Calendar of Events

Free and Open to the Public
Location: Steve and Judy Turner Recital Hall (Google map of this location)

 Amy Dorfman, Craig Nies and Mark Wait, pianists

The world-premiere performance of 12 new piano etudes commissioned by the Blair School of Music from acclaimed contemporary composer Richard Danielpour.

Danielpour took inspiration for these pieces from Claude Debussy's celebrated 12 Etudes for Piano, centering each of these 12 pieces around a different musical or technical challenge: One is centered around fast scales; another is composed of full-sounding chords; another is played with the left hand on the keys and the right hand inside the piano plucking the strings. Each of the 12 pieces is dedicated to a different pianist with whom Danielpour has been affiliated, including Leon Fleisher and Yefim Bronfman, and one apiece dedicated to Dorfman, Nies and Wait.

Among the most honored composers of his generation, Richard Danielpour has written a wide range of orchestral, chamber, instrumental, ballet and vocal works. He has received a Grammy Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award and the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Guggenheim Award, Bearns Prize from Columbia University, and grants and residencies from the Barlow Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Copland House and the American Academy in Rome. He was one of the first composers invited for a coveted residency at the American Academy in Berlin. He was only the third composer - after Stravinsky and Copland - to be signed to an exclusive recording contract by Sony Classical, and his music can also be heard extensively on Delos, Koch, Harmonia Mundi, New World and Reference Recordings.

Sponsored by the parents of a current Blair student