ADAM TENDLER, piano
and ALEXANDER PLATT, reciter
Piano Recital

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Reserved Hall Seats: $50.00, $29.00, $25.00 (partial obstruction)
General Admission/Outdoors/Uncovered: $20.00, Students: $10

adamtendler.com
alexanderplatt.com

“The Abrupt Ending, of a Prolonged Vibration”
Works for Narrator and Piano, in Memory of Ned Rorem

Copland: Piano Variations
Ned Rorem: Eight Etudes for Piano (1975)
Philip Glass: Mad Rush
Darius Milhaud: From the Album of Madame Bovary (Alexander Platt, narrator)
Alberto Ginastera: Piano Sonata No.1 (1952)

A recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and the 2022 Yvar Mikhashoff Prize, “currently the hottest pianist on the American contemporary classical scene” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), a “remarkable and insightful musician” (LA Times), and “relentlessly adventurous pianist” (Washington Post) “joyfully rocking out at his keyboard” (New York Times), Adam Tendler is an internationally recognized interpreter of living, modern and classical composers. A pioneer of DIY culture in concert music who has commissioned and premiered major works by Christian Wolff and Devonté Hynes alike. In his early twenties Tendler performed in all fifty United States as part of a grassroots recital tour he called America 88×50, which became the subject of his memoir, 88×50, a Kirkus Indie Book of the Month and Lambda Literary Award nominee. He has gone on to become one of classical and contemporary music’s most recognized artists with recent engagements including appearing as soloist with the LA Philharmonic and on the mainstages of Carnegie Hall and BAM. He has been presented by the NY Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and a host of other leading series and platforms including The Broad, Guggenheim, Liquid Music, The Kitchen, le Poisson Rouge, National Sawdust, Knockdown Center, Issue Project Room, Maverick Concerts, Roulette, Death of Classical, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and NYC Pride.

Recently honored by the Illinois Council of Orchestras, Alexander Platt has built a unique career spanning the worlds of symphony, chamber music, and opera.

Alexander Platt is Music Director of the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra, the Waukegan Symphony Orchestra, and the Wisconsin Philharmonic, and spends his summers as the Music Director of the Maverick Concerts in Woodstock, New York, the oldest summer chamber-music festival in America.

Previously he spent twelve seasons as Resident Conductor and Music Advisor at Chicago Opera Theater, where he led the Chicago premieres of such landmark 20th-century operas as Britten’s Death In Venice, John Adams’ Nixon in China, Shostakovich’s Moscow Paradise, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter Brook’s The Tragedy of Carmen, the Tony Kushner/Maurice Sendak Brundibar, the first full staging of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and the world-premiere recording of Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik — all to high acclaim in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Opera News, Opera Canada, and both the Chicago papers.

“The abrupt ending, of a prolonged vibration”
Music and Words in Memory of Ned Rorem (1923-2022)

Aaron Copland (1900-1990): Piano Variations (1930)

Ned Rorem: Piano Sonata No.2 (1949)
I. Ouverture. Allegretto
II. Tarantella. Scherzando
III. Nocturne. Moderato
IV. Toccata. Allegro molto

Philip Glass (b.1937): Mad Rush, for solo piano (1979)

INTERMISSION

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974): L’Album de Madame Bovary, Op.128b
Emma – Pastoral – Tristesse – Chanson – Rêverie – Le Tilbury – Romance
Jeu – Le Tilbury – La Saint Hubert – Soupir – Dans les bois – Promenade
Pensée – Chagrin – Barcarolle – Dernier feuillet

Alexander Platt, reciter

Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983): Piano Sonata No.1, Op.22 (1952)
I. Allegro marcato
II. Presto misterioso
III. Adagio molto appassionato
IV. Ruvido ed ostinato

A recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and the 2022 Yvar Mikhashoff Prize, “currently the hottest pianist on the American contemporary classical scene” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), a “remarkable and insightful musician” (LA Times), and “relentlessly adventurous pianist” (Washington Post) “joyfully rocking out at his keyboard” (New York Times), Adam Tendler is an internationally recognized interpreter of living, modern and classical composers. A pioneer of DIY culture in concert music who has commissioned and premiered major works by Christian Wolff and Devonté Hynes alike, in his early twenties Tendler performed in all fifty United States as part of a grassroots recital tour he called America 88×50, which became the subject of his memoir, 88×50, a Kirkus Indie Book of the Month and Lambda Literary Award nominee.

