In the current cultural climate in America, it's always an encouraging thing to see somebody step forward to launch a new arts initiative in a community. Last week, after the Southeastern Piano Festival was over, my wife and I were up in Charlotte to teach at a brand-new chamber music camp for grades 9-12, under the auspices of Chamber Music at St. Peter's. It was an exhilarating but somewhat exhausting week!

I don't know of many such camps that give high school students the opportunity to be exposed to the chamber music experience. For young pianists, especially, this experience is invaluable. To learn how to listen to and react to what is going on around you while still keeping focused on what you are doing at the instrument is a fantastically useful lesson. It may sound easy to do, but one would be surprised how many technically accomplished pianists cannot do this, interact with a colleague in a chamber music situation.

Part of the problem is that chamber music is still undervalued as part of advanced piano training at many institutions. Everybody wants to learn their Rachmaninoff 3rd Concerto; the reality is that a young pianist stands a much better chance of picking up a paycheck for playing the Brahms Horn Trio or a Beethoven violin sonata than for playing the Rach 3 with an orchestra. Not training pianists to be flexible enough to be good chamber musicians is, accordingly, a kind of malpractice. I've come across doctoral piano students who were fantastic technicians, yet had never played a note of chamber music.

So, kudos to Dottie Hollowell and Alan Black (principal cellist of the Charlotte Symphony), the organizers of the Chamber Music Camp for Teens in Charlotte. They did a marvelous job of organizing this complicated affair (56 students, 40-odd different ensembles, a dozen coaches). The students, almost all from high schools in the Charlotte area, did a wonderful job preparing their parts ahead of time and then being thrown into an intensive rehearsal/coaching schedule. There were major works by Brahms, Shostakovich, Ravel, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, etc., being performed. Besides my wife and me, the faculty was drawn from CSO players, as well as faculty from UNC-Greensboro and elsewhere. It was a brief, intense period of work; but the students already have a leg up when and if they go on to major in music at a university or a conservatory.

It's been an unusual last couple of weeks for me (and busy ones, too...ergo the scant blog entries). The week before this last one, I spent a good deal of time in and around the fourth annual Southeastern Piano Festival at the University of South Carolina, in the company of some outstanding pianists from grades 8 through 12. I did a recital program on June 12, and at the end of the week, was a judge for the Arthur Fraser Concerto Competition involving 16 of these young artists. My fellow judges (Jon Nakamatsu, Ann Schein, Nicholas Smith of the SC Philharmonic, and John Kenneth Adams, Professor Emeritus at USC) and I were treated to an entire day of  impressive performances. I don't generally like the idea of music competitions, but reluctantly accept that they are a way to give young musicians a target for learning large amounts of big repertoire. It's always tough to quantify what is after all a subjective judgment. Are we rewarding the finished product as it stands (the concerto performance itself, asking "can this work right now with an orchestra on stage?") or are we to give a boost to someone who shows glimmers of ultimately being the one among this group who may have the most to say, the poetic nature inside to say it?

That's a tough question, and the fact that the five of us took over an hour to decide the three top prizewinners and three honorable mentions is indicative of that dilemma. But we were all reassured by the fact that all three top winners will be able to perform a movement with the SC Philharmonic. These three promising young pianists are (1st Prize) 9th-grader Sejoon Park of McLean, Virginia, who gave us a Beethoven 3rd Concerto of true command, poise, and clarity; (2nd Prize) 11th grader Jooeun Shim of Glenview, Illinois, whose Chopin 1st Concerto showed similar command and sweeping momentum, punctuated by moments of loveliness where needed; and (3rd Prize) 9th grader Mariana Olaizola of Bethesda, Maryland, small of stature but who made us all sit up and take notice with truly heartfelt, poetic approaches to both the Schumann Arabeske and Beethoven 3rd Concerto. (More details on the results, including the date of the winners' performance in Columbia, here.)

