After the past week’s flurry of premières, I’m turning back into a pianist in prepa­ra­tion for a solo recital at Caramoor on June 20. It’s the same program west-coasters might’ve heard in San Fran­cisco, inter­lac­ing selec­tions from Janáçek’s On An Over­grown Path with recent works by Caroline Shaw, Eric Shan­field, and Christo­pher Cerrone. Here’s a “cura­to­r­ial state­ment” in answer to your ques­tions: “what and why?”

There’s a good reason for all the evoca­tive titles on this program, which is that all the works are based on visual images, either real or imagined. What I liked was that all the pieces have to do with differ­ent mediums, or chains of mediums, like a game of inspi­ra­tional tele­phone. Caroline’s Gustave le Gray is named after a pioneer in photog­ra­phy, and is half an analogue to his images, and half an imagined portrait of the photog­ra­pher himself. Chris was inspired by an artist friend’s render­ing of a beau­ti­ful brutal­ist bridge in southern Italy—the two-dimen­sional repre­sen­ta­tion of a three-dimen­sional form, trans­lated into a musical form. Eric’s Utopia Parkway is an homage to the sculptor Joseph Cornell—musical “objects” move against each other in shifting posi­tions, like the objects in one of Cornell’s shadow boxes.

And it’s not known exactly what inspired the titles of Janáçek’s On An Over­grown Path, though I believe they were given only just before being published—it seems likely they were images or phrases out of his own head. But they are amaz­ingly evoca­tive in a way that is picto­r­ial but nonethe­less abstract. 

I suppose what I’m trying to “say”, if one can speak through one’s program­ming, is that the way an artist sees art and the world is not usually confined to a single form or disci­pline. The qual­i­ties that move me in music are the same that move me about a building, a photo­graph, or a piece of chore­og­ra­phy. They’re all related in cryptic ways.

Caramoor is a short Metro-North trip from Grand Central and I can’t recom­mend it highly enough. It’s beau­ti­ful and the archi­tec­ture is slightly outra­geous. I even composed the bell chimes which summon you To Concert, so the entire evening promises to be some­thing of a Gesamtkunst­werk.