Stravinsky The Rite of Spring for Piano, Four Hands
Bruce Adolphe, CMS Resident Lecturer and Director of Family Programs, explores Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring for Piano, Four Hands.
Excerpts performed by Juho Pohjonen, Michael Stephen Brown, piano.
Recorded live in the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio on February 16, 2022.
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Bruce Adolphe
Juho Pohjonen
Michael Stephen Brown
Resident lecturer and director of family concerts for CMS since 1992, Bruce Adolphe is a composer of international renown, much of whose output addresses science, history, and the struggle for human rights.
His works are frequently performed by major artists, including Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Fabio Luisi, Joshua Bell, Daniel Hope, Angel Blue, the Brentano String Quartet, the Washington National Opera, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Human Rights Orchestra of Europe, and over 60 orchestras worldwide.
Among his most performed works are the violin concerto I Will Not Remain Silent, the violin/piano duo Einstein’s Light, and Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto. Also an author and innovative educator, Bruce Adolphe has spent decades helping people to hear and enjoy music in extraordinary ways. He is the author of several books, including The Mind’s Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination for Performers, Listeners and Composers (3rd ed., 2021) and the chapter on composing in Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal (2019).
Widely known for his weekly Piano Puzzler segment on American Public Media’s Performance Today, which has been broadcast since 2002, Mr. Adolphe is also the artistic director of the Off the Hook Arts Festival in Colorado, for which he brings scientists, visual artists, filmmakers, writers, and musicians together.
He has been a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar, visiting lecturer in the residential colleges at Yale, composer-in-residence and visiting scholar at the Brain and Creativity Institute in Los Angeles, distinguished composer-in-residence at the Mannes College of Music, and on faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Juilliard School.
Lauded for his “impeccable technique” (Washington Post) and “elegant musicianship” (New York Times), pianist Juho Pohjonen is in demand internationally as an orchestral soloist, recitalist, and chamber performer. An ardent exponent of Scandinavian music, Pohjonen’s growing discography offers a showcase of music by Finnish compatriots such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kaija Saariaho, and Jean Sibelius.Recent engagements include the German Radio Philharmonic; Taiwan, BBC, and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras; Cleveland and Minnesota Orchestras; the Symphonies of San Francisco, Atlanta, New Jersey, and Colorado; and the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Danish National Symphony, Finnish Radio Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra of London, and Mostly Mozart Festival. He has also collaborated with today’s foremost conductors, including Marin Alsop, Lionel Bringuier, Marek Janowski, Fabien Gabel, Kirill Karabits, Osmo Vänskä, Pietari Inkinen, Stefan Asbury, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, Markus Stenz, and Pinchas Zukerman. He has performed in recital at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, the Steinway Society in San Jose, Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, and in San Francisco, La Jolla, Philadelphia, Detroit, Savannah, and Vancouver. He made his London debut at Wigmore Hall and has played recitals throughout Europe in Antwerp, Hamburg, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, and Warsaw.An alum of CMS’s Bowers Program, he enjoys an ongoing association with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 2019, Pohjonen launched MyPianist, an AI-based app that provides interactive piano accompaniment.
Michael Stephen Brown has been described as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers” (New York Times). Winner of a 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, he is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and an alum of CMS’s Bowers Program. He makes regular appearances with orchestras such as the National Philharmonic and the Seattle, Phoenix, North Carolina, and Albany symphonies, and recently has made European recital debuts at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn and the Chopin Museum in Mallorca. He has received commissions from many organizations and some of today’s leading artists, and recently toured his own Piano Concerto around the US and Poland with several orchestras. He performs regularly with his longtime duo partner, cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and has appeared at festivals worldwide. A prolific recording artist, he has three albums in the works, including Mendelssohn+, featuring world premieres of music by one of Mendelssohn’s muses, Delphine von Schauroth. He was the composer- and artist-in-residence at the New Haven Symphony, and winner of the Concert Artists Guild and Copland House Awards. He holds degrees in piano and composition from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Jerome Lowenthal, Robert McDonald, and Samuel Adler. Additional mentors include András Schiff and Richard Goode. An Artist Ambassador for Creatives Care, Brown lives in New York City with his two 19th-century Steinway D pianos, Octavia and Daria.