An Evening with Michael Stephen Brown
Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 7:30 PM
Alice Tully Hall
2 hours, including intermission
Hailed by the New York Times for his “fearless performances,” and "one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers” pianist and composer Michael Stephen Brown devotes his first solo recital program at Lincoln Center to showcasing the complexity and evolution of piano writing and exploring how different composers, writing in different styles, examined and expressed human interaction, love, and connection.
The concert opens with Haydn's Fantasia in C Major, followed by tributes to Haydn by Ravel, Debussy, and Brown himself. Ravel’s masterwork, Miroirs is next; Brown's recording of the work spurred the BBC Music Magazine to ask, "How many pianists realise the luminosity and the quietest dynamics [of Ravel] as well as Brown?" Audiences will be introduced to pianist-composer Delphine Von Schauroth, who wrote Songs without Words for Mendelssohn, who once considered marrying her. Brown also offers his own Breakup Etude for Right Hand Alone, a work he wrote in the midst of a relationship ending during pandemic isolation. Two transcriptions from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night’s Dream bring the program to a close.
Program
Joseph Haydn
(1732–1809)Fantasia in C major for Keyboard, Hob. XVII:4, “Capriccio”
(1789)Claude Debussy
(1862–1918)Hommage à Haydn for Piano
(1909)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn for Piano
(1909)Michael Stephen Brown
Etude-Fantasy on the name of Haydn for Piano
(2020)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Miroirs for Piano
(1904–05)Delphine von Schauroth
(1813–1887)Selections from Songs Without Words for Piano, Op. 18
(1830)Felix Mendelssohn
(1809–1847)Fantasie in F-sharp minor for Piano, Op. 28
(1830)Michael Stephen Brown
Breakup Etude for Right Hand Alone for Piano
(2020)Felix Mendelssohn/Rachmaninoff
Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Piano
(1842, arr. 1933)Felix Mendelssohn/Liszt
Wedding March in C major from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(arr. Brown) (1842)
Michael Stephen Brown
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.