The concert is part of the Horowitz Piano Series, a series of piano recitals honoring pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who left his papers with the University before he died. 

“Emmanuel Ax is one of the most important masters on the concert stage of today. His repertoire is enormous and constantly expanding, and it is our good fortune that he is a generous friend of Yale,” said Boris Berman, artistic director of the Horowitz Series and head of the piano department at the School of Music.

Ax rocketed to international fame after winning the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in 1974. Since then, Ax has become one of the most celebrated pianists in the world, winning eight out of 20 Grammy nominations and the Avery Fisher Prize — he is a “titanic legend,” said Robert Levinger MUS ’24, and “there is no aspiring young pianist who is unfamiliar with him and his landmark recordings.”

Ax has a long history of ties to Yale — the News’ coverage of the pianist goes back to a performance with celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma in Woolsey Hall in 1982 during “their still-young careers.” Ax also recalls performing a “chamber music benefit concert” with Ma, acclaimed violinist Jaimie Laredo and the student-run Yale Bach Society Orchestra in the 1980s, at the time conducted by legendary violinist Isaac Stern’s son, David Stern ’86, he said.

He performed with the Yale Symphony Orchestra in 2000 and has returned regularly to perform on the Horowitz Series since its inception in 2000.

Ax received an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Yale in 2007 and is a recipient of the Sanford Medal, an award instituted by Yale in 1972 that honors celebrated concert artists and distinguished members of the music profession.

From 2009 to 2010, the School of Music appointed Ax as a Visiting Professor of Piano. Both of Ax’s children also graduated from Yale — he is a “proud father,” he said.

His concerts at Yale are always “eagerly anticipated,” said Berman, who noted that his performance on Wednesday sold out weeks before the recital.

“I’m always excited to hear Emanuel Ax because he brings a distinct sense of sincerity and humility to everything he plays, a quality that is not always found among superstars of the concert platform,” said Alex Nam ’25, co-president of the Yale Undergraduate Piano Collective.

Ax has garnered a reputation for a “modesty [that] is at the heart of his pianism and personality alike”  according to the New York Times. Though his program on Wednesday consists of pieces he has performed many different times at concert halls throughout the world, he said he is “just working hard and trying to make them better.”

The program alternates between works by Beethoven and Schoenberg, two composers associated with opposite ends of the Viennese music tradition and separated by a century of time.

Ax chose the program because this year is Schoenberg’s 150th birthday, and since the “first Viennese school is Beethoven and the second Viennese school is Schoenberg,” he decided to put the two composers in conversation.

The program will open and close with two of Beethoven’s most well-known piano sonatas: the “Sonata Pathétique” and the “Appassionata” Sonata. In between, Ax will perform three of Schoenberg’s earlier works — the composer’s first forays into atonality — and Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in A Major.

Ahead of Wednesday’s concert, Ax hopes his performance will “be meaningful to everyone,” and he looks forward to seeing old friends, such as Berman and piano professor Robert Blocker, at the School of Music. But he will also be “nervous as usual,” he said, although he is “certain he will enjoy [performing].”

Tickets for the concert start at $31. Yale faculty and staff can purchase tickets for $23, and students can buy them for $12.

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On Friday evening, before a sold-out crowd, Fleming performed a recital with Yale Opera director Gerald Martin Moore in Morse Recital Hall as part of a residency program created by the Schwarzman Center and the School of Music. 

On Saturday, Fleming gave a public masterclass with School of Music vocal students — then led a public “Music and Mind” forum with Yale professors Laurie Santos and AZA Allsop.

One of this generation’s most celebrated singers, Fleming’s many accolades include five Grammy awards, the U.S. National Medal of Arts and a Kennedy Center honor for lifetime artistic achievement. She is the first classical artist ever to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl, and she has performed everywhere, from Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

She received an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Yale in 2020 and has served as a member of the Schwarzman Center Advisory Board since 2019.

“Her unmatched versatility, musicality and ability to infuse the arts into other areas of scholarship and research serve as an inspiration for members of our community who are bringing multiple disciplines together to enrich lives and solve pressing global challenges,” said University President Peter Salovey, who attended the recital. “Her leadership and active engagement with the Schwarzman Center and School of Music — and Yale more broadly — provide exceptional learning opportunities for students.”

In the recital, Fleming performed a program based on her album, “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,” which won a Grammy in 2023 for the best classical solo vocal album. The anthology was a collaboration with National Geographic, which created films for each of the songs.

The album, which is mostly art song, is “rather esoteric,” Fleming said, so for the performance, she added in songs from the Lord of the Rings — her voice is the original soundtrack for the movies — and popular Icelandic singer Björk.

Other highlights include her performance of Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” — one of those pieces of music, akin to songs like “Amazing Grace,” that seem to always be able to transcend boundaries and reach people, she said.

At the end of the performance, after a standing ovation, Fleming and Moore performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as an encore, inviting the audience to sing the choruses with her — a “unanimously captivating performance,” said Sandy Sharis MUS ’24.

The next morning, Fleming returned to Morse Recital Hall to give a public masterclass to four students from the opera program at the School of Music. 

Moore, who has served as director for Yale Opera since 2020, said that Fleming’s status as a public figure allows her to impart unique wisdom and inspiration on students.

“You’re in the presence of someone who has embraced all aspects of singing and show business, someone who has been in the industry for such a long time and is still at the height of her [singing] powers,” Moore said. “I think it is very inspiring for young singers to see and realize that even superstars like that still can get nervous, still have to look after their voice, still have to check in — she’s had this longevity for a reason.”

Moore began working with Fleming 25 years ago: Fleming sponsored his green card and visa when Moore moved to the U.S. He is still amazed by her work ethic and energy — he has “never seen an empty space in her calendar,” he observed.

On Saturday evening, Fleming hosted a public forum in Commons on the interaction of neuroscience, the arts, music and mental health with Laurie Santos, a Yale psychology professor who formerly taught one of the most popular courses at the university, and AZA Allsop, an assistant professor at the Yale psychiatry department. The three have more in common than meets the eye.

