Congratulations to student Mengyi Yang, First Prize Winner of the 2013 Bradshaw & Buono International Piano Competition. A student of Professor Emile Naoumoff, Mengyi will give her debut performance in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall on May 19th.
For more on the Gradshaw & Buono International Piano Competition results, visit: http://www.alexanderbuonointl.com/bbpiano/piano_competition_winners_2013.html
Jacobs School professor Arnaldo Cohen will take on the artistic leadership of the Portland Piano International concert series in Oregon, while continuing to each full time in Bloomington.
Pressler with friends well worth hearing
When a “Menahem Pressler and Friends” event is announced, one doesn’t usually know, at first, who those “friends” will be, but one can be sure those chosen “friends” will be worth hearing.
So it was Sunday afternoon in Auer Hall, when the remarkable Master/Mr./Professor Pressler appeared on stage to help Indiana University’s Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program mark its 40th birthday. On this august occasion, he called upon violinist Andrew Cardenes (IU/Josef Gingold alum, former Pittsburgh Symphony concertmaster, and prominent soloist), violist Paul Coletti (equally prominent concert soloist and teacher at the Colburn School, a music conservatory in Los Angeles), and cellist Eric Kim (Jacobs School professor, chamber musician and former principal in the Cincinnati Symphony).
One heard three collaborative duos: Cardenes and Pressler in the haunting “Nigun” from Ernest Bloch’s Suite Hebraique, “Baal Shem”; Cardenes and Coletti in a brisk and bright Mozart Duo for Violin and Viola, and Kim with Pressler in Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei,” based so movingly on the Kol Nidre prayer used at Yom Kippur services. Pressler, in solo, performed a Chopin Nocturne exquisitely.
To conclude, the four joined in a gorgeous and ardent reading of Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-Flat Major, its highlight, as music and in performance, being the third movement, an Andante cantabile that gushes romance and, quite likely, devotion for the composer’s beloved Clara. Musical romance was in the air.
Prior to the music, the IU Foundation’s President’s Medallion was given to Louis and Sybil Mervis for their generous support of the Borns Jewish Studies Program, and the Provost Medal was bestowed upon the visionary Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, who founded, nurtured and for numerous years directed that program.
IU alumnus and former faculty member Jeremy Denk writes in this week’s issue of The New Yorker about his time in Bloomington, under the tutelage of pianist György Sebok, and other aspects of his musical (and personal) history. A great article! http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/08/130408fa_fact_denk
Congratulations to Justin Bird, a doctoral student of André Watts, who has won the Jacobs School of Music Saint-Saëns piano concerto competition. He will perform the concerto with the University Orchestra on Sunday, April 7 at 8pm, under the baton of Arthur Fagen. The free concert takes place in the Musical Arts Center.
Hanol Baek, a student of Emile Naoumoff, was the runner-up.
Justin Bird began playing the piano at a very early age in New Zealand and came to the United States to further his education in 2004. In addition to performing with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and the Auckland, Wellington and National Youth Orchestras, Bird’s career has featured several concerto appearances with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.
In 1999 he represented New Zealand as a finalist in the Kowhai Australasian Piano Concerto Competition. In 2000 he was awarded the NZ Young Performer of the Year for piano, and in 2002 appeared as a finalist in the prestigious NZ Young Musician of the year Competition. In the same year he won the inaugural NZ Kapiti Coast International Piano Competition. This awarded him his USA debut recital at the Temple Square Series in Salt Lake City. In 2006 he reached the finals of the MTNA National Young Artist Competition in the USA and later that year he performed with the Florida State University Philharmonia.
Bird grew up studying piano with Rae de Lisle, and in later years with Bryan Sayer, Read Gainsford, and Marian Hahn. He has also been privileged to play for Leon Fleisher, Roy Howat, Michael Houston, and John Perry in masterclass. Bird has earned a Bachelor of Music at the University of Auckland, a Masters of Music at Florida State University, and a Graduate Performance Diploma at the Peabody Institute. He is currently working towards a doctorate, studying with André Watts at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Bird is both a prolific accompanist and chamber musician, having twice been part of the winning group in the NZ National Chamber Music Contest. He has worked with many contemporary music ensembles performing on piano, celeste, harmonium, keyboard and harpsichord. His present studies incorporate an interest in early keyboard instruments, with guidance from Professor Elisabeth Wright in the Jacobs School’s Early Music Institute.
