing the critical economic engine and better serving the arts and its consumers.

THURSDAY, MAY 2

Loki Karuna

Agitato: Framing Social Change Through Arts Activism Black Arts & Cultural Center • 4 pm

Loki Karuna began his career as a bassoonist, then transitioned into arts media and activism after seeing an opportunity to create broader change in the world through directed and intentional arts-centered dialogue. In this presentation, he will outline his career trajectory as an arts activist, offer insight on how the arts can impact immediate and long-term social change, and highlight his vision for a renewed “classical” music ecosystem.

MONDAY, MAY 6

Mark Nepo

Drinking from The River of Light

Kalamazoo Public Library Central Branch, VanDeusen Room • 2 pm

Kalamazoo-based poet, philosopher, author, and educator Mark Nepo will explore the lifelong process of listening, reflecting, expressing, and how bearing witness to the truth of living reveals the mysteries of life while introducing each of us to our very personal voice. Through poems and stories, Mark will explore the nature and practice inherent to the life of expression, by which we can strengthen our connections and find our way.

MASTER CLASSES

Master classes are free and open to the public, presented as part of The Gilmore Festival Fellows program. Observers are welcome to listen in to gain insight into the extraordinary dedication it takes to become an exceptional pianist. Hear how Festival artists and artist-teachers-in-residence share their talents with Festival Fellows, who will perform and receive in-the-moment feedback.

SUNDAY, APRIL 28

Awadagin Pratt

Wellspring Theater • 10 am

TUESDAY, APRIL 30

2006 Gilmore Artist Ingrid Fliter

Dalton Center Recital Hall • 10 am

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1

Paul Lewis

Dalton Center Recital Hall • 10 am

THURSDAY, MAY 2

Gabriela Montero

Dalton Center Recital Hall • 10 am

FRIDAY, MAY 3

Paul Lewis

Dalton Center Recital Hall • 10 am

SATURDAY, MAY 4

Olga Kern

Wellspring Theater • 10 am

TUESDAY, MAY 7

Paul Lewis

Dalton Center Recital Hall • 10 am

WEDNESDAY, MAY 8

Simone Dinnerstein

Dalton Center Recital Hall

THURSDAY, MAY 9

10 am

2010 Gilmore Artist Kirill Gerstein

Dalton Center Recital Hall • 10 am

CONCERT PREVIEWS & ARTIST CONVERSATIONS

THURSDAY, APRIL 25

Labèque Duo

6:30 pm • Concert Preview with Dr. Sophié van der Westhuizen, Olmsted Room, Mandelle Hall

7:30 pm • Concert at Stetson Chapel, Kalamazoo College

SATURDAY, APRIL 27

Maria João Pires

6:30 pm • Concert Preview with Dr. David Abbott, Dalton Lecture Hall

7:30 pm • Concert at Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU

MONDAY, APRIL 29

2006 Gilmore Artist Ingrid Fliter

1 pm • Concert Preview with Dr. Zaide Pixley, Dalton Lecture Hall

2 pm • Concert at Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU

TUESDAY, APRIL 30

Paul Lewis

Stay after for a conversation with Paul Lewis and Pierre van der Westhuizen

2 pm • Concert at Wellspring Theater

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1

Gabriela Montero

6:30 pm • Concert Preview with Dr. Beau Bothwell, Dalton Lecture Hall

7:30 pm • Concert at Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU

FRIDAY, MAY 3

Olga Kern

6:30 pm • Concert Preview with Dr. Lia Jensen-Abbott, Dalton Lecture Hall

7:30 pm • Concert at Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU

SATURDAY, MAY 4

Kenny Barron Trio

5 pm • Conversation with Kenny Barron & Gilmore Director of Jazz Seth Abramson

Gilmore Theatre Complex second floor atrium

6 & 9 pm • Concerts at Shaw Theatre, WMU

SERIES SPONSOR

TUESDAY, MAY 7

2002 Gilmore Artist Piotr Anderszewski film: Warsaw is My Name

Stay after for a conversation with Piotr Anderszewski and Gilmore Executive and Artistic Director Pierre van der Westhuizen

2 pm • Film at Kalamazoo Valley Museum

THURSDAY, MAY 9

2002 Gilmore Artist Piotr Anderszewski

6:30 pm • Concert Preview with Dr. Zaide Pixley, Dalton Lecture Hall

7:30 pm • Concert at Dalton Center Recital Hall

FRIDAY, MAY 10

2010 Gilmore Artist Kirill Gerstein

1 pm • Concert Preview with composer Matthew Aucoin, Olmsted Room, Mandelle Hall

2 pm • Concert at Stetson Chapel, Kalamazoo College

SATURDAY, MAY 11

Anderszewski play-conducts Beethoven with the KSO

6 pm • Concert Preview with Dr. Zaide Pixley, room #130

7 pm • Concert at Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo

GRANDPIANOSERIES.ORG

Naples, FL - Bonita Springs, FL

Clayton Stephenson, Photo by: Richard Rodriguez - Cliburn

Warner is proud to support the Gilmore Piano Festival bringing the finest pianists and outstanding performances to the West Michigan community.

About The Gilmore Organization

The Gilmore’s mission is to nurture and celebrate a passion for piano music. We do this by:

• identifying exceptional pianists through a non-competitive process and then providing significant support to enhance their careers;

• presenting world-class music festivals featuring the finest international pianists;

• providing an outstanding keyboard educational program; and

• supporting the creation of piano music.

© Mark Bugnaski

The Gilmore Artist Award recognizes extraordinary classical piano artistry with some of the most generous financial support given in the musical arts. The $300,000 award is conferred every four years to a pianist of any age and nationality, following a rigorous and confidential selection process. Sometimes likened to the MacArthur Foundation “genius grants,” the Gilmore Artist Award is determined through a noncompetitive process. Pianists are nominated by a large and diverse group of international music professionals. An anonymous, six-member Classical Awards Advisory Committee appraises the nominees over a period of time and assesses their musicianship and performing abilities through numerous performances under varying conditions. Throughout the four-year process, candidates for the Award are unaware they are under consideration. The next Gilmore Artist Award will be presented in 2028.