Beyond music, Fleming, who was recently named World Health Organization Goodwill Ambassador for Arts and Health, is a leading advocate for connections between the arts and health. Her recent work at the intersection of the arts and sciences include supporting the NIH Music-Based Intervention Toolkit, which seeks to use music as a non-invasive therapeutic avenue to brain disorders caused by aging. Meanwhile, the NeuroArtsBluePrint has provided critical funding for students and faculty members who are interested in research projects at the intersection of medicine and the arts. 

According to Fleming, music has the potential to mold the connection of the approximately 86 billion neurons in the human brain — offering a beacon of hope into both individual and community wellness. The benefits extend into mental and psychological health, an area that Santos and Allsop are all too familiar with.

Santos, who mentioned that she has known about Fleming and her work for a while, is also excited about the prospect of exploring music as a means of bolstering social connection, reinforcing mental health and reducing stress. 

“Laurie Santos has become such an important and influential figure in health and well-being in the country,” Fleming said. “She’s been such a bright light on the horizon for the intersection of health and well being and the way that we think about it now.”

The complete program for the 2023-24 Schwarzman Center season can be found here.

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The concert is part of the Horowitz Piano Series, a series of piano recitals honoring pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who left his papers with the University before he died. Chen has performed in the series almost every year since he arrived at Yale. 

Chen, a professor in the practice of piano, joined the School of Music faculty in 2000. He served as associate director at Bard College Conservatory of Music in 2005 before returning to Yale in 2012, where he was appointed as a deputy dean for the School of Music. Renowned for his solo and chamber performances in the United States, Canada and Asia, Chen’s solo recordings have received critical acclaim — his “Diabelli” Variations by Beethoven was lauded as a “classic” by the American Record Guide.

“He’s potent in character, powerful and dramatic, and he has this special ability to bring out the essence of every piece,” said Daniel Che MUS ’25, one of Chen’s students.

When approaching programming, Chen tries to put together a program where both the performer and listener can see a clear reason why the pieces are on a program together. He compares the recital to a narrative that requires understanding from both sides.

“I think it is important for both the performer and the listener because a recital is a kind of narrative, and both the listener and the performer should understand the narrative that is going on through the course of the recital,” he said.

All the pieces on Wednesday’s program explore the idea of memory, according to Chen. The program will open with Russian composer Nikolai Medtner’s “Sonata Reminiscenza,” the first of a set of pieces Medtner named “Forgotten Memories.”

The second piece, “Rhapsody of Hmong,” was written by Zihan Wu MUS ’25, another one of Chen’s piano students. Wu, originally from China, received her bachelor’s in piano and composition at the Eastman School of Music before coming to the School of Music as a composition major.

“Rhapsody of Hmong” was inspired by the Hmong people in Southwest China, Wu said. Wu uses the piano to imitate the sound of the qeej, a 3000-year-old homophonic wind instrument played by the Hmong she first heard during a visit to a Hmong village. The piece has a narrative structure that follows the relationship between the instrument and the Hmong people, she said. 

“It opens with the sound of the echoing of living things, and the qeej comes from nowhere, gradually becoming the interaction among people and the instrument,” Wu said. “The instrument is part of their life, and I am trying to depict that sound, that interaction, in a contemporary language — ancient China in a modern perspective.”

Wu said she found working with her own teacher on a piece she wrote an “interesting reversal of roles.” Chen’s studio has two pianos — one of which Chen normally sits at during lessons to demonstrate. But when Wu and Chen worked together on Wu’s piece, they switched seats, with Wu sitting at the teaching piano to tell Chen about her intentions for the piece.

Chen’s performance on Wednesday will be the first time that Wu will hear her own piece played.

“It just feels like such a special honor to be able to listen to my teacher perform my own music,” Wu said.

After Wu’s piece, Chen will perform Robert Schumann’s “Gesänge der Frühe,” or “Songs of Dawn.” Schumann, who suffered from psychotic melancholia, wrote the piece one year before being admitted into a mental institution, and Chen described it as “strange, philosophical and utterly beautiful.”

The program will end with 12 of Edvard Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces” — “little vignettes” and character pieces. To Chen, they evoke a sense of memory, both explicitly — the first and the last pieces are related and the last piece is named “Remembrance” — and through the music’s suggestion of nostalgia-tinged images.

Chen received his bachelor of science in chemistry and physics from Yale College before obtaining a master’s degree in both piano and violin from Juilliard. He then went to Harvard University to earn a doctorate in chemistry, where he continued to “play more and more” concerts in New York every month. 

“First, I tried doing mainly music [at Juilliard]. Then I went all in on science [at Harvard]. I realized I preferred the music,” Chen said.

After earning his doctorate, he returned to Yale to teach piano, emphasizing that Yale “just feels like home.” Chen mentioned feeling “incredibly lucky” to work at Yale and that he loves being able to walk by places like Old Campus and say “that’s where I stayed when I was a freshman.”

His comfort on campus doesn’t necessarily translate to comfort backstage — Chen said that playing at Yale can be “stressful” because of the talent level of the other students and his colleagues. 

But nerves and excitement often go hand in hand, and Chen said he looks forward to presenting the “unique beauty” of each of the pieces on the program Wednesday.

“I love music because it combines the intellectual and emotional to send a powerful message, but not necessarily a specific one — it affects each person differently and individually,” Chen said.

Tickets for the concert start at $17. Yale faculty and staff can purchase tickets for $12, and students can buy them for $8.

The post Faculty pianist Melvin Chen to explore memory through Medtner, Wu, Schumann and Grieg appeared first on Yale Daily News.

On Friday night, the JACK Quartet performed Catherine Lamb’s “divisio spiralis” at Yale.

Hailed by The New York Times as “our leading new-music foursome,” the Grammy-nominated JACK Quartet has become a genre-defining leader in contemporary classical music. They are composed of violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards and cellist Jay Campbell, the only musician to win two Avery Fisher grants. The group currently serves as the Quartet in Residence at the New School in New York City.

“Given our keen interest in unconventional performance practice and the distinctive architecture of the Dome, it seems only fitting that the JACK Quartet will enliven the space with a work that plays so beautifully with its spatial qualities and acoustics,” said Rachel Fine, the Schwarzman Center’s executive director.

The JACK Quartet champions new string quartet music through commissions and close collaborations with composers. Their JACK Studio initiative, which selects composers for reading sessions and residencies with the quartet, offers composers paid opportunities to develop new work in an attempt to “dismantle outmoded classical music pipelines for composers,” according to their website.

