Chamber Music Hawaii opens season
September 7, 2010 by Star-Advertiser Staff
Filed under Music
By Steven Mark
smark@staradvertiser.com
UH piano professor Jonathan Korth will perform a trio for piano, horn and
clarinet by Carl Reinecke, a little-known but highly influential composer of
the mid to late 19th century. He plays and discusses a few excerpts from
this unusual work. Chamber Music Hawaii opens its season with a performance
of this work and a Beethoven string trio Sunday at the Doris Duke Theatre,
with a repeat performance Monday at Paliku Theatre.
Do It: ‘Smooth Jazz’ series features pianist Benoit
July 16, 2010 by Star-Advertiser Staff
Filed under Do It
Star-Advertiser Staff
tgif@staradvertiser.com
The “Smooth Jazz Nights” concert series continues this weekend with pianist David Ben oit, one of the steadiest keyboard players around, with more than three decades of recording, including several Grammy award nominations.
His latest album, released this year, is “Earthglow,” another accessible effort that adeptly mixes genres. On the closing track, “Freedom at Midnight (The Schroe der Variations),” Ben oit continues to honor Vince Gua ral di’s memory, combining a previous hit with his “Peanuts” muse with Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
Hawaii-born saxophonist and co-promoter Michael Paulo is also on the bill.
» Where: Royal Hawaiian Theatre, Royal Hawaiian Center
» When: 8 p.m. tomorrow
» Cost: $45, $85 and $125
» Info: 550-8457 or www.smoothjazznights.com
NYC to plunk down pianos at ferry, Brooklyn Bridge
June 17, 2010 by Star-Advertiser Staff
Filed under Associated Press, Featured, Music
Associated Press
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, right, stands by as Jaela Cheeks-Lomax, 16, left, Samantha Bogle, 16, foreground second from right, and Alexander Long, 18, at the piano, perform during a press conference announcing the public art project “Play Me, I’m Yours”, Thursday at Gantry Plaza State Park in the Queens borough of New York. The two-week project, which will feature 60 public pianos in locations throughout the five boroughs, is scheduled to kick off June 21 at the one-day citywide Make Music New York festival.
By Sara Kugler Frazier
Associated Press
NEW YORK » Consider them keys to the city: Anyone who gets a sudden itch to tickle the ivories will be able to play free public pianos in 50 places throughout New York City, from the Coney Island boardwalk to the Metropolitan Museum.
An art installation touring the world is making its first U.S. stop beginning Monday. For two weeks, players can play tunes on pianos all over New York City, at famous landmarks like the Lincoln Center, the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Staten Island ferry terminal and Central Park’s bandshell.
The concept, devised by British artist Luke Jerram, has put more than 130 pianos in parks, squares and bus stations since 2008 in cities including London, Sydney and Sao Paulo. And now it’s New York City’s turn to play, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Thursday. Read more
Talking story with Sara Buechner
June 11, 2010 by Star-Advertiser Staff
Filed under Music
By Steven Mark
smark@staradvertiser.com
Award-winning pianist Sara Buechner will perform the opening recital of the Aloha International Piano Festival at the Hawaii Convention Center this Saturday.
Her program covers an astonishing breadth of the piano repertoire, from Mozart to modern, from the Western Europe to the West Coast, from the Far East to the East Coast. She also will be presenting a workshop Friday on composers whose works have been preserved on piano rolls, and will be performing on June 19 at the Atherton Performing Arts Studio.
She comments about her upcoming appearances:
When Lisa Nakamichi invited me to play the opening recital of this year’s Aloha International Piano Festival, I was of course honored, but also felt a certain responsibility to make my recital a kind of annunciatory event, one that exemplifies an all-embracing pianistic experience. Maybe a simpler way to put that is with the old adage, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
In addition to the old (Mozart) and borrowed (transcriptions of Bach) and blue (Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue), I felt the ‘new’ was particularly important. Classical music is often seen as something from older centuries, suitable only for aging audiences — and that just couldn’t be further from the truth. For me, the music I live with, practice and play and teach every day of my life, is vibrant and vital, and gives life its very meaning and richness of experience.