Professor Edmund Battersby has re-released a recording of “Franz Schubert: Shorter Works For Piano,” on the Schoodic Sound digital label.
The project comes from a program Battersby put together for the Musical Heritage Society in 1978, as homage to the 150th anniversary of Schubert’s death. It was recorded in Sage Hall at Cornell University on an Imperial Bösendorfer Concert Grand that the university acquired from Paul Badura-Skoda at the behest of pianist and fortepianist Malcolm Bilson.
The compilation includes 11 different works that cover a range of styles that are hallmarks of the composer, some with unusual histories. For instance, Fünf Klavierstücke is really the composer’s first sonata, the lone Diabelli Variation was written for the same publisher who requested a variation from 50 composers, with Beethoven very lately and sarcastically responding with 33. The main offering of this disc is Schubert’s Drei Klavierstucke, an acknowledged posthumous masterpiece, some believing another set of Impromptus left unfinished.
For more on recordings by Edmund Battersby, visit http://www.schoodicsound.com/
EDMUND BATTERSBY
Throughout the course of an international career as pianist, orchestral soloist, chamber player and teacher Edmund Battersby has earned the highest praise from his audiences, critics and colleagues alike. American Record Guide claimed that his landmark recordings of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, on modern and period instruments, put him, “in the company of Brendel, Serkin, Schnabel and Pollini.” His many CDs for Musical Heritage Society, Naxos, Koch, and others over the years, have been noted impressively, the 1992 Grammy Short list for Goyescas of Granados among them. Battersby’s digital re-release of Mendelssohn’s complete “Songs Without Words” on the Schoodic Sound label, was a “Sleeper of the Year” for WNCN Magazine in 1982, the artery for what was then the premiere classical radio station of New York City. The 2012 Schoodic Sound digital re-release of his iconic Musical Heritage Society recording, “The Early Romantic Piano”, performed on a Rodney Regier replica of an 1834 instrument by Conrad Graf, was warmly received by Fanfare Magazine. “This is simply a beautiful recording that should be heard by everyone.” (Dubins) Schoodic Sound has just released his Musical Heritage Society recording; Franz Schubert: Shorter Works for Piano and will release the newly recorded complete Iberia by Isaac Albeniz later in 2013.
Battersby gained the admiration of Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, George Rochberg, Elliot Schwartz and William Bolcom in live and recorded performances directed by the composers. He has played recitals worldwide, most notably in London, New York City and Washington, DC, and has performed with conductors such as McGegan, Schwarz and Schuller, with orchestras ranging from the Indianapolis Symphony to Pittsburgh Symphony. A frequent guest at the Library of Congress in our nation’s capital, Battersby has performed on their series with the Vermeer Quartet and elsewhere with the Tokyo Quartet and the Orion Quartet. Festivals featuring him in solo or ensemble capacity include Mostly Mozart, Santa Fe, Seattle and La Jolla. He has given master classes at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, Dublin Master Classes the Hochschule fur Musik in Leipzig, Princeton, Rutgers and Duke Universities as well as Indiana University Bloomington where he has been a member of the artist-faculty of the Jacobs School of Music since 1995. During the summer of 2013, he will give Master Classes at the Euro Arts Festival in Halle, Germany and in Dublin, Ireland for the inaugural season of the new Dublin International Piano Festival. Edmund Battersby is the Artistic Director of Harbor Music, the Artur Balsam Chamber Ensemble Classes for Piano and Strings, supported by Indiana University Foundation since 1999.
Pressler enjoys a moment outside the hall.
In an extraordinary concert at the end of January, 89-year-old Distinguished Professor Menahem Pressler performed a solo recital of Schubert and Kurtag at the Konzerthaus in Vienna to a sold-out audience as a replacement for Mitsuko Uchida, who unexpectedly canceled her recital.
Pressler’s playing was described by Die Presse’s Wilhelm Sinkovicz as having “struck a tone that was long believed lost already, a tone we perhaps last heard from Wilhelm Kempff.”
Sinkovicz continued to write that Viennese audiences had witnessed the comeback of Horowitz at 84 and Horczowski at 100 and that the evening’s performance was in the same league. Not surprisingly, the audience rose as one to offer a prolonged standing ovation.
On the same tour, Pressler joined the Emerson Quartet in a performance of Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-Flat Major to a packed house at the Saltzburg Mozarteum. In response to the performance, Saltzburger Nachrichten critic Karl Harb said that, in Pressler’s hands, “the music drips from the keys in crystalline beauty, forms phrases of natural grace, all simple and honest.”