“divisio spiralis,” written for JACK in 2019 by Lamb, is a roughly 90-minute piece that explores and pushes the boundaries of harmony with the sustained sound of strings. 

Lamb’s genesis of the piece derives from Erv Wilson’s 1965 organization of the overtone series as a logarithmic spiral. According to the program, she sought to “describe harmonic space as numbers in repetition and interaction … blooming outwards with each new prime and composite.”

The work uses microtonal tunings based on the overtone series of a 10-hertz fundamental. Every note is an overtone of this 10-hertz frequency, a frequency slow enough “that it’s basically a rhythm,” and the music shifts “freely” through these different pitch collections, according to Campbell. 

For Campbell, the contradiction between balancing the “numerical perfection” with the “materiality and imperfection of the physical world” is what makes the piece so beautiful. 

While the goal of the piece is to play exactly the frequency each player is supposed to play with each other, the concept of perfection intonation is mathematically impossible: if frequency is a function of time, it takes an “infinite amount” of time to say something is in tune.

“[This contradiction] changes how we relate to each other as musicians — changes, for me, how I relate to the passing of time,” Campbell said. “[‘divisio spiralis’] was a life-changing piece.”

Striving for perfection in intonation for a work that relies solely on patterns of resonance and harmony to make its impact pushed the group in an “extreme direction.” Campbell described pre-rehearsal preparation with sawtooth wave mockups of the piece and a month during the pandemic where they “spent all their time on just [‘divisio spiralis’].” The quartet also experiments with playing with tuners, which allows them to isolate their individual pitch and read their frequencies as they play. 

Playing long, slow notes can be surprisingly physically taxing, said Campbell. Mentally, Campbell tries to balance feeling comfortable enough to be physically flexible with a “hyper-focus” on the intonation while ensuring he is “in the present” and is being “swept away” by the piece.

At the start of the performance, Wulliman encouraged the audience to make themselves comfortable. “It’s a long journey,” he said. Throughout the 90 minutes, some audience members walked or found a different seat, some stood and stretched before sitting back down and some stood and remained standing.

Jennifer Harrison Newsman, Schwarzman Center’s associate artistic director, said she found the group’s flexibility a unique departure from a traditional classical performance.

“It’s so special that we can offer a durational piece that allows you to come in and respond with your own, sitting at such a proximate location to artists at that caliber,” she said.

Registration for the concert was free. On Dec. 15, the Schwarzman Center will present the AMOC* production of John Adams’ “El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered” with Julia Bullock. 

Correction, Feb. 12: This article has been adjusted to spell “divisio spiralis” with correct casing.

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The concert is part of the Horowitz Piano Series, a series of piano recitals honoring pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who left his papers with Yale before he died. Berman serves as the artistic director of the series and has performed on every series since its inception in 2000.

Berman, a professor in the Practice of Piano and the head of the Piano Department, joined the School of Music faculty in 1984. Lauded as the “pianist’s pianist” by the Boston Globe, Berman, who was born in Moscow, performs regularly around the world — in six continents and over 50 countries so far. 

“[Berman] is one of the greatest living pianists in the world,” said Elisabeth Tsai MUS ’23, a student of Berman. “He has had a profound impact on every single pianist in my generation. He’s the gold standard of Prokofiev and Scriabin, and his recordings are the firsts we all go to.”

Berman is also an active recording artist. He is the first pianist to record Prokofiev’s complete solo works and is currently working on a recording project he is calling the “dawn of modernism.” The project will focus on pieces written in the 1910s and 1920s to show how “different composers gave inspiration to following generations,” he said.

Despite his storied performance and recording career, Berman said he still gets “terribly, terribly nervous” before every performance.

“Every performance, you put yourself on the line and you know your previous good concerts do not guarantee that [the upcoming] one will be good,” he said. “It’s very risky. But this ability to communicate with the audience, to present to them the music I care very much about — very often I do on stage something different from what I planned to do, and this moment of improvisation in public is very dear to me. When it happens, it is a fantastic pleasure.”

According to Berman, each concert requires the artist to choose from various guidelines in programming. He said that these include monographic programming — choosing programming on the “basis of similarity,” exploring the influence younger composers experience from their predecessors, crafting pieces on the “principle of contrast” and examining different music written in different countries at the same time.

Berman said that his program on Wednesday draws from all of these principles.

The program will open with Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B flat major, K. 333 and close with Prokofiev’s Fifth Sonata, a neoclassical work. Berman said he believes this “bookending” allows exploration into how the classical principles Mozart used were “modified by Prokofiev.” 

For the rest of the concert’s programming, Berman will turn to his “dawn of modernism” recording idea with three pieces all written in the 1910s or 1920s: Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Piano from 1923, Debussy’s “Six épigraphes antiques” from 1914 and Prokofiev’s “Visions fugitives” from 1917.

Berman described Debussy’s “Six épigraphes antiques” as “bizarre” and full of “half tints and delicate shades of expression.” Schoenberg’s five pieces — the fifth of which is Schoenberg’s first 12-tone composition — contrast sharply with Debussy.

Berman said that he finds this contrast in its character. It is “quirkier,” much less “sensual,” and “rational but not dry” — and also in the juxtaposition between Debussy’s “Gaelic sensibility” versus Schoenberg’s Germanic tradition.

Prokofiev’s “Visions fugitives,” a set of small pieces written between 1915 and 1917, creates further contrast, both within the pieces and against Debussy and Schoenberg. Some of the pieces continue the Russian tradition, while others amount to “intentional rebelling” against it.

“Anytime he performs, you just feel all his experience and history coming through as a listener — there’s just such an enormous depth to everything that he does,” said Anthony Ratinov ’20 MUS ’23 who studied with Berman. “He’s absolutely incredible on stage, and it’s very inspiring to be able to see your teacher do all these things that he talks about himself so well.”

Both Tsai and Ratinov described the impact of Berman’s work, both on their personal development and on the School of Music. 

They described his selflessness with his time and his care for his students as “inspirational” and essential to the culture he has created as a leader on the faculty.

“He’s such a well-respected musician and teacher that any time he walks into any room you can feel how much everyone really admires and respects him,” said Ratinov. “He’s succeeded in creating a really supportive atmosphere [at the School of Music].”

