Summertime
Inon’s summer season is about to begin- and it’s a doozy! Aspen Festival with conductors Robert Spano and Nicholas Mcgegan , Vail Bravo Festival with Dallas Symphony and Jaap Van Zweden, Blossom Festival with the Cleveland Orchestra and Jahja Ling, Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic and Bramwell Tovey, Chausson Concerto with Janine Jansen at the Berlin Philharmonie, Recitals at the Ravinia, Santa Fe and Texas Piano festivals, and chamber music appearances at Spoleto USA, Seattle, Music@Menlo, La Jolla Summerfest, Aspen and Santa Fe Chamber festivals.
For a detailed schedule, visit http://inonbarnatan.com/web/events.aspx
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Darknesse Visible, Inon Barnatan’s exciting new release, is now available for pre order on iTunes and Amazon
Darknesse Visible, pianist Inon Barnatan’s debut recording for Avie Records, will be released in the U.S. on Tuesday, April 10 and in Europe on Monday, April 23.
This recording brings together colorful works by British and French composers which are inspired by literature and evocatively explore the interconnection of darkness and light.
The works on the CD are: Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit andLa valse, opening and closing the CD respectively; Thomas Adès’s Darknesse Visible, from which the recording takes its name; Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque; and Ronald Stevenson’s Fantasy on Peter Grimes, based on themes from Benjamin Britten’s opera.
Mr. Barnatan, described by the London’s Evening Standard as “a true poet of the keyboard”, explains why he chose the CD title: “When British composer Thomas Adès titled his piano piece Darknesse Visible he was remembering two towering English figures: John Milton, who used the phrase “Darkness Visible” to describe the fires of hell in his epic poem, “Paradise Lost”, as well as John Dowland, on whose song of 1610, In Darknesse Let Me Dwell, Adès based his own piano piece. Adès’s piece highlights the Dowland song not by illuminating it, but rather by emphasizing its darkest qualities. With a simple change of spelling (Darknesse instead of Darkness) Adès alludes to both Milton and Dowland, and thus simultaneously suggests the inspiration and its transformation. The title represents some of the aspects I find most fascinating about the music on this album. All the pieces are inspired by stories or poems; and in all of them the dark and the light are intertwined.”
In his liner notes for the recording (abridged below), Mr. Barnatan outlines the literary origins and inspirations of the other works on the recording.
To further illustrate the themes of the works on this recording, Mr. Barnatan is collaborating with videographer Tristan Cook and artist Zach Smithey on a series of short video vignettes that will be available to view at the time of release in April at www.inonbarnatan.com and on YouTube.
Israeli-born, New York-based Inon Barnatan moved to the United States in 2006 and has rapidly gained international recognition for engaging and communicative performances that pair insightful interpretation with impeccable technique.
In 2009 he was awarded a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, an honor reflecting the strong impression he has made on the American music scene in such a short period of time.
Mr. Barnatan performs internationally with orchestras, in recital, and is an avid and popular chamber musician.
He will perform recitals of the Darknesse Visible repertoire throughout the 2012-13 season, including at the Ravinia Music Festival (August 26) and at the 92nd Street Y in New York City (December 6).
This summer Mr. Barnatan will return to the Berlin Philharmonie performing Chausson’s concerto for piano and violin with Janine Jansen on June 18, and he will make his Hollywood Bowl debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Bramwell Tovey performing Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals on September 6.
Other summer festival performances include the opening concert of the Aspen Music Festival with its new music director Robert Spano, his debut with Dallas Symphony at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and performances at the Spoleto Festival USA, the Seattle Chamber Music Festival, Music@Menlo and La Jolla SummerFest.
For a full concert calendar please visit www.inonbarnatan.com or his Facebook fan page.
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Darknesse Visible – Liner Notes (abridged)
Gaspard de la nuit
Maurice Ravel was absorbed by the works of writers who shared his fascination with the dark and fantastic, such as Edgar Allen Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Baudelaire. Gaspard de la nuit, which roughly translates as Treasurer of the Night, is a collection of poems by the French poet Aloysius Bertrand, and the gothic and haunting quality of the poems found an immediate echo with Ravel, who wrote his own suite of ‘piano poems’ in 1908.
In Gaspard, Ravel creates one of the most remarkable relationships between words and music in the history of instrumental writing, as he enhances the poems and brings their scenes to life more vividly than if they were happening before our eyes.
Suite Bergamasque
The poem Clair de lune by Paul Verlaine, and its dreamy and enchanting masked figures dancing in the moonlight, inspired Debussy to write Suite Bergamasque in 1890.
He enclosed his justly famous rhapsody on the poem with three movements in a style of a Baroque suite – a prelude and two dances, a minuet and a passepied.
The darkness and the moonlight form an idyllic scene, yet Verlaine’s poem speaks of costumed dancing figures who are ‘almost sad’ beneath their fantastic disguises. Accordingly, Debussy brings nostalgia and a tinge of melancholy even to these light-hearted dances – a quality he shares with Schubert, who often smiles through tears.
Fantasy on Peter Grimes
A poem was also the inspiration for Benjamin Britten’s masterful opera, Peter Grimes. George Crabbe’s poem The Borough, adapted to a libretto by Montagu Slater, contains the story of Peter Grimes, an English fisherman who is driven to suicide after two of his apprentices die in mysterious circumstances.
Britten explores the dark side of Man, the frightening certainty with which Grimes’s fellow villagers turn against him and their relentlessness in pursuing him to his end.
In 1971, 26 years after the opera’s triumphant post-war premiere, British composer Ronald Stevenson created a short, compelling fantasy on themes from the opera, and provided grateful pianists with a rare opportunity to play the music of Britten, who wrote surprisingly little for his own instrument.
The imaginative evocation of plucked strings at the end of the piece is particularly powerful.
