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Timothy Olsen and guest artist Nicole Keller will present a program of organ music Friday, April 1, at 8 p.m. in Sage Chapel. On the program will be works by Mozart, Widor, Howells, Paschali and Leighton.
An active recitalist in the United States, guest artist Keller has given recent performances that include the 2003 American Guild of Organists Region V Convention, where she was heralded by the Chicago Crusader as " an aggressive player with outstanding technique and fine musical sensibilities." A participant in several competitions, including the 2004 Grand Prix de Chartres, Keller is organist and director of music at First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lorain, Ohio, and is on the faculty of Cleveland State University and Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music.
Olsen currently is serving as Cornell's acting university organist, as well as instructor of organ, harpsichord and theory at Ithaca College. He holds a bachelor of music degree from Concordia College and is currently finishing his doctoral studies as a student of David Higgs at the Eastman School of Music, where he received his master of music in organ performance and literature in 2000 and a master of arts in theory pedagogy in 2005. He was first-prize winner of the 2002 National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance sponsored by the American Guild of Organists and has recorded a CD for the Naxos label, released in 2004.
Featured in the concert will be several solo pieces performed by each organist. Olsen will perform movements one and three from Herbert Howells' Rhapsody, and Keller will play Charles-Marie Widor's Symphonie Gothique and Victimae Paschali's "Cinq Improvisations." The program will be rounded out by several duet pieces: Mozart's Fantasie in F Minor, Rayner Brown's Organ Sonata for two players, and Kenneth Leighton's "Martyrs: Dialogue on a Scottish Psalm-Tune."
Miri Yampolsky, Read Gainsford and Xak Bjerken will present a concert of music written for two pianos and four-hand piano Sunday, April 3, at 3 p.m. in Barnes Hall. On the program will be the world premiere of a new piece by Roberto Sierra, as well as works by Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Mozart and Ravel.
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The two works by Rachmaninoff and Debussy both come from late in the composers' respective careers. Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, to be performed by Yampolsky and Gainsford, was the last piece the composer ever wrote. Full of fantasy and color, the three movements are not formal dance pieces, but mystic evocations, originally titled Noon, Twilight, and Midnight. Debussy's En Blanc et Noir, to be performed by Bjerken and Gainsford, was written in 1915 as World War I was ravaging Europe. Although the composer insisted the music contained no explicit comment on the war, the second movement's dedication to a slain French army officer and the faint bugle calls heard throughout the piece suggest that it was a subject very much on Debussy's mind. Its use of pianistic color and adventurous harmonic language mark En Blanc et Noir as a masterpiece of Debussy's late style.
Mozart composed and premiered his Sonata in D Major, K. 448, in 1781, shortly after he had moved to Vienna. This sonata is one of several pieces the composer wrote for two pianos and is often symphonic in nature, taking full advantage of the added possibilities for sound and complexity that having two pianos brings. It will be performed by Yampolsky and Bjerken.
Rounding out the program will be "La Valse," written by Maurice Ravel and performed by Gainsford and Bjerken, and the world premiere of Cuatros formas de observar un mismo objeto by Sierra, professor of composition at Cornell. Sierra's work will be played by Bjerken and Yampolsky.
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