Two of Berman’s former students, Melvin Chen ’91 and Wei Yi Yang MUS ’04, now serve as piano professors at the School of Music with Berman. Berman’s legacy now “spans generations,” Tsai added.

When Berman first joined the School of Music faculty, the overall applicant pool for the piano department was between 18 and 25 people, he said. Now, acceptance to the School of Music, the only music school attached to an Ivy League institution, Berman said, is “very competitive,” with an applicant pool of roughly 250 pianists, and the faculty is “able to take the best pianists.”

He cited the department’s focus on collaboration between faculty members and students as integral to his approach to creating community within the School of Music. He said that he believes diversity in opinion is what “makes the environment so fertile” because “there is no absolute truth in music,” and students need to be exposed to different approaches.

Berman has also published two books including “Notes from the Pianist’s Bench” and “Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas: A Guide for the Listener and the Performer.” 

“He’s just the perfect model of great artistry and intellectual artistry,” Tsai said.

Tickets for the concerts start at $17. Yale faculty and staff can purchase tickets for $12, and students can buy them for $8.

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The Horowitz Piano Series will begin its 2023-2024 season on Oct. 18. Under the artistic direction of Boris Berman, a professor in the practice of piano, the series consists of monthly concerts spotlighting School of Music faculty pianists and other world-renowned guest artists. This year’s series will feature performances by pianists Emmanuel Ax and Hélène Grimaud and faculty pianists Berman, Robert Blocker, Wei-Yi Yang MUS ’04, Melvin Chen ’91 and Boris Slutsky.

“The piano recital, by the virtue of the form, is a very intimate experience,” Berman said.  “It’s an encounter with an artist — one singular artist on stage — and they share their vision of music through intimate communication.”

With the exception of the COVID-19 shutdown, the series has run every year since its establishment in 2000 — according to Berman, the Horowitz Piano Series might be the only continuously running piano recital series in the country.

Michael Friedmann, a professor emeritus of music who served on the School of Music faculty from 1985 to 2020, has attended almost every Horowitz Piano Series concert since its inception and said he always “avidly looks forward to each.” 

He cited an “almost always full-capacity” turnout in Morse Recital Hall each year as evidence of the following the series has garnered — and of the stability of music lovers in the Yale and New Haven communities. 

The series is named after pianist Vladimir Horowitz, considered one of the greatest pianists of all time, who left his papers with Yale before he died.

Horowitz and Yale

In 1986, Horowitz and his wife, Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, decided to donate Horowitz’s personal collection to Yale. Its contents, which fill 164 boxes that reside in the Gilmore Music Library, include papers that “reflect the life and work” of the pianist and 218 discs of unpublished live recordings from Horowitz’s 1940s and 1950s Carnegie Hall recitals. Horowitz used these private recordings to study and evaluate his own performances.

The discs were copied onto tape by Yale’s Collection of Historical Sound Recordings, where they are now housed. Together, they represented the first discography of Horowitz’s private recordings — known as the “Yale Collection.”

Horowitz’s first performance at Yale was a recital in Woolsey Hall in 1966. He returned in 1968, one year before a five-year withdrawal from public performances, then performed a final time in Woolsey in 1980.

But Horowitz’s relationship with Yale extends beyond those three public performances. Daniel DiMaio ’74, now a professor of genetics at the School of Medicine, shared his experience as a Yale student with the legendary pianist with the News.

In 1972, John J. E. Palmer, the dean of Silliman College, chanced upon Horowitz at a party hosted by novelist William Styron. After meeting Horowitz, Palmer invited the pianist to become an associate fellow of Silliman College — “a total coincidence,” said DiMaio — which Horowitz accepted.

That year, Horowitz visited Yale for a conversation with a small number of students, including DiMaio, at Silliman College. According to DiMaio, Horowitz discussed plans to return to Yale to present a lecture-concert, but those plans never materialized.

DiMaio, a longtime fan of Horowitz, decided to take action. After obtaining the pianist’s address from the dean’s office, he reached out to Horowitz himself. A series of letters, phone calls and a telegram ensued, and before long, DiMaio had a date for a private recital from the “most famous pianist of all time,” he said, who, plagued by depression and performance anxiety, had not performed for the public in five years.

Horowitz insisted to DiMaio that only students in Silliman College, not faculty nor School of Music students, could come to hear him perform. On May 5, 1974, DiMaio and 30 other Silliman students traveled to Horowitz’s home in New York, where they were greeted by Wanda Horowitz before taking seats in their living room. 

“I was sitting literally five feet away from [Horowitz],” DiMaio said. “For classical music fans, it’s equivalent to going to Taylor Swift’s house for a concert in her living room.”

Horowitz performed a program of Clementi, Schumann, Chopin and Scriabin for the Yale students. DiMaio described how the pianist initially seemed “tense” but “relaxed” as the group of students showed their appreciation after each piece.

Two days later, DiMaio learned through national news that Horowitz would play for the public again. On May 12, just one week after his private recital for the Yale students, Horowitz performed a “flabbergastingly” triumphant return in Severance Hall in Cleveland — the “General MacArthur of piano has returned,”  the New York Times announced. 

“I think he saw us as a trial run,” DiMaio said. “Somewhere in the back of his mind, there was a kernel of ‘if this goes well, maybe I’ll perform again.’ And it went very well. We were very appreciative. So he decided to strike while the iron was hot. I’d like to think that we were the catalyst that made that happen.”

Last year, Berman received the program notes Horowitz distributed in the recital DiMaio described. The program notes sit framed in his office, and Horowitz’s signature is scrawled in the bottom left corner.

The pieces are listed in the same order Horowitz performed them in Cleveland, and each is accompanied by a description of the work. Berman told the News he believes the recital was what spurred the celebrated pianist out of his retirement cycle.

To DiMaio, Horowitz’s donations to Yale were a “sign of his enduring affection” for the University.

He likened Horowitz to Bob Dylan and Babe Ruth as “immortal” — “the best of his era, maybe of all time,” he said, and he noted that the Horowitz Series is a way to honor his legacy.

“Part of the university’s job is to keep alive what’s best from the past,” DiMaio said. “I think part of our responsibility is to make sure people respect the past, honor the past while making new discoveries and leaving them for the future. But part of leaving for the future is knowing what happened in the past. I hope people who don’t know who Horowitz was will see the name [of the Horowitz Series] and ask, ‘Who is this guy?’”

