This past fall I tried to allocate a fair amount of my time for covering performances presented under the auspices of the Ross McKee Foundation. This involved catching up with the Piano Talks recitals arranged by Executive Director Nicholas Pavkovic, which I had not covered since March of 2019. It also led to getting to know the Piano Break series, which was arranged to support Bay Area pianists who have lost performance opportunities due to COVID-19.
Both of these series will continue during the New Year. Pre-recorded events will be live-streamed through the Ross McKee Foundation YouTube channel. Each performance will run for about a hour’s duration, after which the audience can meet the artist and ask questions in a Zoom Green Room. In addition, there will be a third series entitled Piano Launch, which will showcase recitals by Ross McKee Young Artists from both 2019 and 2020. Taken collectively, all of these offerings will be presented weekly on Friday evenings at 5 p.m. As was the case in the fall, Web pages for the Piano Break and Piano Talks series provide summaries and links to more specific information; the Piano Launch recitals are listed on the Piano Break Web page, identifying the performers as Ross McKee Young Artists. Here is a week-by-week summary of the Spring Season, which will begin in two weeks and continue through the first week in May:
February 5: Piano Break: This will be a very special tribute concert honoring Robin Sutherland, whose life ended this past December 18. Sutherland was Principal Pianist for the San Francisco Symphony for 45 years. The performers will be Christopher Basso, Britt Day, Elizabeth Dorman, Jeffrey Kahane, Jeffrey LaDeur, Keisuke Nakagoshi, and Marc Shapiro, each playing a short work with a connection to Sutherland. They will also share personal remembrances. Pavkovic will serve as host.
February 12: Piano Launch: 2020 Ross McKee Young Artist Ryan Sheng will perform works by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Liszt.
February 19: Piano Break: Antonio Iturrioz will present a program of transcriptions prepared by two leading virtuoso pianists, Liszt and Leopold Godowsky.
February 26: Piano Talk: Mark Ainley is the author of the Facebook group The Piano Files with Mark Ainley. The title of his talk will be An Introduction to Historical Piano Recordings, and he will advocate the practice of listening to such recordings. In the course of making his case, he will present, as examples, recordings of Dinu Lipatti, Josef Hoffman, Ignaz Friedman, and other major pianists from the beginning of the twentieth century.
March 5: Piano Break: Robert Schwartz will present a program structured around three major nineteenth-century composers, Johannes Brahms, Liszt, and Frédéric Chopin.
March 12: Piano Launch: 2019 Ross McKee Young Artist Solomon Ge will perform works by Robert Schumann, Beethoven, Chopin, Joseph Haydn, and Sergei Prokofiev.
March 19: Piano Break: Christopher Basso will present a program organized around the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and Beethoven.
March 26: Piano Talk: Dorman will lead a conversation with her teacher Gilbert Kalish, reflecting on his 85 years as both a performer and a teacher.
April 2: Piano Break: Joe Warner will present a program entitled 100 Years of Piano. He will review the range of influences in the last century of both jazz and blues. The composers examined will be Bud Powell, Scott Joplin, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, W. C. Handy, John Coltrane, and Stevie Wonder.
April 9: Piano Launch: 2020 Ross McKee Young Artist Zak Mustille will perform works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Charles-Valentin Alkan, and Pavkovic.
April 16: Piano Break: Kate Campbell will showcase compositions by Bay Area composers Leila Adu-Gilmore, Fernanda Aoki Navarro, Matthew Welch, Ryan Brown, and Stanford University graduate David Lang.
April 23: Piano Break: Ken Iisaka will undertake a virtuosic review of compositions in the key of F-sharp major (six sharps); the contributing composers will be Chopin, Nikolai Medtner, and Alexander Scriabin.
April 30: Piano Talk: Christina Dahl will take a social networking approach to music history. The title of her talk will be In the Orbit of the Schumanns. She will examine the extent to which nineteenth-century musical culture developed by virtue of acquaintances, influences, and (probably) rivalries that can be traced back to both Robert and Clara Schumann.
May 7: Piano Break: Jenny Q Chai will take a multimedia approach to performing works by Jarosław Kapuściński, György Ligeti, Milica Pavlović, and Stephen Sondheim supplemented by visualizations of data compiled by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration pertaining to both climate change and pandemics.
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