Tickets $18 for general audiences, $14 for students, children over age 12, IA Course participants & seniors 60+.  Children age 12 and under: free.  Tickets available by calling the Sondheim Center box office at 641-472-2787.  www.sondheimcenter.com

Gold Medalist of the 2008 New Orleans International Piano Competition, SPENCER MYER is garnering stellar audience and critical acclaim from around the globe, rapidly establishing himself as one of the most outstanding pianists of his generation.

Following a summer that included a return to the Bard Music Festival and debuts at the Colorado Music Festival and the Gina Bachauer International Piano Festival, Spencer Myer’s current season is highlighted by performances with the Cleveland and Louisiana philharmonic orchestras and the Baton Rouge, Glacier (MT), Richmond (IN) and San Juan symphony orchestras, as well as solo and collaborative recitals throughout the United States, highlighted by a performance with the Manhattan String Quartet at New York City’s historic Park Avenue Christian Church..

Spencer Myer’s orchestral, recital and chamber music performances have been heard throughout North America, Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia. He has been soloist with The Cleveland Orchestra, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bozeman, Indianapolis, Knoxville, New Haven, Phoenix, Richmond (IN), Santa Fe, Southeast Iowa, Tucson and Wyoming symphony orchestras, Dayton and Louisiana philharmonic orchestras and Beijing’s China National Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with, among others, conductors Nicholas Cleobury, Neal Gittleman, Jacques Lacombe, Jahja Ling, Maurice Peress, Matthew Savery, Klauspeter Seibel, Arjan Tien and Victor Yampolsky. In May 2005, his recital/orchestral tour of South Africa included a performance of the five piano concerti of Beethoven with the Chamber Orchestra of South Africa. Mr. Myer made his debut at the famed festival of the Blossom Music Center during the summer of 2007.

Spencer Myer’s recital appearances have been presented in New York City’s Weill Recital Hall, 92nd Street Y and Steinway Hall, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Chicago, Cincinnati, Fort Worth, Knoxville, Logan and China, while many of his performances have been broadcast on WQXR (New York City), WHYY (Philadelphia), WCLV (Cleveland) and WFMT (Chicago). An avid chamber musician, he has collaborated on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music Series and at the Bard, Cape Cod Chamber and Meadowlark music festivals and performed with the Blair,

Miami and Pacifica string quartets. In January 2007, Mr. Myer performed Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at the Inaugural Festivities of Ohio’s Governor Ted Strickland and Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher.

In 2004, Spencer Myer captured First Prize in the 10th UNISA International Piano Competition in Pretoria, South Africa, as well as special prizes for the best performances of Bach, the commissioned work, the semifinal round recital and both concerto prizes in the final round. He is also a laureate in the 2007 William Kapell, 2005 Cleveland, 2005 Busoni (where he was also awarded the Audience Prize), 2004 Montréal and 2003 New Orleans International Piano Competitions. Winner of the 2006 Christel DeHaan Classical Fellowship from the American Pianists Association, Mr. Myer also received both of the competition’s special prizes in Chamber Music and Lieder Accompanying. He is also the winner of the 2000 Marilyn Horne Foundation Competition, and subsequently enjoys a growing reputation as a vocal collaborator. Mr. Myer was a member of Astral Artistic Services’ performance roster from 2003-2009, a result of his having won that organization’s 2003 national auditions.

An enthusiastic supporter of the education of young musicians, Spencer Myer has been a frequent guest artist at workshops for students and teachers, including Indiana’s Goshen College Piano Workshop and the Texas Conservatory for Young Artists in Dallas, and has served on the faculty of the Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music. He is also an advocate of contemporary music and inter-arts collaboration, and has worked with the Chicago- and New York-based ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Indianapolis’ Dance Kaleidoscope, Ohio Dance Theatre and New York City’s New Triad for Collaborative Arts and The Juilliard School’s “Composers and Choreographers” series.

Spencer Myer is a graduate of The Juilliard School, where he studied with Julian Martin. Other teachers include Peter Takács, Joseph Schwartz and Christina Dahl. He spent two summers at the Music Academy of the West, studying with Jerome Lowenthal and, later, Vocal Accompanying with Warren Jones and Marilyn Horne. During the course of his undergraduate studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he was the recipient of numerous awards from that institution, while, in 2000, he was named a recipient of a four-year Jacob K. Javits Memorial Fellowship from the United States Department of Education. His Doctor of Musical Arts degree was conferred by Stony Brook University in 2005.

Spencer Myer can be heard on the Dimension Records label, performing music of the late Cleveland composer Frederick Koch and on a composer-conducted Naxos CD in performances of three concerti from Huang Ruo’s Chamber Concerto Cycle. His debut CD for harmonia mundi usa - music of Busoni, Copland, Debussy and Kohs - was released in the fall of 2007.