Enjoy pictures of the recent performances:
Scoring his Requiem a final time, Gabriel Faure determined it should be performed by mixed chorus, boy soprano, baritone and an orchestra of strings, timpani, four horns, three trombones and pairs of flutes, clarinets, bassoons and trumpets. On Saturday evening in Indiana University’s Auer Hall, pianist Emile Naoumoff called on a Steinway concert grand to replace all of the above.
What this adventurous Jacobs School of Music faculty pianist did was to transcribe Faure’s gentle masterpiece, a Requiem with an uplifting spirit virtually like no other, for his instrument of choice. Not to suggest that the piano, as wonderful an instrument as human endeavors have devised, can in any way replace Faure’s choral/solo/instrumental lineup, but Naoumoff’s previously honed skills at transcription and his sensitivity to the Requiem’s content surprisingly combined to shape a work that, in his pianistic hands, exuded the supernal, the lofty.
Just to have included the range of strokes needed to make one feel the music as substantively complete was quite an artistic feat. To have also given the transcription that aura of spirituality made this audacious effort an exhilarating experience, sometimes breathtaking.
Naoumoff opened his recital with a performance of Schubert’s final Piano Sonata, the B Flat. As one has come to expect from this larger-than-life interpreter, it was appropriately contemplative and, in the final two movements, exuberant. For this listener, however, the interpretation hovered too much on the extremes of soft/loud, slow/fast and was punctuated with overdramatic and overly extended silences. Nevertheless, one could not deny its effectiveness.
Copyright: HeraldTimesOnline.com 2013
The Jacobs School of Music is pleased to announce that doctoral student Christopher Miranda has won an internal concerto competition and will perform the Ravel Piano Concerto in G Major with the Philharmonic Orchestra, David Effron conducting, on February 13 at 8:00 p.m. in the Musical Arts Center. Miranda is a student of Menahem Pressler. The runner up for the competition was Jinseo Joo, student of Emile Naoumoff.
“I am so grateful to be given this opportunity to play such a beautiful and unique work with Orchestra,” said Miranda. “Its nearly as much of a concerto for orchestra as for the piano, such a showcase for the entire ensemble, a heartfelt, collaborative experience.”
From Canada, Miranda began learning the piano at the age of seven. At 9 years old, he was invited to compete at the North American Age Championship of the American Guild of Music competitions. He continued his early success winning the Contemporary Showcase Competition, as well as the Tom Thomas Scholarship awarded by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has also won the coveted Rose Bowl at both the Peel Music Festival and the Kiwanis Music Festival of Toronto, first prize in the Canadian Music Competitions, Toronto Music Competition, TD Canada Trust National Competition and Toronto Symphony Piano Competitions, was awarded the Kesri Arts Award and the Emerging Performing Artist Award by the city of Mississauga, and the Professional Musician Grant of the Canada Council for the Arts from the Government of Canada. Christopher continues to delight audiences today in both solo and chamber categories, including performances at Roy Thompson Hall, the CBC Glenn Studio, Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and with the Toronto and Yale Philharmonia Orchestras. He has also been heard on television and radio including OnTV, Bravo! television, CBC Radio and CJRT 91.1fm in Canada.
Miranda earned an A.R.C.T. Performer’s Diploma achieving first class honours with distinction from the Royal Conservatory of Music, where he is also a graduate of the Young Artists Performance Academy of the Glenn Gould Professional School as a scholarship student of Marina Geringas. At the University of Toronto under the tutelage of Marietta Orlov, Christopher earned his Bachelor and Master in Music Performance degrees, was awarded the W.O. Forsyth Memorial top graduating scholarship, an Advanced Certificate in Performance, and the distinguished Felix Galimir Award for excellence in Chamber Music. Most recently Miranda completed an Artist Diploma on full scholarship from Yale University, studying with Claude Frank.
The January-February issue of Fanfare magazine, read by many around the globe, features an extensive interview with IU Jacobs School of Music professor and pianist Edmund Battersby. The coverage of Battersby includes a conversation with Jerry Dubins, as well as reviews of the pianist’s recent re-release of Schumann’s “Kreisleriana”; Chopin’s Ballades, Op. 52, 23; Waltzes, Op. 64/1 & 2, and Nocturne, Op. 84/1; and Albeniz’s Iberia, Book 1 and 2 (a new recording!)
Battersby’s recordings of Iberia, Books 3 and 4 are planned to be released towards the end of 2013.
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