He has gone on to become one of classical and contemporary music’s most recognized artists with recent engagements including appearing as soloist with the LA Philharmonic and on the mainstages of Carnegie Hall and BAM. He has been presented by the NY Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and a host of other leading series and platforms including The Broad, Guggenheim, Liquid Music, The Kitchen, le Poisson Rouge, National Sawdust, Knockdown Center, Issue Project Room, Maverick Concerts, Roulette, Death of Classical, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and NYC Pride.Tendler recently released an album of Liszt’s Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses on the Steinway Label, Robert Palmer: Piano Music on New World Records, and published his second book, tidepools. In 2022, he premiered 16 newly commissioned works using the complete inheritance left to him by his father after his untimely death, including by Laurie Anderson, Devonté Hynes, Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Christopher Cerrone, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Timo Andres and Pamela Z as part of a project called Inheritances. Adam Tendler is a Yamaha Artist and serves on the piano faculty of New York University.

Alexander Platt is Music Director of the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra, the Waukegan Symphony Orchestra, and the Wisconsin Philharmonic, and spends his summers as the sixth Music Director of the Maverick Concerts. He also returns this season to guest-conduct Symphonia Boca Raton, where he served as Principal Conductor for five seasons. Previously he spent twelve seasons as Resident Conductor and Music Advisor at Chicago Opera Theater, where he led the Chicago premieres of such landmark 20th-century operas as Britten’s Death In Venice, John Adams’ Nixon in China, Shostakovich’s Moscow Paradise, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter Brook’s The Tragedy of Carmen, the Tony Kushner/Maurice Sendak Brundibar, the first full staging in that city of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and the world-premiere recording of Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik. He has guest-conducted the Houston Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the City of London Sinfonia, and at the Banff Festival and the Aldeburgh Festival, among others. He is a graduate of Yale College and of King’s College Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and was a Conducting Fellow at Tanglewood. His work has been broadcast on National Public Radio, the South-West German Radio, and the BBC, and his recording with violinist Rachel Barton and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra of the Max Bruch Scottish Fantasy is frequently broadcast across North America.

Adam Tendler and I present this program in memory of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, pianist, author and diarist, Ned Rorem, who died late last year in his Manhattan apartment at the age of ninety-nine. Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana into a Quaker family: the son of business executive C. Rufus Rorem, whose ideas served as the basis for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance plans. He received his early education in Chicago, at the American Conservatory of Music and then Northwestern University. Later, Rorem moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and finally the Juilliard School in New York City. In 1966, after many years spent living in Paris, he published The Paris Diary, which, like his subsequent New York Diary, brought him great notoriety for his extremely frank descriptions about his life as a gay man, living in both the gay subculture as well as the cultural elite of both cities. Rorem wrote extensively about music as well, in several books of collected essays, and composed works on commission for most of the great American orchestras. Rorem composed in a chromatic yet largely tonal idiom throughout his career, and was not hesitant to attack the orthodoxies of the avant-garde. His notable students included Jonathan Bailey Holland, Daron Hagen, Russell Platt and David Horne, and he joins W.H. Auden, Count Harry Kessler and Gore Vidal as one of the great chroniclers of gay culture in its golden age of the twentieth century. Finally, his work and persona were an inspiration to countless gay American artists.

One of Rorem’s great mentors was the great father-figure of twentieth-century American music: Aaron Copland, an earlier American-in-Paris as one of the great students of Nadia Boulanger, and whose seminal Piano Variations begins tonight’s performance. Composed in 1930, the Variations mark the high-point of Copland’s early compositional phase in the modern, twelve-tone style, before his pronounced return to traditional tonality and — as was typical of artists in the years of the Great Depression — a simpler, more populist style with another of his great, short masterpieces, the El Salon Mexico of 1936. That said, the mastery of the Piano Variations is plainly for all to hear, as it remains one of Copland’s most succinct and satisfying works. As Vivian Perlis noted,
“Copland’s first major piano piece caused a stir from the time the composer gave the premiere performance at the artists’ colony Yaddo, where he had started a festival of contemporary American music. He wrote that the Piano Variations “was the first work where I felt very sure of myself.” Critic Paul Rosenfeld prophesied: “One felt its author the composer of the coming decades.” The work has continued to draw attention and has been described as strong, spare, and granitic. While Copland adapted the twelve tone method for the piece, the twenty variations and coda flow naturally in a style that is recognizably Copland’s own.”