Our thanks go out to the Artistic Advisory Committee for the 2024 Gilmore Artist Award:

Elizabeth Ostrow, Committee Chair

Paul Schenly

Gary Hanson

Kathy Shuman

Wolfgang Fink

Howard Watkins

GILMORE ARTISTS

2024 • Alexandre Kantorow

Alexandre Kantorow is the youngest pianist and the first French artist to be named a Gilmore Artist. Now in demand worldwide, he is applauded for his poetic charm, luminous clarity, and stunning virtuosity. Mr. Kantorow will return to Kalamazoo to perform in the 2024-25 Gilmore season. See inside back cover for event information.

2018

• Igor Levit

2014

2010

• Rafał Blechacz

• Kirill Gerstein

2006

• Ingrid Fliter

2002

1998

• Piotr Anderszewski

• Leif Ove Andsnes

1994

1991

• Ralf Gothóni

• David Owen Norris

The Gilmore Young Artist Award is presented every two years to single out two promising U.S.-based pianists, age 22 and younger. Nominations are made by music professionals from around the world, and an anonymous selection committee evaluates the nominees over a period of time. Candidates are unaware that they are under consideration. Each Gilmore Young Artist receives a $15,000 stipend to further their musical career and educational development, and up to $10,000 towards a commission of a new piano composition for which the artist will have exclusive performance rights for one year. The next Gilmore Young Artists will be named in 2026.

2022

Janice Carissa

Clayton Stephenson

2020

Misha Galant

Maxim Lando 2018

Wei Luo

Elliot Wuu 2016

Daniel Hsu

Micah McLaurin 2014

Andrew Hsu

Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner 2012

George Li

Conrad Tao 2010

Charlie Albright

Ivan Moshchuk 2008

Adam Golka

Rachel Naomi Kudo 2006

Natasha Paremski

Yuja Wang 2004

Christopher Falzone

Elizabeth Schumann 2002

Jonathan Biss

Kirill Gerstein 2000

Kasey ShaoHarmony Zhu

Andrew von Oeyen

Hsing-ay Hsu

Brenda Jones

1996

Andrew Armstrong

Katherine K. Lee

Adam Neiman

Orli Shaham

Alex Slobodyanik

1994

Soojin Ahn

Anders Martinson

Christopher Taylor 2024

Orion Weiss 1998

Andrea Schneider

1991

Wendy Chen

Brenda Huang

Peter Miyamoto

GILMORE COMMISSIONS

The creation of new music for the piano is an important part of The Gilmore mission. Nearly every International Piano Festival includes the premiere of one or more commissioned works for keyboard instruments. Many are commissioned by Gilmore Artists and Young Artists with their award funds, either by the artists themselves or in collaboration with other artists and institutions. The Gilmore itself has also partnered with several organizations, including Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, to commission important new works for the piano. Since 1991, Gilmore commissions comprise 45 works by 56 artists.

This year, four Gilmore commissions will be premiered during the 2024 Piano Festival. On Friday, May 10, 2010 Gilmore Artist Kirill Gerstein will play The tracks have vanished, by Matthew Aucoin. Our 2024 Gilmore Young Artists Kasey Shao and Harmony Zhu will perform a new work by Christopher Cerrone, Uncanny Valley, on Wednesday, May 1. Gabriela Montero has composed a piano quintet she will perform with the Calidore String Quartet on Sunday, May 5. Finally, Conrad Tao and Caleb Teicher will perform a new work composed by Mr. Tao.

© Mark Bugnaski

The Gilmore Artist Awards program expanded greatly in 2022 with the creation of the Larry J. Bell Jazz Artist Awards, modeled after the classical Gilmore Artist and Gilmore Young Artist Awards, and established with an $8.8 million gift to The Gilmore’s endowment, made possible by and named for Kalamazoo businessman and Gilmore International Piano Festival trustee and past president Larry J. Bell, founder of Bell’s Brewery.

As with the Gilmore Artist Awards, awards will be given following a rigorous and confidential selection process. The Jazz Awards Nominating Committee, comprising music professionals from around the world, recommends artists to be considered for the Jazz Artist Awards. These candidates are then evaluated by an anonymous Jazz Awards Advisory Committee who make final recommendations. Throughout the process, candidates for the Awards will be unaware that they are under consideration.

The Larry J. Bell Jazz Artist Award will be conferred every four years to a jazz pianist of any age, beginning in 2026. Of the $300,000 award, the first payment of $50,000 can be used at the artist’s discretion and the remaining $250,000 will be disbursed over a four-year period for projects and activities that will enhance the artist’s musicianship and career.

The Larry J. Bell Young Jazz Artist Award will be presented every two years to two of the most promising U.S.-based jazz pianists, age 22 and younger, beginning in 2026. Each will receive a $15,000 stipend to further their musical career and educational development, and up to $10,000 toward a commission of a new piano composition for which the artist will have exclusive performance rights for one year.

LARRY J. BELL JAZZ ARTIST AND YOUNG JAZZ ARTIST AWARDS

The Gilmore’s Education Programs are designed to celebrate the joy of music-making and foster a lifelong appreciation of music. Central to our mission is providing learning experiences that develop piano skills, musical exploration, and performance opportunities for youth and adults.

PIANO LABS

Small-group classes for new or returning piano students of all ages are taught year-round in multiple locations, including public schools, by professional piano teachers. Music therapists lead programs for young adults at the Kalamazoo County Juvenille Home and KRESA's Young Adult Program to help develop life and social skills.

BATTLE CREEK PROGRAMS

Battle Creek is home to Piano Labs in the Ann J. Kellogg Elementary and at the Art and Culture Collective. Group piano, and soon music production, is taught year round. Collaborations with summer camps and community programs by partner organizations are also central to our goal to develop Battle Creek’s music-making and music-going culture for children and families.

KEYSFEST

An annual, day-long learning event for piano students grades 1–12, KeysFest hosts students at master classes with an audience of supportive peers and adults, for one-on-one instruction from professional pianists and educators. Rounding out the day are workshops and performances by KeysFest clinicians and other guests.

