Guest Artist: Stephen Drury, Pianist

Wednesday November 06, 2024 7:30 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Stephen Drury, piano

CHARLES IVES – COMPLETE PIANO SONATAS

Charles Ives, the first truly great, idiosyncratically American composer in the classical tradition, was born 150 years ago; this program is a celebration of his sesquicentennial. He wrote his second piano sonata, subtitled “Concord, Mass. 1840 - 1860” inspired by the Transcendentalist movement that flourished and was centered around Concord during those decades. The individual movements are “Emerson” (a kind of metaphysical overture), “Hawthorne” (inspired by that writer’s “wilder, fantastical adventures”), “The Alcotts” (not only Louisa May but also the family patriarch Bronson Alcott), and “Thoreau”. Ives’ lesser known First Sonata is filled with the composer’s memories of growing up in late 19th-century New England, and the adventures of a young boy leaving home. The delightful “Three Page Sonata” packs marches, ragtime, waltzes and twelve-tone rows into a loving parody of classical sonata form.

About Stephen Drury:

Drury has performed throughout the world with a repertoire that stretches from Bach to Liszt to the music of today. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. A champion of contemporary music, he has taken the sound of dissonance into remote corners of Pakistan, Greenland, and Montana.

Drury’s performances of music written in the last hundred years, ranging from the piano sonatas of Charles Ives to works by György Ligeti, Frederic Rzewski, and John Cage, have received the highest critical acclaim. Drury has worked closely with many of the leading composers of our time, including Cage, Ligeti, Rzewski, Steve Reich, Olivier Messiaen, John Zorn, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, Christian Wolff, Jonathan Harvey, Michael Finnissy, Lee Hyla, and John Luther Adams. He has commissioned new works for solo piano from Cage, Zorn, Adams, Terry Riley, and Chinary Ung, with funding provided by Meet The Composer, and has recorded the music of Cage, Ives, Zorn, Adams, Rzewski, Elliott Carter, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Colin McPhee, as well as works of Liszt and Beethoven. He has performed with John Zorn in Paris, Vienna, London, Brussels, and New York, and has conducted Zorn’s music in Bologna, Boston, Chicago, as well as the UK and Costa Rica. In 1995, he gave the first performance of Zorn’s concerto for piano and orchestra Aporias with Dennis Russell Davies and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Drury has appeared at the MusikTriennale Koln in Germany, the Subtropics Festival in Miami, and the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, as well as at Roulette, the Knitting Factory, Tonic, and the Stone in New York. At Spoleto Festival USA, the Angelica Festival in Bologna, and Oberlin Conservatory, he has performed as both conductor and pianist.