301 North Orange Grove Boulevard
Pasadena, CA 91103
USA
On Saturday, April 18th, PIE presents a concert with The Magnetic Resonator Piano, an augmented instrument created by London-based composer-researcher Andrew McPherson that dramatically expands the sound palette of the acoustic grand piano. Playing this remarkable instrument will be four of LA’s finest young pianists: Nic Gerpe, Aron Kallay, Steven Vanhauwaert,and Richard Valitutto (also featured as Satellite Artists on this year’s Piano Spheres concert series). The concert will include existing repertoire for the instrument as well as newly commissioned works.
Andrew McPherson is a composer, engineer and instrument designer. He is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. He studied composition with Peter Child, John Harbison, James Primosch and Jay Reise and attended the Tanglewood and Aspen music festivals. His research focuses on building new augmented instruments which extend the expressive capabilities of familiar instruments, with a particular focus on the keyboard. Among his projects are the magnetic resonator piano, an electromagnetically-extended acoustic grand piano, and the TouchKeys, an electronic keyboard with multi-touch sensing on the surface of every key which successfully launched on the Kickstarter crowd-funding site in 2013. Prior to joining QMUL, Andrew completed his undergraduate and Master’s work in music and engineering at MIT, a PhD in composition at the University of Pennsylvania, and a postdoc at Drexel University. http://andrewmcpherson.org
Grammy®nominated pianist Aron Kallay‘s playing has been called “exquisite…every sound sounded considered, alive, worthy of our wonder”(LA Times). “Perhaps Los Angeles’most versatile keyboardist”(LaOpus), Aron has been praised as possessing “that special blend of intellect, emotion, and overt physicality that makes even the thorniest scores simply leap from the page into the listeners laps”(KPFK). Aron’s performances often integrate technology, video, and alternate tunings; Fanfare magazine described him as “a multiple threat: a great pianist, brainy tech wizard, and visionary promoter of a new musical practice”. Aron has performed throughout the United States and abroad and is a fixture on the Los Angeles new-music scene. He is the co-founder and execute director of People Inside Electronics (PIE), a concert series dedicated to classical electroacoustic music; the managing director of MicroFest, Los Angeles’annual festival of microtonal music; and the co-director of the underground new-music concert series Tuesdays@MONK Space. He is also the co-director of MicroFest Records, whose first release, John Cage: The Ten Thousand Things, was nominated for a Grammy®award for Best Chamber Music Performance. Aron has upcoming recordings on MicroFest, Cold Blue, and Populist records. In addition to his solo work, Aron is currently a member of the Pierrot + percussion ensemble Brightwork newmusic, the Varied Trio, and the Ray-Kallay Duo. He is on the faculty of the University of Southern California and Chapman University. ::www.aronkallay.com::
Richard Valitutto has been described by the Los Angeles Times as a “vivid soloist”and “vigorously virtuosic”and was the featured pianist on the Grammy-nominated album Harry Partch: Bitter Music. He has performed in concert halls, museums, and conservatories across the country including Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall’s REDCAT, the Broad Stage’s Edye Space, the Hammer Museum, and the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall. A strong proponent of contemporary music, he has interacted with composers such as John Adams, Clarence Barlow, Sofia Gubaidulina, Michael Gordon, John Harbison, David Lang, Steve Reich, Marc Sabat, and Chinary Ung as a performer and dedicatee of their works. Richard has held fellowships and given performances at Tanglewood, SongFest, Bang on a Can, International Performing Arts Institute, New Music on the Point, Brevard, and Eastern Music Summer Festivals. As a composer, he seeks to create works balancing tradition and experimentalism, through a comprehensive awareness of various artistic styles and mediums and their signifiers, often drawing from improvised material as well as from the vast repertoire he himself performs. His compositions have been performed by What’s Next? Ensemble, as well as the critically acclaimed wild Up Modern Music Collective of which he is a regularly contributing performer and composer. Richard is a founding member of the new music quartet gnarwhallaby, called “startlingly versatile”(New York Times) in their Carnegie Hall debut in 2013. He holds degrees in piano performance from the California Institute of the Arts (MFA) and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (BM, summa cum laude). ::www.richardvalitutto.net::