GILMORE PIANO CAMP

Since its creation in the late 1990s, Piano Camp has welcomed hundreds of young pianists of all levels of experience to its natural outdoor setting at Sherman Lake for piano training, a wide range of music-related electives, and lots of traditional, fun camp activities.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

The Gilmore works year-round to bring equitable access to music education and performances to our community. Through the Gilmore Pass Community Tickets program, supported by Stryker, we provide free and discounted tickets to select Festival experiences including “Jazz at Noon” performances and Gilmore Family Concerts in Kalamazoo and Battle Creek. We are grateful to work in collaboration with area organizations in presenting free local events such as Juneteenth and Hispanic Heritage month celebrations, among many others.

THE GILMORE ORGANIZATION

GILMORE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Oliver S. Howell, President

Zaide Pixley, Vice President

Timothy Wendt, Treasurer

Kevin Paul, Secretary

Larry J. Bell, Past President

Nathan D. Batts

Daniel E. Bitzer

Lynn Chen-Zhang

Hon. Scott W. Dales

Daniel Guyette

Deanne Hartman

Robert J. Hill

Danette Ifert Johnson

Cheryl L. Johnson

Ping Liang

James L. Liggins, Jr.

Lucas Mansberger

Donald R. Parfet

Caroline Fox Pavone

Rita Raichoudhuri

Christopher Roberts

Michael A. Roeder

Linnaea Thomas

L. Marshall Washington

TRUSTEES EMERITI

Carol Beech

John F. Beering

Elizabeth Binda* **

Sue Birch

Karen Bouche

Denise Brooks-Williams

Janice Brown

Rosemary Brown

Timothy Brown

David M. Buday

Elizabeth Burns

Howard Cain

Jill Goubeaux Clark

Richard Clark

William Cole*

Lori Lee Curley

Cheryl A. Dickson

Gregory S. Diment

Judith Dodge*

John M. Dunn

Linda Dunn

Diane Eberts

Pamela Enslen

Nolan Fischer

Russell L. Gabier* **

Charles Hall

Curtis Hall

Harold Hanselman**

Jeffrey Harkins

Raymond Harvey

Jack Hopkins*

Deborah Hudgins

C. Reid Hudgins III

Patti Huiskamp

Barbara James

Judy Jolliffe

James Jones

Thomas King

Robert Kittredge

Wallson G. Knack

Cindy Kole

Thomas Lambert

A.G. Langbo

Barbara Liggett

Joy C. Light

Catherine Christ Lucas

Robert Luscombe**

Michelle Mackay

N. Dean MacVicar

Elizabeth Upjohn Mason

Amy Douglass Melvin

Jeffrey Messner

Jerry Miller

Michael Mueller

Kelly T. Murphy

Jessica Murphy

Lisa Palchick

Barbara J. Parish

Priscilla Pedraza

Janice Perkins

Keith A. Peterson

Nancy Richardson

William C. Richardson**

Lisa Rodriguez

Barry Ross

Eugene Royster**

Frank Sardone

John Schreuder

Christopher J. Smith

James P. Spica

Karen Henry Stokes

Yoshimi Takeda**

Daniel Terpsma

Stephen Upton

Judy Van Solkema**

Sherman Van Solkema

Charles Van Zoeren

Von Washington, Jr.

