September will be a somewhat different month for the performances being offered in the Old First Concerts (O1C) series. O1C will serve as the host venue for a new concert series supported by the Ross McKee Foundation. The title of the series will be Piano Current, and the intention is that the programs will be guided by the diversity of contemporary perspectives. The plan is to present three concerts over the course of the month, each with its own approach to contemporary repertoire.
As of this writing, all three of these performances will be live-streamed. However, the concerts themselves will continue to be “hybrid,” allowing seating in Old First Presbyterian Church limited to 100 tickets, all being sold for $25 (no reduced rate for seniors or students). As of this writing O1C has created event pages for only two of the three concerts. This site will be updated when the event page has been created for the remaining concert, and notification of that update will be provided through the Facebook shadow site. All performances will begin at 8 p.m., and hyperlinks will be attached to the date and time of the performances for which event pages have been created as follows:
Saturday, September 11: This will be a decidedly unique approach to contemporary thinking about concert programming. Last year was the centenary of the birth of science fiction author Ray Bradbury, and this year marks the 70th anniversary of the eighteen stories that Bradbury collected under the title The Illustrated Man. Pianist and composer Nicole Brancato will mark this occasion with a program entitled The Illustrated Pianist. She and six other composing pianists will create and perform works inspired by Bradbury’s stories. The other contributors will be Nicholas Pavkovic, Jed Distler, Monica Chew, Dee Spencer, Tin Yi Chelsea Wong, and Keisuke Nakagoshi. The performances will be supplemented with a video installation by Cory Todd. [updated entirely: 8/5, 3:30 p.m.:
Friday, September 17: Pianists Sarah Cahill and Regina Myers will curate a program entitled Current: Cross Rhythms. Performing as a duo, they will share the program with pianists Gloria Cheng, Monica Chew, Jerry Kuderna, and Allegra Chapman. Specific selections have not yet all been finalized. However, the program will take in a diverse collection of composers: Fred Onovwerosuoke, Eleanor Alberga, Terry Riley, Adolphus Hailstork, Grażyna Bacewicz, James Newton, R. Nathaniel Dett, Anthony Cheung, and Wang Lu.] [added 8/26, 1 p.m.:
Sunday, September 19, 4 p.m.: Another concert in this series, taking place at a different time, has just been added to the Piano Current series. Violinist Alisa Rose will present the world premiere of her composition “Quartet with Solo Violin: Embracing Roots.” She will be joined by the Americana String Quartet, whose members are violinists Matthew Szemela and Nigel Armstrong, violist Alexandra Simpson, and cellist Matt Park. The program will also include the Fog Holler bluegrass trio, whose members are Casey Holmberg on banjo, Tommy Schulz on guitar, and Noa Laniakea on bass.]
Saturday, September 25: Pianist Stephen Prutsman will present a program entitled Prog to Bach and Bach Again. In spite of my semantic association of “Prog” with the LISP programming language, Prutsman intended the term as an abbreviation of “Progressive Rock.” Selections from that genre first performed by Gentle Giant, Yes, and Genesis will be interleaved with two keyboard compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, the BWV 971 “Italian” concerto and BWV 870, the first coupling of a prelude and fugue in C major in the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
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