Hill Auditorium
The Complete Philip Glass Piano Etudes
Featuring 10 Pianists
Season tickets on sale 5/1 for general public.
One of the most influential composers of our time, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact on the musical and intellectual life of our age.
Glass has written more than 30 operas, 14 symphonies, 13 concertos, numerous soundtracks to films, nine string quartets, a growing body of work for solo piano and organ, and collaborated with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie. He describes himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures” and says that “If I’m to be remembered for anything, it will probably be for the piano music, because people can play it.”
Philip Glass conceived his collection of etudes as a set of 20 works for solo piano written to improve his own performance technique. His most personal body of work is a self-portrait of a life’s practice, representing some of the most intimate and inventive music of Glass’s oeuvre. This distinctive concert offering of all 20 of Glass’s etudes features 10 pianists onstage, each offering a unique musical tribute to this masterful composer.
Co-presented with The Gilmore Piano Festival
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The Complete Philip Glass Piano Etudes
Featuring 10 Pianists
Hill Auditorium
Renewals start 4/22 for current subscribers.
Season tickets on sale 5/1 for general public.
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Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.
The operas — Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among many others — play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as The Hours and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop, and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film, and in popular music — simultaneously.
He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School, and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble — seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.
The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, and develops.
There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. Glass has composed more than thirty operas, large and small; fourteen symphonies, thirteen concertos; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; nine string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Leonard Cohen, and Doris Lessing, among many others.
Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Recent highlights have included a solo recital debut for Carnegie Hall and the world premiere of a piano concerto for Aaron Diehl at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by John Adams. Andres’s orchestrations and arrangements for Justin Peck’s 2024 production of Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise completed an acclaimed limited run on Broadway at the St. James Theater following sold-out runs at The Fisher Center at Bard, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and at New York City’s Park Avenue Armory. For his work on the production, Andres was nominated for 2024 Tony Award for Best Orchestrations.
“One of the most admired pianists of his generation” (New York Times), Inon Barnatan has received universal acclaim for his “uncommon sensitivity” (The New Yorker), “impeccable musicality and phrasing” (Le Figaro), and his stature as “a true poet of the keyboard: refined, searching, unfailingly communicative” (The Evening Standard). A multifaceted musician, Barnatan is equally celebrated as soloist, curator and collaborator.
As a soloist, Barnatan is a regular performer with many of the world’s foremost orchestras and conductors. He was the inaugural Artist-in-Association of the New York Philharmonic from 2014-17, and has played with the BBC Symphony for the BBC Proms, the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Cleveland, Boston and most major orchestras in the US, as well as the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra Symphony and the London, Helsinki, Hong Kong, and Royal Stockholm Philharmonics. He performed a complete Beethoven concerto cycle in Marseilles; Copland’s Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco and at Carnegie Hall; and multiple U.S. tours with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, playing and conducting from the keyboard. With the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, Barnatan played Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto on New Year’s Eve, followed by a Midwest tour that culminated in Chicago, and a return to the BBC Proms in summer 2018.
Equally at home as a curator and chamber musician, Barnatan is Music Director of La Jolla Music Society SummerFest in California, one of leading music festivals in the country. He regularly collaborates with world-class partners such as Renée Fleming and Alisa Weilerstein, and plays at major chamber music festivals including, Seattle, Santa Fe, and Spoleto USA. Barnatan was a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) from 2006 to 2009, and continues to perform with CMS in New York and on tour. His passion for contemporary music has resulted in commissions and performances of many living composers, including premieres of new works by Thomas Adès, Sebastian Currier, Avner Dorman, Alan Fletcher, Joseph Hallman, Alasdair Nicolson, Andrew Norman and Matthias Pintscher, among others.
A Gilmore Young Artist and Salon de Virtuosi recipient, Indonesian pianist Janice Carissa is celebrated for her ability to craft vivid musical narratives that transcend mere virtuosity (Chicago Classical Review). She has performed for the President of Indonesia at the Presidential Palace Indonesia, and earned ovations in the United Nations, Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House and Louis Vuitton Foundation, among others.
Following her Philadelphia Orchestra debut at sixteen, which earned praise from the Philadelphia Inquirer for “radiating the multicolored highlights of a mature pianist,” she has collaborated with luminaries including Stéphane Denève, Cristian Măcelaru, Peter Oundjian, Osmo Vänskä, and Jahja Ling; stepped in for Andre Watts with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; and featured as a soloist with the Kansas City, Nashville, Curtis, Promusica, Amarillo, Sacramento, Kalamazoo, Bay Atlantic, Battlecreek, Symphony in C, and Tacoma symphonies.
Vicky Chow (piano) (She/Her) Hong Kong/Canadian/American pianist Vicky Chow has been described as “brilliant” (New York Times) and “one of our era’s most brilliant pianists” (Pitchfork). Since joining the Bang on a Can All-Stars in 2009, she has collaborated and worked with composers/artists/ensembles/orchestras such as Tania León, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, George Lewis, John Zorn, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Sasha Waltz Dance Company, Doug Varone Dance Company, BBC Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Symphonietta Riga, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble, The Knights, Wild Up, Philip Glass Ensemble, Tyshawn Sorey, Andy Akiho, John Zorn, Gong Linna, Kronos Quartet, Longleash Trio, Trinity Choir, Wet Ink Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Momenta Quartet among others. She has toured to over 40 countries and has performed in various venues including Carnegie Hall (New York) Park Avenue Armory (New York), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles) Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam) Hong Kong Arts Centre, Barbican Centre (London), Southbank Centre (London), Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms (London), L’auditori (Barcelona), Tivoli Vrendenburg (Utrecht), ZKM (Karlsruhe), City Recital Hall (Sydney) Konzertzāle Latvija (Venxtspil), POLIN Museum (Warsaw) and the Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires) .