Gayl Werme* **

James Westin* **

Carolyn Williams

Paul Williams

Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran

Robert Windsor

Kate Pew Wolters

Adelaide Zabriskie

*Charter Trustee

**Deceased

STAFF

Seth Abramson, Director of Jazz

Aidan Baas, Digital Marketing Coordinator

Leslie Baron, Education and Community Engagement Manager

Clive Beatty, Finance & Human Resources Associate

Rem Cabrera, Grants & Inclusion Manager

Alisa Carrel, Director of Development

Elizabeth D. Cooley, Executive Assistant

Amy Chen, Piano Lab Instructor

Sara Cleland, Battle Creek Piano Lab Coordinator and Instructor

Christie Lee Coleman, Tessitura Database Manager

Anders Dahlberg, Director of Operations

Kory Heitzig, Operations & Volunteer Manager

Katie Houston, Communications Manager

Colwyn Hoard, Education & Operations Technician

Terri Hunter, Development & Finance Assistant

Liz Kelly, Piano Lab Coordinator

Stacy Koviak-Davison, Livestream Digital Coordinator

Mindy MacInnis, Director of Marketing

Annie Mittelstaedt, Piano Lab Instructor

Marilyn Moore, Piano Lab Instructor

Louie Morand, Piano Lab Music Therapist

Daniela Peña, Development Associate

Wilson David Casallas Polomo, Piano Lab Instructor

Giada Pontoni, Piano Lab Instructor

Adam Schumaker, Director of Education

Michael Sellers, Livestream Manager

Sandra Shaw, Piano Lab Instructor

Julie Shoup, Director of Finance

Pierre van der Westhuizen, Executive and Artistic Director

INTERIM FESTIVAL STAFF

Colwyn Hoard, Festival Operations Assistant

Liz Kelly, Festival Operations Assistant

Izzy Pratt, Festival Operations Assistant

Diego Zambrana, Festival Operations Assistant

As of February 1, 2024

Anora D. Ackerson

Heather Adams

Maryann Adams

Karen M. Allen

Stephen W. Allen

Sharon Anderson-Western

Nancy J. Ausema

Mary Austin

Robert Balik

Janie Bare

Elizabeth Barren

Carrie Bellen

Lynda Bauckham

Rob Bauckham

Paul Beason

Kathleen Beeman

Paige Beers

Denise Berry

Emily Blank

Jane Boekeloo

Mark Boekeloo

Janet Boesch

Ellie Bohms

Judith J. Bosshart

Mary Bowman

William J. Braaksma

Matthew Bradley

Will Brandt

Ruth Breyfogle

William Breyfogle

Margaret Bristol

Anna Brodhagen

William Brooksma

Emily Brouwer

Jody Brylinsky

Beverly Byle

Nancy L. Calloway

Linda M. Campbell

Bruce Caple

Dana Castanier

Adam Castle

Joan M. Cavanaugh

Christine Chadderdon

David Chadderdon

Carol Chandler

Linda Cieresewski

Denise Clegg

William K. Clegg

Nancy A. Colburn

Rachel Colingsworth

Janet Corstange

Beverly J. Crabb

Patricia Crowley

Robert A. Dahmer

Nicole Daniels

Susan Day

Andrew DeGraves

Carol Diest

Nancy M. Diment

Joann Dodson

Bruce Dougherty

Dave Duggan

Barbara Eisenbach

Valerie Eisenberg

Connie Ferguson

Stephen M. Ferguson

Jeanette S. Field

Donna Fitzpatrick

Darlene Flachier

Tania A. Fleitas

Byron Foster

Michael A. Foster

Nancy Foster

Marianne Frauenknecht

Ralph L. Freed

Margaret R. Fritz

Warren R. Fritz

Bonnie J. Frye

Judith Gay

John S. Geisler II

Beth Gibson

Americus M. Gill

Sue K. Glenn

Rosemary Gomes

Christina L. Gorter

Marilyn S. Graber

Stephanie G. Grathwol

Gregory D. Greenman II

Cynthia Gremban

Jean Grossman

Samuel Grossman

Ms. Caroline Guo

Henna Haight

Veronica Harik

Linda J. Havens

Ann Hawkes

Michael R. Helms

Andy Henn

Janice Herrick

Cindy Hetrick

Katy Hock

Joan Hoekstra

Brian C. Hoff

Bruce A. Hood

Donna R. Hood

Gwendolyn Hooker

Phil Horwich

Janet M. Huff

Teddy Huff

Amy L. Hunter

Cynthia M. Hunter

Cynthia Hutchinson

Ariadne Z. Ill

James A. Jackson

Judith Jackson

Isaac N. James

Brandi A. Janes

Bruce R. Johnson

Peggy Johnston

Garret Jones

Hannah Julien

Wilma J. Kahn

Cynthia Keesler

Katherine Kinas

Richard L. Kinas

Megan Klein

Rebecca Klien

Effie Kokkinos

Sydney Kott

Steve Kruse

Janice Lakers

Kathleen Ledger

Patricia Lemanski

Eunice K. Levy

Karen Libman

Dominic Licavoli

Madison Lloyd

Madelynn Locker

Yabing Lyu

Michael Macek

Cary J. Mannaberg

Jan E. Marshburn

Billy P. Martin

Dianne Martin

William Maxey

Anne B. May

Prudence D. McCabe

Joyce K. McNally

Lauren E. Meade

Susan Meldrim

Caroline Meyers

Ruth M. Moser

Lorraine A. Mosier

Samantha Mroz

Natalie Muresan

Betty Murphy

Nancy H. Muszynski

Sophia Newcomb

David Nielsen

Derrick Norris

Heather R. Norris

Moira Norris

R. Patrick Norris

Derl D. Oberlin

Heidi S. Oberlin

Zoe Odom

Stacey O'Keefe

Simone Olden

Pam Olmstead

Marianne Orr

Sally J. Padley

Anne S. Pancella

Kelley Pattison

Nancy Payne

Judy A. Mort

Meghan Peet

Scott Peterson

Sharon Peterson

Debbie Phillips

Laurrie Pirrone

Liz Plummer

Gerald Potratz

Louise Potratz

Larry Potter

Tanya Potter

Rolland W. Preuss

Sharon A. Preuss

Joan E. Raffenaud

David R. Randell

Kate Rasberry

Martha A. Ream

Jane Rettke

Karen A. Richard

Janet G. Roadhouse

Gerald F. Robbins

Myral Robbins

Wanda Robinson

Elsie Romano

Ian J. Russel

Pamela Sackett

Stanley Sackett

Ava Sauer

Mary L. Schardt

Jane A. Schelhas

Keeley Schroeder

Carolyn M. Selby

Laurence Shaffer

Sayuri N. Shahid

Kathleen Sheffield

Jenna Sherman

Janet Short

Lauren Shult

Virginia Simon

Bernie Simpson

Judy A. Sims

Carol Smith

Megan Smith

Nancy Snell

William Snell

Fiorella Spalvieri

Jocelyn Spooner

Carol Steiner

Svetlana Stone

Lindy Storms

Michael Storms

Gail Stults

Dawn Sylvester

Kimberly Tabor

Gary R. Taylor

Madison Taylor

Avril Tegge

Sandra S. Thielman

Susan Thoms

Mary Tift

Andrea M. Trautman

Gerry Tregerman

Lee Tregerman

Edie S. Trent

Barbara E. Trenter

Jayne Trombley

Catherine M. Troyer

Dawn Updike

Gregg M. Updike

Janice W. Utter

Dana Vandeveer

Rachel Vogel

Ashley Wagner

Abbie J. Walker

Andy Walker

Pamela A. Walker

Joi R. Ware

Joan Weaver

Robert M. Weir

Tracy Whitaker

Sara L. Wick

Don Wiertella

Evelyn Williams

Shirley M. Wise

Ann Wright-Parsons

Richard D. Zane

At Lakeview Ford Lincoln, we take great pride in our community. We consider it a privilege to assist organizations and individuals as they improve our world and make a difference in the lives of others.

Invest in The Gilmore

Your gift makes possible all we do.

Ticket sales are an important source of revenue for The Gilmore, but cover a fraction of the cost of presenting the Piano Festival – or even a single concert. We rely on charitable gifts from people like you to help make up the difference. If you are enjoying the Festival and wish to ensure future musical and educational experiences for our community, please consider a gift to The Gilmore. You can give online at TheGilmore.org/donate, or by scanning this QR code with your phone’s camera. Thank you!