    PROGRAM

Handel - Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427

Janacek -  Sonata  1. X. 1905 ("From the Street")

Beethoven - Sonata Op. 27, #2 ("Moonlight")

    INTERMISSION

Schubert - Four Impromptus, Op. 90

Granados - "El Amor y la Muerte" and

"Los Requiebros", from Goyescas

Spencer Myer plays Scarlatti Sonata K87

http://www.spencermyer.com/

    PROGRAM NOTES

While George Frederic Händel is widely known as one of the great composers of opera and oratorio, with works like Messiah and Giulio Cesare being staples of the repertoire, his keyboard music is largely neglected.  Overshadowed by the prolific keyboard output of his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach, the keyboard works of Händel (intended originally for the harpsichord) are works of charm and sophistication, with attractive ornamented writing and counterpoint that proves equally as challenging as that found in his other, more well-known works.

Written in approximately 1720, Händel’s Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427, is possibly the shortest of his keyboard suites, and breaks from the traditional mold of the Baroque suite comprised typically of dances of the time.  Here is found simply a tempo indication for each movement:  Adagio – Allegro – Adagio – Allegro.  The lyrical opening movement resembles an aria, while the contrasting second movement provides a fast display for the keyboard player.  A recitative-like third movement follows, and the work concludes with a joyous fugue.

The Sonata 1.X.1905, subtitled “From the Street,” was written after Leos Janáček’s participation in a street demonstration of October 1, 1905, during which he witnessed the killing of a Czech laborer (named František Pavlík) by a German soldier in a skirmish over the building of a Czech university in Brno. The sonata is in two movements, “Presentiment” (Premonition) and “Death.” The music well portrays the angry mob, followed by grief at the senseless loss of a life.

He started to compose it immediately after the incident occurred and finished the work in January 1906. The première took place on 27 January 1906 in Brno with Ludmila Tučková at the piano. Janáček also wrote a third movement (a funeral march), which he cut out and burned shortly before the first public performance of the piece in 1906. He was not satisfied with the rest of the composition either, and later tossed the manuscript of the two remaining movements into the river Vltava.  The composition remained lost until 1924 (the year of Janáček’s seventieth birthday), when Tučková announced that she owned a copy. The renewed première took place on 23 November 1924 in Prague under the title 1. X. 1905. Janáček later accompanied the work with inscription: "The white marble of the steps of the Besední dům in Brno. The ordinary labourer František Pavlík falls, stained with blood. He came mere to champion higher learning and has been slain by cruel murderers".

The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2, by Ludwig van Beethoven, is popularly known as the "Moonlight" Sonata. The work was completed in 1801 and rumored to be dedicated to his pupil, 17-year-old Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom Beethoven was, or had been, in love. The name "Moonlight" Sonata derives from an 1832 description of the first movement by music critic Ludwig Rellstab, who compared it to moonlight shining upon Lake Lucerne.

Beethoven included the phrase "Quasi una fantasia" (Almost a fantasy) in the title partly because the sonata does not follow the traditional sonata pattern where the first movement is in regular sonata form, and where the three/four movements are arranged in a fast-slow-fast sequence. Instead, the Moonlight Sonata possesses an end-weighted trajectory, in which the climax is held off until the third movement. To be sure, the deviation from traditional sonata form is intentional. In his analysis of the Moonlight Sonata, German critic Paul Bekker states, “The opening sonata-allegro movement gave works a definite character from the beginning…which succeeding movements could supplement but not change. Beethoven rebelled against this determinative quality in the first movement. He wanted a prelude, an introduction, not a proposition.” By placing the most dramatic form (sonata form) at the end of the piece, Beethoven could magnify the drama inherent in the form.

Franz Schubert’s Four Impromptus, Op. 90, were composed in 1827, just a year before the composer’s death.  While Schubert’s gift of melody permeates his entire output, there is a special quality to his largest and most revered output, his over 600 lieder.  These Impromptus each have a much closer resemblance to a lied than his piano sonatas, which are all much more grand in scope. 

The first and longest Impromptu, in C Minor, has a foreboding quality that is constantly juxtaposed by almost reverent material in the parallel key of C Major.  The second, in E-flat Major, is the least vocal of the Impromptus and provides more of a chance of display for the pianist, with light and cascading scales.  The third, in G-flat Major, most closely resembles a lied, with the seamless melody in the top voice accompanying by a flowing, almost water-like figure in the lower voices.  Finally, in the final Impromptu in A-flat Major, we find the florid writing of the second Impromptu contrasting with a very lyrical middle section in which the juxtaposition of major and minor reflects back to the first Impromptu, thus rounding out the set of individual pieces and giving it the flavor of a true large, multi-movement work.

Goyescas – subtitled Los majos enamorados (The Majos in Love) – the piano suite written in 1911 by Spanish composer Enrique Granados and premiered by the composer himself at the piano in 1911 (movements 1 to 3) and 1914 (movements 4 to 6).  It is usually considered his crowning creation and was inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya, although the piano pieces have not been authoritatively associated with any particular paintings.  Granados later made the suite the basis for an opera, the plot of which followed the relationship of two young lovers, Fernando and Rosario, from the beginnings of their courtship through to Fernando’s death.

The piano writing of Goyescas is highly ornamented and extremely difficult to master, requiring both subtle digital manipulations and great power. Some of them have a strong improvisational feel, the clearest example of this being the fifth piece, El Amor y La Muerte (Love and Death).  The other movement chosen for tonight’s performance is the first of the suite, Los Requiebros (Flirtations), in which we are taken back to their initial courtship in a much more exuberant atmosphere than that of the tragic and tender El Amor y La Muerte.

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