Horowitz Piano Series inception

Robert Blocker, a professor of piano, served as dean of the School of Music from 1995 to 2023. He recalled trying to find a way to acknowledge Horowitz’s legacy and his gifts to the school, ultimately deciding on a piano series.

He asked Berman, a world-renowned pianist who has served as a professor at the School of Music since 1984, to be the artistic director of the new Horowitz Piano Series.

“As our leader, our world-class pianist and scholar, and most importantly, our teacher, he was the ideal person to head the series,” Blocker said.

In the series’ inaugural season in 2000, Blocker said he decided that the series would be performed on Horowitz’s personal Steinway, which served him for decades in his New York home and gained fame for accompanying him on his tours. A crane would load the black, 990-pound Steinway and float it from his sixth-story studio to the sidewalk ahead of tours.

The storied piano found its way to Yale through Elaine Toscanini MUS ’55, Wanda Horowitz’s niece-in-law. Owned by the University, the piano is now currently on loan to the Steinway company. It will be displayed in Yale’s Morris Steinert Collection of Musical Instruments once the gallery reopens after renovation.

“You walk in, and you put your hand on [the piano], and you’re thinking, my God, this is unbelievable — Horowitz has played this piano, this was his instrument,” Blocker said. “I find inspiration, continuity in that.”

Blocker described the piano as “very difficult to control because of its fast action.” But he and the faculty had decided not to make adjustments to the piano in order to preserve the state Horowitz used it in, so they have not performed on the piano often since its inaugural series.

Berman said he tries to balance inviting “big stars with some lesser-known stars” for each year’s series. Since its opening season, the series has welcomed a wide array of world-renowned guest artists: among them Peter Serkin, Emanuel Ax, Yefim Bronfman, Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, Fou Ts’ong, Olga Kern, Angela Hewitt and Garrick Ohlsson.

The 2023-2024 season and beyond

On Oct. 18, Blocker will open this year’s season in Morse Recital Hall with pieces by Scarlatti, Schubert, Beethoven and Ginastera. To Blocker, programming is a “personal issue.” He said that “looking for connections to where we live and work” is important in deciding what he wishes to present to an audience.

On Nov. 8, Berman will perform a program with pieces by Debussy, Mozart, Prokofiev and Schoenberg. 

Composing a concert program is “art in itself,” according to Berman. Each performer approaches programming differently, and each concert calls for a different approach to programming. Sometimes, he said he wants a monograph program of one composer; other times, he wants as much contrast as possible.

“Those who will follow the whole [Horowitz] Series will see these differing concepts of programming,” Berman said. “The program reflects the personality of the performance.”

On Dec. 8, Wei-Yi Yang will perform the third concert on the series. Yang said he is taking the “road less traveled” with his program, performing music from Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu and late Scriabin works, hoping that they will complement music from more canonical composers.

While Yang said it is impossible to overvalue the canons — Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Bach, he listed — he finds it “stimulating” to create a new context both for less played music that does not fit the traditional concept of classical style and for underrepresented composers whose music was “unjustly unheard.”

“Especially in a series where the only instrument is the piano, it’s important to show the variety and scope of classical music — the performance practice, the context, the idea of sonority, of harmonic, varies so much from style to style,” Yang said.

But two performers choosing the same, canonical piece also provides an opportunity for audiences to experience this variation. A contained series like the Horowitz Series, he said, offers an “efficient” way for audiences to find “variations and differing point of views” — by hearing one concept to the next, it allows them to create their own view of how broad the listening experience can really be.

Yang said that encountering “variation” in performances is integral to his concept of music.

“Words can only do so much. Then, music speaks and translates for us; it’s completely personal and individual,” Yang said. “One person can latch on to certain aspects and the next person would hear different things that would take them to different places, remember different times, imagine different narratives.”

This individuality finds its form within the different ways audience members create narratives and recall memories upon listening to the same music. 

Michael Friedmann, a professor emeritus of music, said he believes classical music is in a period of transition in terms of “finding its proper level and niche of audience” — a confrontation which he thinks the Horowitz Series embraces.

“I think that the performers are always trying to reach out to make their music salient for the current audience — those that are in attendance and those that could be in the future in attendance,” Friedmann said. “All of the performers on this series give conscious and focused thought to the issues of expanding the audience. And the results speak for themselves.”

While Blocker is cautious of losing focus on having a series “honoring one of the greatest pianists and the massive amounts of literature for pianists,” he said that transition has always been a part of classical music — and that musicians should embrace change, “new sounds,” and “new ways of creating and presenting music.” 

The Horowitz Series does not try to pinpoint a certain period, and performers frequently perform new commissioned works, Blocker said.

Through the Horowitz Series, Yang said he hopes to imbue the value of live music in the next generation.

“Sometimes, people think about classical music as easy to put in an attic because it’s in the past, but it’s repertoire that’s constantly being renewed because we have live performances that bring new light, interpretation, and perspective,” Yang said. “The listener is not passive [in these concerts] — the listener also participates and creates this synergy that is interfaced between the public and the performer.”

Faculty pianist Melvin Chen will perform the fourth concert Jan. 24. Then, Hélène Grimaud will perform Bach’s Chaconne along with Beethoven and Brahms the following week. Emanuel Ax will perform Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata and music by Schoenberg on Feb. 28. 

On March 27, faculty pianist Boris Slutsky and his former student, Eric Zuber, will close out the Series with a two-piano program commemorating Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 150th birthday.

Tickets for the concerts start at $17. Yale faculty and staff can purchase tickets for $12, and students can buy them for $8.

The post Tracing the origins of the Horowitz Piano Series ahead of this year’s season appeared first on Yale Daily News.

He lifted his baton, and low horns and bassoons answered.

On Friday night, the Yale Philharmonia, joined by treble voices from the Yale Glee Club, the Elm City Girls’ Choir and mezzo-soprano Kara Morgan MUS ’24, performed Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. 

“Mahler demands us to be everything,” Oundjian said. “He demands us to be anything he could conceive of that exists in the world, whether it’s wild animals dancing or the most tender depiction of what you think a flower might sound like if a flower could sing.”

Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 is the longest piece in standard repertoire. Its colossal first movement alone has a duration of around 35 minutes and forms Part One of the symphony. 

Part Two, which has a duration of around 60 minutes, contains the other five movements. 

“To write a symphony is to construct a world,” Mahler once said. 

To Oundjian, Mahler’s third symphony exemplifies this idea of world creation — the piece explores the “development of mankind’s sophistication” through its six movements, he said.

Originally, Mahler had written a program to the symphony. Although he dropped their titles before publication, each movement represents a hierarchical evolution of human divinity. The movements evolve from nature — the first movement titled “Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In” — to flowers and animals, then to the torment of mankind and angels, before ending with “What Love Tells Me.” 

The first movement featured a trombone solo played by Jude Morris MUS ’25 that starts off as a representation of “the voice of death” but evolves throughout the movement into something “tender and sensitive,” Oundjian said. 

“This is the most important piece in [trombone] repertoire,” Morris said. “It is something that will change me as a musician.”

After the first movement, the audience broke into applause, which Oundjian acknowledged. He then took a break — Mahler called for a “long pause” at this point — before launching into the second movement. The second movement, which was originally titled “What the Flowers Tell Me,” is intended to evoke the image of flowers in a meadow.

The third movement, originally titled “What the Creatures of the Forest Tell Me,” is a scherzo and depicts a forest with animals dancing.

Morgan joined the Philharmonia in the fourth movement, pulling the symphony into a darker direction with her singing.

In this movement, Mahler used text from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Also Sprach Zarathusa” as lyrics. The Yale Symphony Orchestra will perform Richard Strauss’s tone poem with the same name on Sept. 30. Morgan sang out over the orchestra, at times cutting through the slow, rocking notes, at times entering wailing dialogue alongside a solo violin played by Concertmaster Jeein Kim MUS ’24.

The fifth movement opened with the Elm City Girls’ Choir singing “Bimm! Bamm,” imitating the sound of the real bells in the orchestra that accompanied their voices. 

As opposed to their usual melodic function, the chorus’s “quasi-angelic texture” gets to become “a part of the instrumental, a part of the landscape,” said Rebecca Rosenbaum, director of the Elm City Girls’ Choir, who received a doctorate of musical arts from the School of Music.

The treble voices of the Glee Club carried most of the text of the fifth movement, which comes from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” a published collection of German folk poems and songs. Morgan juxtaposed her voice against the choruses’ carol-like song, again pulling the movement toward a darker place.

Both Jeffery Douma, director of the Glee Club, and Rosenbaum echoed that even though their choruses only joined the Philharmonia for a short, five-minute movement, their preparation was keen on fitting into the larger scale of the piece.

Douma said that the Glee Club talked in rehearsal about “Mahler’s concept for the symphony” and the relationship between the fifth movement and its peers across the work. 

Douma also highlighted the Glee Club’s short timeline to practice, with only one rehearsal to put the piece together with the orchestra.

The sixth and final movement was originally titled “What Love Tells Me” or “What God Tells Me” — Mahler uses “love” and “God” interchangeably. The movement spanned 25 minutes and explored “every” element of human feeling, according to Oundijan. 

“It’s about our sense of doubt, our sense of longing, our sense of beauty and ultimately our sense of the power of nobility,” he added.

Oundjian, an internationally renowned conductor who has served as the music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, has conducted the piece several times. 

He told the News that it is “almost impossible” to be invited as a guest conductor to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, saying that it is a music director piece.

One challenge of playing a piece of this scale, Oundjian said, is amassing a large orchestra of individuals who can express themselves like actors in a play.

“It’s that exchange of energy between the conductor, the players and the listeners that makes a concert truly exciting, and the musicians in the Philharmonia make this possible,” he said. 

Timpani strokes and expansive brass chords concluded the symphony, and the Friday evening performance closed out with a standing ovation from the audience at Woolsey Hall.

Oundjian told the News he loves connecting with the audience and added that he finds this connection increasingly important in the current world’s social and political climate.

“Harmony seems to be the most important thing we could do for the world at the moment, and there’s a whole bunch of people who we wish we could get to listen to [these performances] and experience what it’s like to actually agree,” he said.

For this year’s season, Oundjian said he is aiming to give the Philharmonia a variety of performance experiences.

The Philharmonia’s next concert features Valerie Coleman’s “Umoja,” Adolphus Hailstork’s “JFK: The Last Speech” and Joan Tower’s “Concerto for Orchestra” — all pieces by living, American composers. 

The Yale Glee Club and the Elm City Girls’ Choir will join the Yale Symphony Orchestra in April to perform Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem.”

The post Yale Philharmonia opens season with Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The Emerson String Quartet gave their last performance as part of the School of Music’s Oneppo Chamber Series. The Emerson String Quartet, hailed as “America’s greatest quartet” by Time Magazine, has held a central position in the genre of string quartets. After more than four decades as one of the world’s premier chamber music ensembles, the quartet will disband in October.

“With musicians like these, there must be some hope for humanity,” Jose García-León, dean of the School of Music, quoted from the London Times to a sold-out crowd. “I am not very far off in age, but I grew up listening and cherishing their recordings. I, as I’m sure many others, learned much about music from their superbly artistic performances, and for that I’m very grateful.”

As one of the biggest names in classical music, the quartet has made more than 30 acclaimed recordings and has been honored with nine GRAMMYs, three Gramophone Classical Music Awards and the Avery Fisher Prize — a prize awarded to the most outstanding American classical musicians. 

Their discography includes the complete string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, Anton Webern and Dmitri Shostakovich. 

“They’ve been at the center of the entire genre for almost half a century now, recording everything, commissioning works and performing around the world,” said Gregory Lewis, a violinist of the Callisto Quartet and the Yale College’s Fellowship Quartet in Residence. 

The quartet is composed of violinists Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist Paul Watkins, who currently serves as the School of Music’s Polak Family Professor in the Practice of Cello.

As festival artists for many years at the Yale School of Music’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the quartet’s connections with Yale run deep. The quartet members are close colleagues of many members of the School of Music faculty — they have performed extensively with School of Music Professors Ani Kavafian and David Schifrin. Schifrin is also the artistic director for the YSM’s Oneppo Chamber Music Series and worked with the Emerson Quartet to create the program for Tuesday’s concert.