© Chris McGuire

Members of the Encore Society have expressed their commitment to our organization by naming the Irving S. Gilmore International Piano Festival as the ultimate beneficiary of a planned gift. Such gifts might include a bequest, a charitable income gift, the remainder of an individual Retirement Account, or a gift of life insurance. Please let us know if you have named the Irving S. Gilmore International Piano Festival as a beneficiary of a planned gift and do not see your name listed below. If you wish to learn more, please contact Alisa Carrel, Director of Development, at acarrel@thegilmore.org.

As of February 15, 2024

Anonymous (4)

Mary Beth Birch

Avril and Malcolm Blair

Dorothy Buchler

Tim Bunce and Gail Johnson

Cheryl and Philip Burley

Genevieve Alcott Causse Estate

Margaret C. Connell Estate

Robert and Marianne Denes Fund

David G. Dvorak and Karol J. Peterson

Alfred Garcia and Sandra Edwards

Roger Gauntlett

Daniel and Barbara Gustin

Fred and Nan Harrison

Lynn Harrison

Tim Israels and Sylvia Robbins Israels

Judy Jolliffe

Alice and Mike Kemerling

Cynthia and Kevin Kole

Ann Langston

Karen and Terry Lason

Faye Luscombe

Jeffrey Mackie-Mason and Janet Netz

Elizabeth Upjohn Mason

James C. McGuire

Edwin E. Meader Trust

Wanda Pagel Herman Estate

Ann and Don Parfet

Barbara J. Parish

Julie and Keith Peterson

Kay Polzin

Stan and Connie Rajnak

William and Nancy Richardson

Diane S. Robertson

Barry Ross and Jane Rooks Ross

Judy Sarkozy

David and Janet Scarrow

David and Carol Schmitt

Gail G. Smith Estate

Randall Stehle Estate

John Stites Estate

Dewitt and Julie Strong

Pierre and Sophié van der Westhuizen

Charles Van Zoeren

Robert and Nancy Windsor

David C. Zimmermann

DANIEL R. GUSTIN ENDOWMENT FUND

In honor of former Director, Dan Gustin, who retired in 2018, an endowed fund was established with gifts from the following supporters. The Daniel R. Gustin Fund helps commission new works, launch new artistic initiatives, and advance the organization.

Carol and Tom Beech

Larry and Shannon Bell

Daniel and Anne Bitzer

Karen A. Bouche

Elizabeth Burns and Roger Zinser

Kevin and Sheri Carlstrom

Alisa Carrel

Paul and Susan Chummers

Lori Lee and Michael Curley

Cynthia and Oliver Curme

Greg Diment and Anne Quinn-Diment

David and Susan Doan

Diane and Randall Eberts

Friends in memory of Suzanne Kerr

Deborah Gauntlett

Roger Gauntlett

Irving S. Gilmore Foundation

Linda and Charles Hall

Curtis Hall and Susan Houseman

Havirmill Foundation

Deborah and Reid Hudgins

Patti and Bob Huiskamp

Terri Hunter

Barbara and Jerry James

Judy Jolliffe

Barbro and Norman Jung

Tom Kasdorf

Alice and Mike Kemerling

Thomas and Susan King

Robert P. and Patricia H. Kittredge

Wallson and Rebecca Knack

Cindy and Kevin Kole

Tom and Donna Lambert

Christopher and Margo Light

Timothy and Joy Light

Faye A. Luscombe

Dean and Linda MacVicar

Elizabeth Upjohn Mason

Bill and Jeannette Maxey

Judith Moore

Jessica Murphy and Dan Terpsma

Kelly T. Murphy and Mini Paulose Murphy

Derl and Heidi Oberlin

Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran and Olasope Oyelaran

Ann and Don Parfet

Barbara J. and Preston S. Parish

Katherine A. Patrick

Caroline and Vince Pavone

Gabriel and Priscilla Pedraza

Zaide Pixley and John Fink

William C. and Nancy F. Richardson

Diane S. Robertson

Lisa and Gonzalo Rodriguez

Mike Roeder

Barry Ross and Jane Rooks Ross

Frank Sardone and Susan Fall

William and Melinda Scott

Judith Sherman and Curtis Macomber

Judy Smith

Karen Stokes

TSI Consulting Partners, Inc.

Mary L. Tyler

Cynthia VanDenBerg

Sherman Van Solkema

Charles Van Zoeren

Heinrich G. von Schreiner

Von Washington, Jr.

Joshua and Pamela Weiner

D. Terry and Sharon Williams

Carolyn and Sidney Williams

We thank the following individuals who have contributed to our annual Contributors Circle campaign, which provides unrestricted support for all our activities.