La valse
In La valse, Ravel created a piece at once charming and malevolent, a waltz that emerges out of the mists and works itself into a delirious frenzy.
Many have suggested a parallel between Ravel’s piece of 1919–20 and a Gothic short story from 1842 by Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death, in which a prince throws parties while his people are dying from the Red Death, before Death pays a visit to the prince himself.
‘We are dancing on the edge of a volcano’, Ravel wrote in his notes to La valse, both paraphrasing a nervous politician in post-revolution France and reflecting the troubled tenor of his own times.
As the waltz spirals towards an ecstatic and maniacal end, the darkness is, plainly, visible.
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New York Trilogy
Pianist Inon Barnatan will give three performances in New York City over the course of a week, playing programs which include solo, duo, and chamber works. Following a series of orchestral engagements across the U.S., including a highly praised appearance with the Houston Symphony in January, Mr. Barnatan will return to his hometown of New York City for performances which range in repertoire from Schubert to MacMillan, demonstrating his artistic versatility.
On Saturday, February 26 at 8 p.m., Mr. Barnatan will give a solo recital as part of the Peoples’ Symphony Concert Series. The program, “Inside Stories,” comprises Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, Britten / Stevenson’s Fantasy on Peter Grimes, Adès’s Darkness Visible, Ravel’s La Valse, and Schubert’s Sonata in A Major; a selection of musically diverse pieces he says share a common thread. “The pieces that comprise this program all have different stories at their core,” said Mr. Barnatan. “Some are poems, like Verlaine’s Clair de Lune at the heart of Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque or the Dowland song explored in Adès’s Darkness Visible. Some are narratives, such as Britten’s Peter Grimes which Stevenson reworked into his fantasy, or the Edgar Allen Poe story that inspired Ravel’s exuberant and sinister waltz. Finally, we’re given a glimpse into Schubert’s tortured inner life, his own personal story, in the second movement of his otherwise majestic and lyrical sonata.”
The following Monday, February 28 at 7:30 p.m., Mr. Barnatan will join violinist Janine Jansen at (Le) Poisson Rouge in the West Village for a recital featuring violin sonatas by French impressionist composers Debussy and Ravel. The repertoire for the concert, which also includes Messiaen’s Theme and Variations, was recently recorded by Ms. Jansen on her latest disc for Decca, Beau Soir. Later this season, Mr. Barnatan and Ms. Jansen will perform together once more in a chamber music program at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
Finally, on Wednesday, March 2 at 7:30 p.m., Mr. Barnatan will take part in Carnegie Hall‘s ‘Making Music: James MacMillan’ concert at Zankel Hall, opening the concert with MacMillan’s Piano Sonata, and performing the U.S. premiere of Mr. MacMillan’s Raising Sparks with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and the specially curated ‘Zankel Band.’
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Houston Symphony Rave Review
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Back to the Future
This weekend pianist Inon Barnatan returns as soloist with the Houston Symphony, the site of his American concerto debut in June 2007 (Read the review of that concert here). His career in the U.S. has unfolded like a row of dominos, including appearances with the San Francisco, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, a fruitful collaboration with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, extensive summer festival engagements from Aspen to Santa Fe, Spoleto and Vail, and concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Library of Congress. In 2009 he received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. And then there’s Europe… with recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and his fall debut as concerto soloist at Berlin’s Philharmonie.
Barnatan is often described as a remarkably complete artist who inhabits the music – much like Meryl Streep in her film roles. Recent reviews cite his plush tone, gossamer touch, “virtuosity and poetry. Conducting [the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields] from the keyboard, Barnatan played with tremendous intelligence and sensitivity.” (The Oklahoman)
San Francisco Classical Voice included last summer’s concert with the Miró Quartet from Music@Menlo in its Top 10 Concerts of 2010. “The balance with Inon Barnatan’s wonderful pianism was impeccable.”
http://www.sfcv.org/article/top-10-concerts-of-2010
For more information, visit InonBarnatan.com, his YouTube channel, or the Opus 3 Artists web site.
Performance in the Berlin Philharmonie
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Inon Barnatan’s Whirlwind Autumn
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| Inon Barnatan’s whirlwind autumn |
 Pianist Inon Barnatan spent September abroad making his debut in Berlin’sPhilharmonie with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, recording a recital for German radio, collaborating with actor John Malkovich in Croatia, and playing a recital at the famedConcertgebouw in Amsterdam. Already this month, the indefatigable pianist opened the Vancouver Recital Society‘s season with a critically lauded recital, played a concert in NYC with cellist Alisa Weilerstein (repeated this week at London’s Wigmore Hall) and stepped in for his Cincinnati Symphony debut. He also makes his debut as conductor, directing two Mozart concertos from the keyboard in a tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. His U.S. highlights include:
“It was a losing game for the Reds Friday night in Philadelphia, but quite the opposite for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at Music Hall … Israeli-born pianist Barnatan, 31, last minute pinch-hitter for pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa, who canceled because of illness, is a real find for Cincinnati … [The] crowd made itself heard at the end, calling Barnatan back for repeated bows.” -Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/9/10
“We hear an awful lot of brilliant up-and-coming pianists in Vancouver, but British-trained Barnatan impresses with the depth of his musicianship, as well as formidable technique.” -Vancouver Sun, 10/4/10
For more information, visit InonBarnatan.com or the Opus 3 Artists web site. |
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Inon Barnatan will be replacing Mihaela Ursuleasa as the soloist in Beethoven’s first concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra this coming weekend, October 8 and 9, with James Gaffigan conducting.
Also this month, Inon will be performing Chopin’s concerto no.1 with conductor Asher Fisch and the Raanana Symphony Orchestra in Israel on Oct 20, 21 and 23.
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