The University at Albany Department of Music is pleased to present the Piano Roles Festival from March 10-13, 2009 at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus. The festival includes two lectures and two performances and runs for four evenings with events starting at 7pm in the Recital Hall each night.

Kicking off the series on Tuesday, March 10 is a lecture entitled “Reading Musical Recipes” given by James Parakilas. Parakilas is the James L. Moody, Jr. Professor of Performing Arts at Bates College where he is also the chair of the Music Department. He teaches courses in classical music history & performance, opera, music & religion and music theory. His musicological work includes the books Piano Roles (Yale University Press, 2000), Ballads without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Amadeus Press, 1992) and a forthcoming Introduction to Opera. He is active as a pianist in chamber music performances.

On Wednesday, March 11, pianist Frank Glazer will celebrate the 60^th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut by playing the exact same program which includes works by Handel, Brahms, Purcell, Poulenc, Schubert, Copland, Liszt, Chopin and Godfrey Turner. Glazer’s career was shaped by studying piano with Artur Schnabel in Berlin and Arnold Schoenberg. Since performing with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitsky, Glazer has played more than forty concerti with the leading orchestras of the United States, Europe, the Near East and South America including the New York Philharmonic, Chicago and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras, the Residentie Orchestra of the Hague, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the Orchestre Lamoureux. He has concertized in over twenty-four countries; written, narrated and performed on his own television shows for NBC stations; and recorded more than 50 recordings. He has performed thirty world premieres, including Lukas Foss’s “‘Round a Common Center” during the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics.

Glazer is the founding member of the Eastman Quartet, the Cantilena Chamber Players and the New England Piano Quartette as well as co-founder of the Saco River Festival Association and the Portland Chamber Music Society. For fifteen years, he was a member of the Artist Faculty at Eastman School of Music.

For the third event in the festival, Glazer will give a lecture entitled “Critics and Criticism: Perspective for Performer and Public” on Thursday, March 12.

The grand finale of the festival will take place on Friday March 13 when Glazer and UAlbany faculty member Duncan Cumming play great works for two pianos including “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” by JS Bach, Variations on a Theme of Hadyn, Op. 56 by Johannes Brahms and Chopin’s Rondo in C major.

When he was seventeen years old, Cumming participated in a summer chamber music program organized by the Atlanta Virtuosi and it was at this program that he first met Frank Glazer. He studied technique with Glazer during his senior year of high school; then he took two years off from formal education to study privately with him. The following year he enrolled at Bates College so he could continue working with Glazer, and upon graduating from that institution, he began collaborating professionally with him in four hand and two piano repertoire. In 1997 they performed all the solo works of Brahms in a series of concerts commemorating the centenary of the composer’s death. In 2007 he lectured and performed as part of “Focus on Frank Glazer: A Mini-Festival,” which he organized and hosted at UAlbany. His book The Fountain of Youth: The Artistry of Frank Glazer is due out later this spring.

Admission to the Tuesday and Thursday lectures is free. Tickets for the Wednesday and Friday concerts are each $10 for the general public; $8 for seniors and UAlbany faculty-staff and $5 for students. Tickets may be purchased through the Performing Arts Center Box Office. For further information, contact the Box Office at (518) 442-3997 or visit the Performing Arts Center website at www.albany.edu/pac.

Back to Music Department Performances

PAC HOME