During the concert, they danced through a diverse program, opening with “Lyric for Strings” by George Walker, the first Black composer to receive a Pulitzer Prize in Music.

After hearing the piece in its string orchestra version played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Riccardo Muti, the quartet was “struck by how beautiful it was” and knew they wanted to put it in their repertoire, said Setzer. Additionally, Setzer said Walker told him that he wanted the quartet to play the piece for him, but Walker passed in 2018 — before they could play it for him. 

“Drink the Wild Ayre”, the quartet’s last commissioned work by Sarah Kirkland Snider MUS ’05 MUS ’06, was the second piece of the concert. 

“We picked [Snider] from a wide range of some of the most wonderful composing talent in the country,” said Watkins. “[Snider’s] writing really appealed to us from other quartets, and she had also been composer in residence at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which is a festival that I’m artistic director for, so we knew her pieces quite well.”

To Snider, collaborating with the Emerson Quartet was one of the “most meaningful artistic experiences of her life,” she said.

The quartet’s interpretations of the great string quartets were like “gospel” to her, Snider said. She added that she was honored to be asked to write for such an influential group of musicians, comparing it to being asked to write for “the Beatles.”

“There’s not a whiff of ego in the room, which is astonishing for a group this legendary, but you quickly realize that is the secret to their success,” Snider told the News. “They treat each other, and the composer, with consummate respect and collegiality, listening to each other’s ideas and suggestions with genuine openness and interest, with the shared goal of transforming notes on the page into magic.”

Following Snider’s piece, the quartet performed Mendelssohn’s colorful String Quartet No. 2 in A minor — one of Setzer’s top five favorite string quartets.

Then, after an intermission, they tackled Beethoven’s infamous String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, a piece known for its beloved slow movement, the Cavatina and the visionary and monumental Grosse Fugue.

The audience on Tuesday night was aware of the gravity of the moment they were witnessing. Cheers and ovations that lasted minutes welcomed the quartet to stage well before they played their first note — a welcome not lost on Setzer, who was “very moved” by the “warmth” he felt from the audience, he said. 

“I think you applauded louder before we played,” Setzer said to the audience before their performance of the Mendelssohn, leading to another round of cheers and applause.

As a professor at Yale, Watkins explained that there is a certain amount of extra pressure they feel when playing in front of colleagues and students.

The quartet was “keenly aware” that the audience on Tuesday was one of the “most knowledgeable and distinguished” that they had ever played for, Watkins said.

But to Watkins, this awareness was a positive element. 

“It became a really intense performance because as performers, we can sense different levels of concentration in an audience, and it really did seem like Tuesday represented the highest level of concentration and appreciation,” he said. “So, by the time we finished the Grosse Fugue, we were invigorated by the whole thing.”

Many of the audience attendees on Tuesday night were students, and Setzer found the amount of young faces in the audience a “beautiful” reminder that classical music is not going to disappear when there are so many “wonderful young people learning and loving music,” he said.

After the Beethoven, the crowd gave the quartet a standing ovation, prompting them to perform an encore — “Vor deinen Thron Tret’ ich hiermit,” a chorale by J.S. Bach that was “taken by dictation, something that students here might shiver to hear,” said Watkins to the audience. 

On Wednesday, Setzer and Drucker taught a masterclass open to the public with the Callisto Quartet. 

Setzer first worked with the Callisto Quartet in 2018 at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Then, they spent a few summers at the Great Lakes Music Festival, where they had “a mentor-student relationship” with the Emerson Quartet, said Lewis.

“They are one of the reasons I wanted to spend my life playing string quartets,” said Hannah Moses, cellist of the Callisto Quartet. “They offer the rare perspective of people who have studied the vast quartet repertoire together for over four decades. After the impact they have had on my musical life, it has been an honor to have the chance to learn from them and to be present at one of their final concerts.”

Although the quartet is disbanding, they are not retiring. All of them will continue to play and teach.

According to Watkins, “it was a farewell gift, not a retirement gift.”

Watkins said he looks forward to focusing his energies towards his professorship at Yale.

“I’m very happy that we managed to get a performance at Yale so close to our final performance as a quartet because it feels like I’m closing a circle with my time at the Emerson Quartet while opening another circle as a professor of cello at Yale,” said Watkins, who replaced David Finckel as the quartet’s cellist in 2013. “Because if it wasn’t for the Emerson Quartet inviting me over to America in the first place, I don’t think I would have had the opportunity to teach at Yale.”

Setzer, Dutton and Drucker will continue to teach at Stony Brook University, the home of the Emerson String Quartet Institute. 

“The Emerson Quartet means everything to me,” said Lewis.

The Emerson Quartet will perform their final concert together at the Lincoln Center on Oct. 22.

The post Emerson String Quartet bids farewell to Yale appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The event marked the second time the duo, composed of violinists Eddy Chen and Brett Yang, has visited Yale. With 4.12 million subscribers and 1.40 billion views on YouTube, TwoSet Violin is now one of the most-watched classical music related channels on YouTube. Their visit at Yale marked the first stop on their 2023 world tour — they arrived in New Haven from Australia mere hours before the event.

“They’re really the face of the younger classical musician community, and over the past ten years, they’ve revolutionized the image of classical music for a lot of students and younger people,” said Atticus Margulis-Ohnuma ’25, president of the Yale Symphony Orchestra.

The duo first visited Yale in the fall of 2018 when Mary Lui, Head of Timothy Dwight College, invited them after seeing one of their videos pop up in her YouTube feed. As a former orchestral musician herself, Lui said she thought their videos were “one of the funniest things [she had] ever seen.” 

Then, Lui decided she would host the pair in her house, which has a 50-person capacity, as she expected a modest showing. Worried there would not be enough of an audience, she tried reaching out to local neighborhood music schools to bring in more people. Her suspicions were wrong.

“I thought I would just have a small crowd of classical music enthusiasts, but I ended up having my house crammed full with hundreds of students,” she said. “I had no idea they were actually really famous.”

So when the Australian duo said they were doing a world tour and were interested in visiting Yale again this year, Lui decided to host the event in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall. Free tickets sold out hours after opening up to all students.

On Thursday night, Chen and Yang were greeted onto stage by thunderous applause before performing an arrangement for two violins of Handel-Halvorsen’s famous Passacaglia — a famous virtuoso piece usually done with a violin and a cello — in G minor.