September 1, 2022 - February 15, 2024

* 20+ Year Donors

BENEFACTOR

Larry and Shannon Bell Donor Advised Fund

The John W. and Rosemary K. Brown Family Foundation *

Lori Lee and Michael Curley

Curtis Hall and Susan Houseman

Kalamazoo Community Foundation *

Timothy and Joy Light *

Elizabeth Upjohn Mason *

Bill and Patricia O'Connor

Barbara J. Parish *

Kay Polzin *

Nancy Richardson *

Diane S. Robertson

Michael Shubeck and Nancy Monsour *

Linnaea and John Thomas

GUARANTOR

H.P. and Genevieve Connable Fund *

David and Valerie Flagler * in memory of Jim Westin

Havirmill Foundation *

Deborah and Reid Hudgins *

Patti and Bob Huiskamp * in memory of Gitti Huff

Edward Kenny

Keith and Julie Peterson

Zaide Pixley and John Fink

Mike Roeder

Catherine J. Strietzel

Pierre and Sophié van der Westhuizen

Sherman Van Solkema * in memory of Judy Kirsch Van Solkema

SUSTAINER

A Friend of the Gilmore

Carol and Tom Beech *

John and Heather Beering

Robert Boisture and Mary Margaret Pipkin

Susan Bourget and Peter Coles

Janice M. Brown

David and Gwen Buday

Elizabeth Burns and Roger Zinser

Nancy Ford Charles

Joanna and Scott Dales

Rob and Joanne DeWit

Cheryl Dickson, MD in honor of Pierre van der Westhuizen

Linda and George Dunn

James Escamilla and Brenda Longman

Fetzer Institute

Donald Flesche *

Karin Forsblad

Robert and Kathleen Gadwood

Alfred Garcia and Sandra Edwards - endowed

Toni and Francis Gross

Marijke and George Guerin

Linda and Charles Hall *

Oliver and Samantha Howell

Paula W. Jamison

Danette Ifert Johnson and Steve Johnson

Judy Jolliffe * in honor of Alice Kemerling

Barbro and Norman Jung *

Mary E. Klenow

Wallson and Rebecca Knack

Masato and Koko Koreeda

Dori Kunkle *

Scott and Martha Larsen

Ping and Tim Liang

Dean and Linda MacVicar *

Lucas and Sarah Mansberger

Helen McCauslin and Gene Radtke * in honor of Alice Kemerling

J. David and Roxie S. McGee *

Ron and Joan Molitor *

Michael and Sidney Mueller *

Thomas L. Owen in memory of Nancy S. Owen

Ann and Don Parfet *

William and Barbara Parfet

Kevin and Gina Paul

Douglas and Barbara Powell

Susan Birch Reinoehl

Janet and Arthur Riley *

Christopher Roberts and Nancy Zannini Family Fund

Dr. Cynthia and Dr. Gary Ruoff

Frank Sardone and Susan Fall * in honor of Alice Kemerling

Chris J. Smith in memory of Faith Smith

Karen Henry Stokes * in honor of Alice Kemerling

Connie Swartley

Bruce Tap in memory of Pearl M. Tap

Frank C. Taylor and Barry A. Schroeder

Jane and John Todd III *

Tyler Little Family Foundation *

Verlan and Norma VanRheenen

Dr. Richard Voorman and Dr. Mary Lagerwey

Dr. L. Marshall and Tonja Washington

Timothy and Liam Wendt

D. Terry and Sharon Williams in honor of Susan Hanselman

Jim and Maggie Woodruff

Owen and Linda Youngman

Charles and Lynn Zhang

PATRON

A Friend of The Gilmore (3)

Matthew Aubin

Herb Ayres and Beth Hartman

Daniel and Anne Bitzer

Gordon Charles Boardman *

Karen A. Bouche

Kappy Boudeman

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Kay and Mervin Burtis *

Jill and Paul Clark in honor of Pierre van der Westhuizen

Anders Dahlberg and Stacy A. Nowicki

Thomas A. Dietz and Sharon L. Carlson *

Mark and Diane Donovan *

Diane and Randall Eberts *

Tim and Carla Fallon

Shon and Sam Field

Beverly Folz in memory of John C. Folz

Jay and Julie Garside in honor of Scott Brown

Timothy and Jennifer Gatz *

Leonard and Linda Ginsberg in memory of Stephen and Ranja Friedman

Daniel and Barbara Gustin

Carol Haenicke

Robert and Jennifer Hill

David and Susan Hoekema

Cheryl and Ricky Johnson

Peggy Johnston

Nancy Kalinowski

Thomas B. and Celine Keizer *

W.K. Kellogg Foundation - matching gift *

Alice and Mike Kemerling in memory of William E. and Sheila Bowser

Dr. Anthony and Joanne King

Thomas and Susan King

Cindy and Kevin Kole

Tom and Donna Lambert *

John and Lisa Lawitzke in memory of Donald C. Lutz

Faye A. Luscombe * in memory of Bob Luscombe

John and Phyllis Martens

James E. Maslanka

Bill and Jeannette Maxey *

Mary McCormick and Gunther Hega

Beth McIntyre

Ann Moore

Kelly T. and Mini Paulose Murphy

Tim and Sara Nemeth in honor of Alice Kemerling

George Orban and Rae H. Ramsdell

Janice and Eugene Perkins

Ralph L. Pernice and Nancy Englander * in memory of Rebecca Pernice

Julie and Bob Peterson *

Ann Paulson and Bill Pierce in honor of Dr. Elizabeth J. Start

Jeff and Melissa Radawski

Martha Ream *

Charles Ritter *

Charles and Stella Royce Fund for the Arts at the Grand Rapids Community Foundation

David and Janet Scarrow

Thomas Shuster and Catherine A. Walker

Ruth and Tom Small

Jeffrey D. Smith

Sharon Soltesz

Bob and Barbara Struber

Elizabeth Thall

Doreen and Ed Thomas

William and RuthAnn Uggen

Jakob Vos in memory of Stephen Friedman

Randy and Pamela Walker in memory of Jerry French

Michael and Peggy Warlick in honor of Donald Niebrugge

Charles Wattles and Rosemary Willey

Josh and Pam Weiner *

Phyllis Westerman *

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Carolyn H. and Sidney B. Williams, Jr. * in honor of Nancy Richardson

Bob and Nan Windsor *

Gary and Pamela Zandt

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FRIEND

A Friend of The Gilmore (2)

Nathan and Trisha Batts

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Priscilla Blair in honor of Alice Kemerling

Carolyn Bone

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Jim and Sheila Bridenstine in honor of Pierre van der Westhuizen

Chip and Patricia Brooks

Rena Brooks

Dr. Marlene Camacho-Ochoa

Christopher and Logan Campagna

Jeremy Carr

Alisa J. Carrel and Bryan G. Zocher in honor of Charleen and Richard Carrel

Phillip and Carol Carra

Jim and Carol Carter

Michael J. Clark

Frank and Shirley Cody

Daniel Cyganowski

Bill and Fiona Denny

Robert and Etsuko Dlouhy *

David and Susan Doan *

Deborah and David Dunstone *

Dr. David G. Dvorak and Ms. Karol J. Peterson *

Carol Ann Dyer

Vicki and Bill Eichstaedt in memory of LaVonne Stavig

Barbara Farraye *

Marian and Ken Fisher

Stephen Friedman *

Dragos Galusca

Yvonne and Dale Gatz

Virginia Gearhart

Clarice B. Geels

C. J. and Ann Gianakaris *

Bruce and Laura Goethe

Daniel Guyette and DeNel Stoltz

Nicholas and Kathryn Haddad

Wendy Hand

Fred Hawley

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Richard and Susan Hill

Hal Horneffer

Alan and Kristin Hovestadt in honor of James and Sheila Bridenstine

Barbara and Jerry James *

Karlsons and Associates LLC

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Michael A. Krischer and Janet R. Heller