Pianist Aaron Diehl has quietly re-defined the lines between jazz and classical, and built a global career around his nuanced, understated approach to music-making. Praised for his “melodic precision, harmonic erudition, and elegant restraint” (The New York Times), and his “traditional jazz sound with a sophisticated contemporary spin” (The Guardian), Diehl has performed with musical giants such as Wynton Marsalis, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Tyshawn Sorey, and Philip Glass, and has been a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra, working with conductors like Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Marin Alsop, and Alan Gilbert. In 2023, Diehl was named as the Artistic Director of 92NY’s Jazz in July Festival, succeeding the legendary Bill Charlap.
A leader in contemporary jazz, the Philadelphia Inquirer exclaimed that “there’s an entire world of jazz in Aaron Diehl’s playing…he makes the case that jazz is not one style or genre but many, gliding gorgeously among decades of artistic influences.” With an expansive, orchestral, lyrical approach to the piano that channels predecessors like Ahmad Jamal, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and Jelly Roll Morton, Diehl has headlined the Monterey, Detroit, and Newport Jazz Festivals, and had residencies at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Village Vanguard, SF Jazz, and many more. He counts among his mentors towering figures such as John Lewis, Kenny Barron, Fred Hersch, Marcus Roberts, and Eric Reed.
Recently honored as Classical Woman of the Year by NPR’s Performance Today, American pianist (and NY Times crossword clue) Lara Downes has been called “a musical ray of hope” by NBC News, “a classical music instigator pushing the music forward with great gusto” by the NY Amsterdam News, and “an explorer whose imagination is fired by bringing notice to the underrepresented and forgotten” by The Log Journal.
An iconoclast and trailblazer, Lara occupies a unique position of visibility through her dynamic work as a sought-after soloist, a Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, and a beloved NPR personality as host of her popular video show Amplify with Lara Downes. She has garnered millions of fans spanning diverse communities: her devoted NPR viewers and 100,000+ weekly listeners to her nationally syndicated radio programs intersect with her live concert audiences and her followers on streaming platforms to form a broad and constantly expanding fan base.
Born in Motown, Lisa Kaplan is a pianist specializing in the performance of new work by living composers. Kaplan is the founding pianist and Executive Director of the four-time Grammy Award-winning sextet Eighth Blackbird. Kaplan has won numerous awards, performed all over the country and has premiered new pieces by hundreds of composers, including Andy Akiho, Jennifer Higdon, Amy Beth Kirsten, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, George Perle, and Pamela Z. She has had the great pleasure to collaborate and make music with an eclectic array of incredibly talented people — Laurie Anderson, Jeremy Denk, Bryce Dessner, Philip Glass, Bon Iver, J. Ivy, Glenn Kotche, Shara Nova, Will Oldham, Natalie Portman, Gustavo Santaolalla, Robert Spano, Tarrey Torae, Dawn Upshaw and Michael Ward-Bergeman to name a few.
Mexican pianist DANIELA LIEBMAN has rapidly established herself as an artist of eloquence, poise, and nuance. Since her debut at age eight with the Aguascalientes Symphony, Daniela has performed with more than thirty orchestras on four continents.
This season, Daniela makes her debut with the Reno Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfónica del Sodre (OSSODRE), and Orquesta Juvenil Universitaria Eduardo Mata (OJUEM). She will return with the Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco and recently appeared as soloist with the Orquesta Filarmónica del Desierto, Orquesta Sinfonica de la Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (OSUANL), Richmond Symphony, Minas Gerais Philharmonic, Wichita Symphony, the Sequoia Symphony, the Adrian Symphony, Flagstaff Symphony, and Hartford Symphony. She has also made return appearances with the Orquesta Sinfónica del Estado de México and the Ontario Philharmonic. In past seasons, she has performed with the the Corpus Christi Symphony, the National Symphony of Ecuador, Orlando Philharmonic, the Boca Raton Festival of the Arts Orchestra, San Angelo Symphony, the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra of Peru, the National Symphony of Bogotá, and the Guatemala City Orchestra, among others.
In search of new modes of communication and expression, pianist and Yamaha Artist Justin Snyder explores performance as an immersive and integrated experience, reimagining the ways in which we listen and think about music. Through the cross-pollination of music with olfaction, dance and movement, science, visual art, architecture, technology, and beyond, Justin seeks to illuminate entirely new perspectives borne out of experimentation.
Driven a great deal by collaboration, Justin Snyder has joined forces with artists spanning a wide spectrum of backgrounds, from choreographers, poets, and digital artists to perfumers, durational performance artists, fashion designers, and laser artists. With a focus on the music of living composers, he has had the great privilege of working with Libby Larsen, Molly Joyce, My Brightest Diamond (Shara Nova), Kelly Moran, Jonathan Dove, Evan Ziporyn, William Bolcom, and Jake Heggie, amongst many more artists.
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