There were other remarkable events all week at the Festival. Jon Nakamatsu's recital was magnificent, everything I believe in my heart about music and piano playing rolled into an evening. He's got the full arsenal, but knows enough not to swat a mosquito with a sledgehammer, pianistically speaking (a lesson most of the competing young artists needed to learn). But make no mistake, when he does turn on the afterburners, it's that much more thrilling for our senses not having been dulled by a constant onslaught. He made more sense out of the first of the D. 899 Schubert Impromptus than anyone I've ever heard before. His Chopin B minor Sonata was deeply intelligent, keenly attuned to harmonic, contrapuntal, and structural elements within to make a listener lament, "what if Chopin had not died at 39? What might a Chopin of 1875 have created?"

Kudos for this wonderful Festival goes to Marina Lomazov of the USC faculty, who, as Artistic Director of the event, has it down to a science by this point. The students received intensive lessons all week from the very fine USC piano faculty, including Dr. Lomazov, and also Scott Price, Charles Fugo, and Joseph Rackers. Well I've spent so much time writing about this that I haven't even mentioned what I just finished doing this very week just past, which was even more intense and exhilarating...stay tuned for the next entry.

I had heard that he was quite ill, but it still came as a jolt just one week after writing this post, to read that Gyorgy Ligeti died today at the age of 83. My concert today at USC will be dedicated to his memory. As Alex Ross put it, Ligeti was "widely and justly considered the greatest of them all." [Update 6/15: The link to Alex Ross' blog will bring you to further links on Ligeti's legacy. If you only have time to read one, let it be this summary by Ethan Iverson. The Ligeti obit written by Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe includes a wonderful quote about the "Arc-en-Ciel" Etude, which I played last Monday in my recital here for the Southeastern Piano Festival....the pianist Stephen Drury was performing the etude during a festival in Boston at which Ligeti was in attendance, and Ligeti told Drury, "It should sound like Bill Evans playing Chopin at five o'clock in the morning." Wish I'd known that quote in time to tell the audience last Monday!]

The 2006 Spoleto Festival is wrapping up this weekend, but another, increasingly well-known festival is just cranking up in Columbia. This one is for piano lovers: the 2006 Southeastern Piano Festival, under the artistic directorship of Marina Lomazov of the University of South Carolina piano faculty, and running from June 11-18. This is the fourth season of the festival. The primary focus of this event are the young pianists from around the region, ranging from grades 8-12, who spend the week in Columbia having master classes with the USC piano faculty and guest artists. But there are also a number of public concerts featuring those guest artists.

I'm delighted to be participating in the Festival this year. On Monday afternoon, June 12th at 4:30 I'll be doing a brief recital with some comments about programming issues. The program I'm doing is one I've done a number of times, interspersing each of the movements of Maurice Ravel's suite "Miroirs" with a "mirror" work from more recent times. I last did this program in New York City in November and blogged about it here. My Columbia concert on Monday is free and open to the general public.

Other concerts have admission prices, but they are all great bargains considering the panoply of talent on display. Full details on all aspects of the Festival can be found on its website. A brief overview: Sunday evening at 6 PM is a concert with all the members of the USC piano faculty, including Dr. Lomazov. Tuesday evening is a recital by a young up-and-coming competition winner, Di Wu. Wednesday evening is Ann Schein, who taught for many years at Peabody Conservatory and the Aspen Music School. Thursday night is the marquee event, a recital by Van Cliburn gold medalist Jon Nakamatsu.

Even the classes by the piano faculty and guest artists are open to the public, and I highly recommend these if you would like the chance to hear the talented young musicians who have been accepted into this program, and to witness a creative spark lit (one always hopes) under some of them in the classes. It's always fun to see and hear the moment when a musical concept clicks in the mind of a young student, when that student can realize an idea in sound. [update 6/11: click here for more on the Festival and Jon Nakamatsu's visit to Columbia from an article in the State.]