Patrick and Barbara Lavery *

Mark Loehrke and Judy Johnson *

Seth and Maria Malin *

Benjamin Maxey and Sandra Sims

Patrick G. McKeever

Amy and James Melvin *

Joan Melvin in memory of Gary A. Melvin

Michelle Miller-Adams

Lyle Mindlin

John B. Mitchell

Edward and Kari Montgomery

Dagmar Moore

Shaun Moskalik

Donald Nitz

Peter F. Norlin and Willie P. Cupples

Caroline Novak in memory of Brigitte Huff

Martin and Pamela Obed *

Derl and Heidi Oberlin *

Melissa Olken

Helen Osterwald

David and Carol Overton

Julia Paradine Rice

Douglas Pearce and Zac Bauer

Gabriel and Priscilla Pedraza

Nelson and Phyllis Pelletier

Jon and Gwen Pott

Rita Raichoudhuri in honor of Oliver Howell

Robert and Janice Rensch

Carol and Brad Ricker

Sylvia Roederer and and Leslie Tung in memory of Phyllis Rappeport

Candace Ross and John Geisler

Elaine Shirk

Stephanie and Edward Robinson

Dan Ruffe and Heather Hudson

Ed and Jan Sackley

Christopher and Katherine Shook

Jeri Shuler and Mike Macek

Herman and Delores Smith

Paul Smithson

William J. Stein *

Jean Stevens and Jeff Bernstein

Dewitt Strong in memory of Julie Strong

Lisa Sullivan in honor of the marriage of Oliver and Samantha Howell

Terry and Scooter Tessari

Richard and Chris Thomas

Lance and Laura Trexler

Jack Urban

Christine Valentine - endowed

Charles Van Zoeren *

Luis F. Velez

Carrie and Bill Venema

Stuart R. Verseman and James Collier

Pamela West

John and Nancy Wilks *

Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran and Olasope Oyelaran in memory of Bill Richardson

Jan and Frank Wolf *

Valerie and Christopher Wright

JoAnn Yochim *

ASSOCIATE

A Friend of The Gilmore (8)

Brad Allison

Mr. Edward T. Antal in memory of Ellen Antal

Garrett Baker in memory of Gladys Baker

Kim Bakkum in memory of Phyllis Rappeport

Timothy J. Bartik and Debra Wickman

Jan Bedrosian and Steve Pifer

Susan Beechler

Bruce Beier

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Deborah Betz

Hunter Boone

Bob and Marty Boughner *

D. Neil and Sandra Bremer

Leslie Bricker and Hilene Topper-Bricker

Victoria C. Bronson

Alex Brown

Ann and Robert Brown

Lou and Laurel Bruska

Tracy Buck and Laurie A. Hanson

Brian and Susan Buckham

Charles Budd

Janice and Dennis Burke *

Joan E. Burke

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Rem Cabrera and Christopher Schram