It’s an important responsibility of us classical performers to embrace new music, and to encourage new composers who have important things to say. So this program has more new music than I usually include on my programs. I also wanted to play a variety of music that reflects on my own unique life experience, which has embraced many years of living in New York, the west coast, Japan, and increasing amounts of time in Hawaii as well.
From Japan I am offering music of two pretty unknown composers. The first, Kouji Taku, was a pianist and composer who studied in Paris in the 1920s, returned to Japan where he became head of the Tokyo Geddai School of Music, and then quit that job on his 60th birthday because he wanted to spend his days playing jazz in Tokyo piano bars….That insoucient spirit wholly fills his delightful Variations on a Theme of Poulenc. The theme that Taku uses is one of the best-known to all piano students (the first of Poulenc’s Mouvements Perpetuels) so I think the teachers and pupils in the audience will have a lot of fun hearing how that theme is treated — with blues, bossa nova, samba rhythms, even cha cha cha. It’s a little like Maurice Chevalier meeting Elvis Presley.
Yukiko Nishimura, who briefly studied piano with me in New York some years ago, is also a great jazz aficianado, and has mostly written very successful scores for percussion and brass ensembles. But I love how she writes for piano, and so I commissioned her to write a set of 10 Etudes (French for “studies,” or pieces of a difficult technical nature) for me. … I’ll be premiering the first three on my recital. I’m particularly proud to offer a “first hearing” to my (Hawaii) audience. It’s like unwrapping a Christmas present, very special indeed. The pieces are very lovely, touching and highly imaginative. There’s a nice surprise in the third piece which I can’t give away here.
I also wanted to bring a little of Vancouver with me to Honolulu, in the form of three pieces I commissioned from three composers over the last seven years, when I moved from the Bronx to Vancouver. This is the first time I’ve played these three pieces as a set, so I’m calling the whole of it “A Vancouver Triptych.”
The first piece, by my (University of British Columbia) colleague Stephen Chatman, is called “Mountain Spirit,” is a powerful evocation in musical terms of the imposing mountains of the Canadian Rockies, which I can see every day from my apartment window. Steve is a great lover of nature, as well as the mountain paintings of Canadian artist Lawren Harris. So I asked him specifically to try to codify the sweeping feeling of those mountains in this brief work.
The second Vancouver piece is a short Elegy by Dorothy Chang, a Chinese-American composer also on the faculty of the University of British Columbia. This is a profoundly sad meditation written at my request to honor the memory of a teenaged piano student I had who died tragically young.
The last Vancouver piece is … by one of my own students, a brilliant young composer, just 21 years old, named Jared Miller. He’s just been accepted into Juilliard for his graduate work, but many Canadians are already buzzing about his talent, and his music has already been played by major Canadian orchestras.
This virtuosic tour de force of Jared’s is called “Instincts.” It calls for tremendous agility and energy, and I was honored that he wrote such a difficult piece for me, clearly figuring the Old Prof could knock it off. Well, it certainly is one of the hardest and most visually exciting things I’ve ever performed, and I think the audience is going to love it!
In regard to the workshop on piano rolls and “crossover music” of the 1920s: There is a vast amount of American keyboard music from the period 1920 – 1940 that was clearly conceived as non-classical. It would include the improvised foxtrots of George Gershwin, the novelty rags of Zez Confrey, but also a large amount of pieces both notated and non, by people whose names are obscure to us now: Pauline Alpert, Dana Suesse, Louis Alter, Raie da Costa. … A lot of these people who went into popular music by way of recordings, radio and player piano rolls, were classically trained. It’s one reason they handled structure and proportion in their music so convincingly.
In my workshop I’ll talk a bit about these composers, discuss and play some of the music they wrote, and help put it into some historic perspective so that some of the teachers and students who attend might be interested to get involved in it, too. My (Atherton) recital (includes) music in this vein, by Gershwin, Suesse, Confrey and Alpert.
