A Complete Artist:
At & Beyond the Piano

I really enjoy & admire your performances. You’ve had much success at the instrument, including in your early years! Tell us about the nature of your formative training & experiences, leading up to your studies at the Curtis Institute.

You’re so extremely kind to state that, although I should hasten to add that I was not really a true prodigy.  However, I was fortunate enough to have two wonderful Suzuki instructors at a young age, and then through a lucky circumstance, was able to study with a fantastic professor at the University of Kansas, Richard Angeletti.  It was under his tutelage that I actually first started to read music, as previously I had learned all my pieces by ear (which sounds a bit unusual to me now, considering one of those pieces was the Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu).  Richard was also in charge of the piano masterclass program, and through this, I was able to play (Mozart K. 330) for my musical hero, Leon Fleisher as a kid (he even signed my LP!), along with Menachem Pressler, and Claude Frank.  It was Mr. Frank who encouraged me to audition at Curtis, despite my misgivings that I wouldn’t have a chance at all to get accepted. 
 

In 2010, you worked closely with the American Ballet Theatre, performing eight sold-out all-Chopin performances at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. How did you experience Chopin integrating with dance? What makes Chopin particularly “dance-like”?
 

Well these performances (and the following year’s season) were for ABT’s premiere of “Lady of the Camellias”, a wonderful ballet (based on the Dumas novel), created all the way back in 1978 by John Neumeier of the Stuttgart Ballet.  Chopin and dance seem to be an ideal marriage, and inspired Balanchine and Robbins, just to name two luminaries in the field of choreography.  For this particular ballet, the music included the 2nd concerto (complete), 1st ballade, Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise, some waltzes, preludes, and portions of the 3rd sonata—all woven into the fabric of the ballet wonderfully.  Chopin’s graceful melodic lines and exquisite counterpoint seem to lend themselves for visualizing movement to complement the sounds. As Busoni once quoted, “Music is the art of sounds in the movement of time”, so dance is a natural partner.

 

Let’s discuss your collaboration(s) with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Please elaborate on the nature of your work together, and tell us how it influenced your solo performances, in other words, your solitary experiences on stage.
 

The collaborations happened through sheer dumb luck!  I had a friend, a cellist, who was a musician in the White Oak Dance Project who contacted me about filling in for a pianist needed to perform for a leg of their European tour (this was in the summer of 1999).  Me, being the complete ignoramus, had to ask, “Is this a famous group, or anything?”  There was a pause at the other end of the line, and my friend simply responded, “Uh, you do know that this is Baryshnikov’s group, right?”

And so I went from having virtually no experience working with dancers to accompanying not only THE dancer, but THE icon (mostly to Mark Morris’s wonderful choreography).  Thankfully the concerts went well, and we hit it off musically and personally.  Several years later, in the midst of raising funds to bring his Arts Center to fruition (https://bacnyc.org/) he approached me about collaborating on a program featuring pieces specifically choreographed for him, with just piano accompaniment, along with solo piano pieces played during his costume changes.  I traded off playing different legs of the tour with the excellent pianist Pedja Muzijevic, which proceeded for the next 2-3 years.  It was an extraordinary opportunity, and I cherished not only the chemistry we shared on stage together, but the dinners and talks afterwards.  Some of the pieces that we performed, for example the Berg Sonata Op.1 I can’t hear now withOUT seeing the movement that go along with it, such a visceral experience remains burned in my brain.

 

I can imagine working with such an incredible icon influences not only your performances but your choice of repertoire. What do you feel you’ve absorbed of Russian culture, or more widely & accurately, Soviet culture? You’ve performed a lot of contemporary music. I assume you’re not only interested in discovering present composers but past ones, too. Do you have any Soviet/Russian “discoveries”? How does their work “fit” with the composers we all know, for example, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Scriabin?

Well, interestingly enough, I encountered Scriabin’s music in particular at a time when frankly I was a bit bored with the standard repertoire (although in my limited view at that time, Scriabin wasn’t standard rep, haha).  And through that gateway drug, I discovered a myriad of other absolutely fantastic Soviet/Russian composers such as Liapunov, Liadov, Blumenfeld, Catoire, and Bortkiewicz, which I absolutely still adore, and am still on the prowl looking for other unknown composers in this vein.  Misha was a bit amused at my absolute obsession in this time with Russian music, but he regaled with lots of fascinating stories regarding these legendary Russian artists such as Horowitz, Gilels, Rostropovich, etc.  I often regret being too young and not having had the opportunity to hear some of these performers in person—I’m certain even the best recordings don’t begin to do them justice. 

 

And, speaking of contemporary music, you’ve given numerous & highly acclaimed world premieres. What led to your interest in this repertoire?

 

I think we as artists and human beings have an intrinsic desire to connect with culture and music of our time.  At least this yearning has often spurred on my own interest in contemporary art.  And on a practical level, we can’t just call or email Beethoven to ask him what he thought about a particular marking or passage, but we can connect and get in the mind of a living composer to possibly ascertain how these artists felt about their creative acts.  And several of these pieces that I’ve been fortunate enough to premiere were written for me, Hector’s preludes came about from our mutual love of Scriabin!