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times for his ‘impressive clarity, sense of structure and monster technique’, Steven Vanhauwaert has garnered a wide array of accolades, amongst which the Maurice Lefranc award, the Rotary Prize, the Galiot Prize, the USC Concerto Competition, and the Grand Prize at the Los Angeles International Liszt Competition. Mr. Vanhauwaert has appeared in major venues such as the Concertgebouw in Brugge, Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa, Bovard Auditorium in Los Angeles, the Singel in Antwerp, the Great Hall of the Brussels Conservatory, the Great Hall of the Budapest Liszt Conservatory, as well as numerous other prestigious venues in Bulgaria, Hungary, the US, the Netherlands, France, Canada, the UK, Austria, and Spain. He frequently tours China with solo appearances at the renowned National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing and the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center. He has appeared with orchestras such as the Pacific Symphony, the Flemish Symphony, the Oak Ridge Symphony, the USC Symphony, the Bryan Symphony, Collegium Instrumentale, the Concord Jazz Ensemble, the Auburn Symphony, the Eastern Sierra Chamber Orchestra, the Peninsula Symphony, and Prima la Musica, amongst others.
An avid champion of lesser known repertoire, Mr. Vanhauwaert has given the West Coast premiere of Messiaen’s Fantaisie for violin and piano at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and the US premiere of Eric Tanguy’s Piano Trio. He frequently performs works by Viktor Ullman, Eric Tanguy, Leon Kirchner, Jeroen D’hoe, Veronika Krausas, Nico Abondolo, Chen Yi, Tan Dun, Maria Newman, Gernot Wolfgang, Tobias Picker, and Karel Goeyvaerts.
His debut album featuring works by Schumann, Schubert, Liszt, Chopin, and Debussy, was well received in the press. Additional recordings include Paris 1913 and Petrushka, featuring works by Stravinsky, Casella, Satie, Poulenc, and Ravel. More recently a disc with works by Lior Rosner was released on Bridge Records. Upcoming releases include a solo Busoni album. Many of Mr. Vanhauwaert’s performances have been broadcast live on networks such as K-MZT, K-CSN, K-USC, K-PFK, W-HKB, W-UOT, K-UAT, W-FMT, RTBF, WTV, PBS, and KLARA. He is frequently invited to give guest lecture recitals and masterclasses in universities throughout the world. Mr. Vanhauwaert is a Steinway Artist.
Pianist Nic Gerpe, a Los-Angeles native, has been hailed as “dashing”(Christian Herzog, sandiego.com) and “appropriately spacy and far-out”(Matthew Guerrieri). A dedicated proponent of new music, Nic has worked with composers such as Steve Reich, Jo Kondo, Michael Gordon and Don Crockett, and has given numerous world premieres in the Los Angeles area and abroad. Nic has performed throughout Southern California and at festivals including the Banff International Keyboard Festival, the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice at the New England Conservatory, and the Tahoe Chamber Music Festival. Nic’s performances have also been nationally broadcast on 91.5 KUSC and classicalkusc.org. As a concerto soloist, Nic’s most recent performances have included composer Thomas Demenga’s “Relations”, a double concerto for two cellos, percussion and prepared piano, premiered at the 2012 Piatigorsky International CelloFest. He also recently premiered composer Dale Trumbore’s piano concerto, titled “10,000 Hours”, with the USC Thornton Symphony conducted by Donald Crockett. As a solo performer and chamber musician, Nic has worked with Los Angeles-based new music groups ensembleGREEN and Midnight Winds, and has performed at Microfest, L.A.’s festival dedicated to microtonal music. Nic earned his Doctor of Musical Arts Degree in Piano Performance at the University of Southern California in 2012, studying with Bernadene Blaha, Kevin Fitz-Gerald and Stewart Gordon. He has also worked extensively with Earl Wild, Arnold Steinhardt, Robert Lipsett, and Stephen Drury. Nic has been on the piano faculty of the Pasadena Conservatory of Music since 2006.