BELOW IS the complete schedule of public events for the Aloha International Piano Festival and Competition.
Unless noted, recitals are $20 general admission and $5 for students; masterclasses and the workshop are $15 and $5.
Saturday, June 12
Solo Piano Competition – free admission
9 a.m.–5 p.m., Liliu Theater, Hawaii Convention Center
Opening Concert: Sara Davis Buechner Recital
7:30 p.m., Liliu Theater, Hawaii Convention Center
Sunday, June 13
Young Pianists Recital – free admission
2 p.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A
Monday, June 14
Masterclass by Norman Krieger
10 a.m., Hawaii Convention Center , Room 317A
Wednesday, June 16
Masterclass by Sean Botkin
10 a.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A
Norman Krieger Recital: “Beethoven Favorites”
7:30 p.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A
Friday, June 18
Workshop by Sara Davis Buechner
10 a.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A
Saturday, June 19
Concerto Competition-free admission
9 a.m.-12p.m., Hawaii Convention Center
10 a.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A
Festival Finale Recital with Chamber Music
7:30 p.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Liliu Theater
Pianist Sean Botkin, violinist Ignace Jang and cellist Mark Votapek
———
Videos of Sara Buechner in performance can be viewed at: http://www.sarabuechner.com/video.html
Inside HILife: Jon Nakamatsu
April 23, 2010 by Star-Advertiser Staff
Filed under Featured
Life in balance
‘A CONCERT IN THE KOOLAUS’ WITH JON NAKAMATSU
A benefit for the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii
» Where: Koolau Golf Club, 45-550 Kionaole Road
» When: 6 p.m. April 24
» Cost: $50 general admission, $40 for JCCH members, $25 for those under 19 years old, $15 for JCCH members under 19 years old
» Call: 945-7633
» On the Net: www.jonnakamatsu.com
By Gary C.W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.com
If you were a regular patron of the late, lamented Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, you probably remember Jon Nakamatsu.
The San Jose, Calif.-born pianist was here last in 2006, working with then-guest maestro Andreas Delfs, who became the orchestra’s principal conductor the following year.
Nakamatsu returns to help the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii with a benefit concert tomorrow on the Windward side.
Nakamatsu occasionally plays as part of a duo with clarinetist Jon Manasse. Both serve as artistic directors of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, now in its 30th season, so he knows of the administrative and financial challenges of keeping a classical music organization viable.
“What we commonly see now, both in touring and working for a nonprofit like the festival, are groups like the Honolulu Symphony taking huge hits financially and, unfortunately, not being able to recover,” Nakamatsu said from his Northern California home.
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Inside HILife: Xiayin Wang
Local ties ease pianists isle debut
 Courtesy Sarah Shatz IN CONCERTXiayin Wang Where: Orvis Auditorium, University of Hawaii at Manoa |
In her first visit to the islands, classical pianist Xiayin Wang should get a special feel for Hawaii, thanks to her local-born manager.
With an interisland tour starting Monday on Oahu, TanNa Young, Wangs manager as well as managing director of Palomino Entertainment Group, will probably include Wang in a family visit.
My mom and brother live in Makakilo, and to answer the obvious question, I went to Campbell High School, and I also got my degree in theater from UH (University of Hawaii), said Young by phone last week from her New York office.
Wang, who previously worked at the New York City Opera, is Youngs first client and the only classical artist on Palominos roster.
Theres something wonderful about her, Young said about the pianist, a very real sense of genuineness and being open. When she first came to this country, she was very naive because her whole world was music.
Being from Shanghai and to travel to the U.S. to be, first, a student (at the Manhattan School of Music) and now a professional pianist, shes been inspired by all the new experiences shes had here.
I just started to tour over the past two years, Wang said by phone last Friday, and TanNa helps me a lot with the last-minute things that come up. I do about 50 dates a year, plus master classes.
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