The Maverick’s own late Program Annotator, Miriam Villchur Berg, was also illuminating in her description:
“Copland was one of the first homosexual composers to live openly with his partner, photographer Victor Kraft. Copland and his partner had a cabin in Woodstock in the summer of 1939. Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears rented a cabin nearby, and the four spent their evenings together, playing tennis or making music…Copland began work on his first major piano piece, the Piano Variations, immediately after his return from Paris in 1930. He wrote to a friend that he composed them out of order, but still wanted each one to flow from the previous one: “I cannot explain this contradiction. One fine day, when the time was right, the order of the variations fell into place.” The work consists of a theme, twenty variations, and a coda. The germ from which the variations grow is a four-note cell that is heard at the outset, ranging over two octaves. Copland inverts it, mirrors it, reverses it, and makes other careful use of it, but always within the context of making music out of it rather than adhering to mere academic interest or cleverness.”

If ever there was a work of music that described Paris in the rain, it is the Ned Rorem Second Sonata for piano, composed near the beginning of his famous (and infamous) years in that city, in 1949.

Rorem’s Second Piano Sonata reflects a unique blend of European and American musical traditions, integrating influences from French Impressionism—and in particular, the mock-sentimental style of Francis Poulenc—and the “open-air” style of his mentor Copland, and with the more formalistic modes of Stravinsky and Prokofiev. His evocative language and impressive command of the piano’s tonal and rhythmic capabilities make the Second Sonata a challenging and rewarding piece for performers and listeners alike, and in the opinion of many is his most impressive work for the instrument. The pioneering recording from the 1960s by Julius Katchen—another of the great American artists living and working in Paris in the postwar years—remains unsurpassed, both as an interpretation and as a document of its time and place.

When the Dalai Lama visited North America in 1979, Philip Glass—arguably, the very last of the great American students of Nadia Boulanger, in Paris—wrote Mad Rush to honor the occasion. Although originally conceived as being of “indefinite length,” the published version indicates only three repetitions of the entirety, or a binary form with a shortened coda. The opening three-voiced texture emphasizes two-note patterns playing against each other with two-against-three rhythm. This contrasts with a four-bar idea of running 16th notes in both hands that adds two extra beats during the fourth bar. The overall effect—in the hands of a great pianist— is hypnotic, one of the great monuments of Glass’ minimalistic style. Simone Dinnerstein presented a notable performance of the work at the Maverick Concerts, in 2022.

Darius Milhaud, one of the great musical figures of Paris whom Rorem knew and admired, will go down in history as one of the group of loosely-allied composers known as Les Six—Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, and the pioneering Germaine Tailleferre—who, along with Falla, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Ravel, defined the art-music milieu of Paris in the years between the wars.

Milhaud’s Album of Madame Bovary is a set of piano pieces subsequently taken by the composer from the music he wrote for a cinematic treatment of Gustave Flaubert’s immortal novel, in 1933. In a tradition made famous by the composer’s widow, this will be a performance in which excerpts from the novel itself, in English, will be recited in between the various movements of the music. It should be noted that Milhaud’s intention was to give only the broadest outline of the plot of Flaubert’s original, and rather to give a series of brief impressions from this realistic tragedy of Emma Bovary, and her failed struggle to escape from the bourgeois conventions of 19th-century France. While a truly first-rate film based on Madame Bovary has yet to be realized—as with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, such a task may be impossible—this fleeting series of vignettes for piano and a narrator may be the purest alternative.

Finally, in homage to this year’s theme of Latin Voices at the Maverick Concerts, in which we celebrate some of the great jazz and classical artists of the Latin American world, Adam appropriately ends tonight’s performance with the amazing 1952 Piano Sonata No.1 of Alberto Ginastera—in many ways, the Argentine equivalent of our own Aaron Copland; the music, without question, is of similar accomplishment, and as with Copland, Ginastera veered between European/modernist and populist, folk-based traditions throughout a long and internationally successful career.

The Sonata was premiered in, of all places, Pittsburgh; not surprising, really, to those of us who have long admired the cultural pedigree of that city, as Ginastera was commissioned by the Carnegie Institute and the Pennsylvania College for Women to write a piano sonata for the Pittsburgh International Contemporary Music Festival. The performance was given by pianist Johana Harris, wife of American composer Roy Harris, and the work was dedicated to both Harrises. Ginastera’s intention for the piece was to capture the spirit of Argentine folk music without relying on explicit quotations from existing folk songs.

The first movement poses two contrasting themes that grow and evolve as the music progresses. The second movement is energetic and scherzo-like; the third is lyrical, with an initial theme that returns after a contrasting middle section. The final movement is a driving toccata filled with busy rhythms, all building to an explosive conclusion. Ginastera’s great achievement in the Sonata is to combine the European modern style with that of the bravura manner of late-Romantic, virtuoso pianism, and with a genuine inclusion of the spirit of the South American folk tradition.
– Alexander Platt

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