Nancy L. Calloway in memory of George Nielsen

Will Canfield

David and Jo Carr in memory of Kathryn Mix

Phillip and Virginia Caruso *

Lisa R. Case

Dick and Elizabeth Casper *

Kim Cauchy

John Chadwick

Carol and Dennis Chandler

Frederick and Elizabeth Clem in memory of Stephen Friedman

Carol Conklin

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Nancy and Ron Crowell

Kalman and Becky Csia *

Frank and Sue Cunningham

Judy D'Arcangelis

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Kathy L. Dilsaver

Dr. and Mrs. Richard Dirrenberger

Beth Dochinger

Patricia Dolan *

Miriam E. Downey

Joseph Driskill

Thomas Duffield

Eaton Corporation - matching gift

George E. Ebright

John B. Edwards

Richard and Sandra Edwards

Fred and Susan Einspahr

Victoria Elkins

Robert Endias and Eileen Stryker

Hans Engelke *

James and Diana Falahee

Nancy Falk

Daniel Fechtner

John and Sharon Feddersen in memory of Jack Feddersen

Gary and Ann Fergemann *

Steve and Connie Ferguson *

Jeanne Fields and Robert M. Wenninger

Grant P. Fletcher

Harvey and Diane Fogel *

Stuart and Madeline Foster

Nancy A. Frost

Ray P. Fuller in memory of Dr. Paul M. Fuller

Richard and Eva Gaines

Jean R. Gardner

Max Gates

Janet F. Gavagan

Tom and Claire Geil

Robert Glassman

Irving S. Gilmore Foundation - matching gift *

Nan Goldenthal

David Granato in memory of Julia M. Granato

Timothy and Joyce Greening

Annette L. Greive

Kenneth J. Greschak and Dana DeLuca

Steven E. Grieve

Charles and Patti Guernsey

Bruce and Ann Haight

Margaret Hamilton and Rod Carpenter

Carla L. Hammel in memory of Mom

James R. Hanson

Deanne Hartman

Roger Hathaway

Robert and Mara Hayes

Mary and Jim Heaton *

Al and Shirley Heavey *

Diane and Jay Heckler *

Denise Helmick in memory of Lyle and Thelma Alrick

Brenna M. Hendrix

Sunny Hill and Maurice Decoster

Hal and Peter Hobson-Morse

Richard and Jocelyn Hodgman

Mark and Mary Sue Hoffman

Phil Horwich and Wilma Kahn

Connie Houts

Brian Hughes

Tim Israels and Sylvia Robbins

David Jackson and Margaret McAllister

Julie Jaksa

Shirley Johnson

Dan Joldersma in memory of Martha Jane Spicuzza

Connie and Steven Kamerling

LuAnn Katko

Jack and Nanette Keiser

Bobbe Kelley

Constance Kennedy

Daniel X. Keto and Cara Lieurance

Richard and Katherine Kinas

James Kleinheksel

Peter and Barbara Kobrak *

Andrew W. Koehler and Sorina Dodu

Steven L. Kohler

Peg E. Kolaja in memory of Bob Springman

Mark Kole

Charles and Jean Kothe

William and Susan Kovats

Charles Krenek

Nelly Kurzmann

Harold T. Kyvig

Janice Lakers in memory of Michael Stoline

Millie Lambert in memory of Christopher Moberley

Karen and James Lancendorfer

Stephanie Larsen * - endowed

Vince Lavieri

Stewart Levin

Sharan and Randall Levine

Candice Lewis

Sandy and Fred Linabury

Barbara Lockart

David Lundquist and Susan Paul

Garrard and Moira Macleod

Ann and Clark Maddox

Judy Maggini

Mary Maley

Catherine and Scott Maxwell

Anne May *

Prudence McCabe *

Elizabeth McKenna

Joyce K. McNally *

Anne H. Mehring

Bettina Meyer

Linda and W. Joseph Mills *

Jeffry H. Mitchell

Steven Moffic

Judith Moore

Lawrence and Deborah Moran

Michael J. Morrison and Linda Mah

Naomi S. Morse

Brenda and Jeff Murphy

Brian J. Nederveld

Thomas Nehil and Gail Walter

Mark Nepo and Susan McHenry

Marcia Nickell

Lucie Nigrelli

John and Pat O'Toole

Donna Oas in memory of Renny Oas

Thomas and Carla Obringer in memory of Joelle Richert

Claire Odland

Kenneth Odza

Mark and Donna Oudersluys

Mary F. Oudsema

Ed and Jan Overbeck

Michael and Donna Parr

Daniela Peña and Francisco Yapor in honor of The Gilmore Staff

Nick Petros

Daniel and Paula Pietryga

Keith Pinter

Franklin and Paula Presler

Richard and Carol Purdy

Stanley and Connie Rajnak

Ward Randol and Loraine Campbell

Robert and Margo Rebar

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Gregg Richardson

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William Robinson

Rose Place Properties

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Fay Ann and Kim Sebaly

Thomas H. Seiler

David and Colleen Semler

Martin and Judy Sepanik

Judy and Lowell Seyburn

Richard L. Seymour, Jr.

Randall Shields and Andrea M. Mazzone

Patricia Shiley

Robert and Judith Shrimplin

Joellen L. Silberman *

Alan H. Silverman *

Larry Simon

David and Carol Simpson in memory of Danielle Simpson

Judith and Jerome Sivak

Jurgen Skoppek *

Kevin Spangelo

Deborah Sparbel *

Andrea J. Starz

Florence Steinberg

Phil and Leah Stickney

Wendy Stock

Ferrell and Marilyn Stremler

Richard H. Shaw and Shirley D. Sutton

Deborah Gang and Alan Sylvester

William Tennant

Sue and Leo Thielman

Mary Tift

Robert B. Tower

John C. Townsend and Janet L. Solberg

Lee and Gerry Tregerman

Jenny G. Trout

Cheryl Tully in memory of John Tully

Thomas and Patricia Turner

Robert and Linda Van Dis

Laura Vessey

Alvin Waddles

Joseph and Holly Walls

William and Kathy Watt

Fred and Cam Weber

Jerome Weitzner and Nancy K. Owens, Ph.D.

Rick Welch and Cindy Stewart

Richard and Sheri Welsh

Kathleen West

Bryan M. Westra

Tracy Whitaker

Jan and Mel White

Robert and Kelly Yeung

Jason Yoshida

Brandon M. Zeigler

Raye Ziring

Floyd Zula in memory of Eileen Markson

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The Concert Truck

July 29 - August 5, 2024

Since 2016, The Concert Truck has performed in city streets, schools, neighborhoods, and parks. Nick Luby and Susan Zhang share music from their mobile music venue at outdoor events all over Kalamazoo this summer. The duo has been featured on Minnesota Public Radio, The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and they have partnered with the Kennedy Center’s Washington National Opera, Aspen Music Festival & School, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Southeastern Piano Festival, Piano Cleveland, Hilton Head International Piano Competition, and Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

SPONSORS

Rising Stars Series

Sundays at 4 pm

Illia Ovcharenko

Julius Rodriguez

HAVIRMILL FOUNDATION

VICKSBURG FOUNDATION

• September 15, 2024

• October 6, 2024

Jahari Stampley Trio

• November 17, 2024

Elizabeth Brauss

• March 9, 2025

Daniela Liebman

• May 11, 2025

PIANO MASTERS

Fazil Say

Saturday, November 16, 2024

Discovered at age 16 in Ankara, Turkey, Fazıl Say has been moving audiences and critics for almost 30 years. As a composer, he has written five symphonies, two oratorios, various solo concertos and numerous piano and chamber music works.

Brad Mehldau Trio

Sunday, April 13, 2025

Grammy®-Award winning jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has recorded and performed extensively since the early 1990s, most often in the trio format, including a five-record set entitled The Art of the Trio

Hélène Grimaud

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Virtuoso French pianist Hélène Grimaud has graced the stages of renowned orchestras worldwide and collaborated with numerous celebrated conductors, establishing her esteemed reputation in the world of classical music.

SPECIAL EVENT

Alexandre Kantorow with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Join us for a very special event welcoming back 2024 Gilmore Artist Alexandre Kantorow. In his first visit to Michigan since his stunning Gilmore debut in September, 2023, his program will showcase composers who helped launch him to fame. Mr. Kantorow will perform Rachmaninoff’s dramatic and virtuosic Piano Sonata No. 1, and then will join Maestro Kuerti and the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra for Brahms’ majestic Piano Concerto No. 2 - which he performed to earn the historic first prize at the Tchaikovsky competition in 2019 at age 22. He was the first French pianist to win the Gold Medal, also receiving the Grand Prix – awarded only three times in competition history.

© Courtesy of the Artist

© Fethi Karaduman

© Courtesy of the Artist

© Mark Bugnaski

The Gilmore inspires future generations of musicians and audiences by connecting our West Michigan community with the highest level of piano artistry. The Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo is proud to support them.

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– Gilmore photo by Chris McGuire.