Lui then joined them for a brief interview before opening the conversation up to a Q&A with attendees. The duo discussed performance nerves and their experience with classical music while bantering with students about their favorite instruments.

Estelle Balsirow ’26, an oboist in the Yale Symphony Orchestra, asked Chen and Yang for their opinion on oboists, leading into a conversation in which Chen and Yang began asking Balsirow about her own journey to becoming an oboist.

“TwoSet helps me balance the world of classical music and our modern times with humor and charm,” said Balsirow. “Talking to them made me realize that they are just as funny and sweet in person as they are on the screen.”

Lui said she is constantly looking for ways to support Yale’s classical music community. 

Last year, she invited Grammy-winning violinist Hilary Hahn to the University last year as a Timothy Dwight Chubb Fellow, 

“In a [classical music] environment that can be so competitive and cutthroat, the joy of playing can sometimes escape students — [students] are always vulnerable putting themselves out there,” Lui said. “To play at a high level, one has to put in a lot of work and dedication. But that doesn’t mean music is only for people who can do that. Music is for everyone, and we can all take enjoyment from it somehow.”

Chen and Yang both attended conservatory and worked as professional classical violinists in the Sydney Symphony and Queensland Symphony Orchestras, respectively. They resigned their positions in 2016 to host live classical-comedy performances, soon becoming the first-ever crowdfunded classical world tour. They have collaborated with some of the biggest names in classical music, including Hahn, Lang Lang, James Ehnes and Janine Jansen.

Their videos focus on life as classical musicians at conservatory and poke fun at what Ella Saputra ’27, a violinist and attendee at the event, said is a field often considered to be  “boring and stuffy.” 

“TwoSet makes the world of classical music accessible to everyone, even non-musicians — they really show that classical music can be something that’s fun and enjoyable, no matter your musical background or experience,” Saputra said.

To Lui, this element of accessibility that the duo exudes is how she chooses who she invites to Yale. Because Chen and Yang have gone through serious classical training themselves, their humor is not only relatable to musicians, but it also gets to the roots of many of the “power dynamics” that classical music often suffers from, she said.

Lui finds their story “incredibly important” for the music community at Yale. She describes them as two successful classical musicians who could have stayed in the “symphony route” but wanted to do more — they wanted classical music to reach more people and to be “something fun.” 

“Especially here at Yale, where so many students came out of a [classical music] background of dedication and hard work, students can often feel like something is missing or gone when they don’t do that anymore,” said Lui. “And it’s important to realize that no, the music really hasn’t left you. The grind has left you, but the music hasn’t.”

TwoSet Violin’s next stops include sold-out shows in some of the United States’ most prestigious venues, including the David Geffen Hall in New York and Symphony Hall in Boston.

The post Classical comedy violin duo TwoSet Violin performs on campus appeared first on Yale Daily News.

García-León served as The Juilliard School’s dean of academic affairs and assessment for nine years. He succeeds Robert Blocker, who had a 28-year tenure at the School of Music.

“The school is in a wonderful place right now,” García-León said. “I arrive with a sense of awe and admiration. My goal is to honor the school’s great history and reputation while finding ways to invigorate the general training and establish new paths towards the future.”

Born in Seville, Spain, García-León graduated from the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Sevilla with highest honors before earning his bachelor’s degree in music from the State University of New York at Binghamton and his doctorate in piano performance from the Manhattan School of Music. 

Prior to his time at Juilliard, García-León was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Haven. 

His decision to switch from a professorship to an administrative role was “sparked” by his goal of helping students and faculty in a “more substantial way” by working within the administration. 

Emily Bakemeier, vice provost for arts and faculty affairs at Yale, chaired the University’s search committee. The search process, which she described as “very rigorous,” combined efforts from two groups: Bakemeier’s Yale search committee, composed of faculty from the School of Music and other related areas of the University, and Isaacson, Miller — an external search firm that includes professionals who specialize in the arts.

The Yale search committee first engaged in “stakeholder conversations” with School of Music faculty, staff, students and alumni before writing a position description. Then, after they received applications, the committee interviewed applicants and nominees, narrowing down the field to a few candidates before sending the names to University President Peter Salovey for the final decision.

“The Yale School of Music is the premier school of music in the world, so we were looking for the best in the world,” Bakemeier said. “We wanted someone who is a leader in the arts, and, for the music school in particular, a musician themself, who understands a complex, educational institution and its workings and has the highest standards of excellence for a school of music.”

Alec Chai MUS ’24, a student involved in the search committee’s stakeholder conversations, cited the School of Music’s renowned faculty and the full scholarships and stipends that it provides its students as “an incredible gift” from Blocker’s tenure.

But there are “opportunities of growth” that Chai hopes García-León will address during his deanship.

“I’ve heard students express a desire for expansion in certain programs, such as performance of baroque, contemporary and jazz music,” Chai said. “Many of us performers also wish there were more opportunities for individual and chamber music performances.”

García-León’s scholarly research focuses on the similarities and differences between Argentine tango and tango flamenco, the roots of multiculturalism in flamenco music and music composition. As dean, he hopes to balance “well-versed tradition” with “new expertise in the latest trends in the field.”

He said that this balance is even more important today, noting that the “pace and range of change” of transformation in the world of classical music has “increased greatly” over the last several years.

“We are in the midst of a time of renewal in the profession, both in the ways music is shared with audiences, be it recorded or live, and in terms of which music should be prioritized and showcased in performances,” García-León said. “The curriculum needs to be as current and relevant to the profession as we can possibly make it.”

García-León is in “complete agreement” with Chai’s hopes for additional performance opportunities and expanded programs in baroque, contemporary and jazz.

He looks forward to having many conversations with current students and alumni like Chai “to incorporate their feedback and suggestions in [his] planning.”

“Musicians can only benefit from having the choice to expand their training to include a variety of styles and traditions,” he said. “Not only will it help them be more versatile as performers, but I firmly believe it will also help them understand more deeply their own craft in classical music.”

He also hopes to develop more performance opportunities for students. To this end, he wants to “create and nurture” a sense of community beyond the school, a quality that he believes is tied closely to “welcoming and engaging” student events and performances.

For García-León, collaboration and openness are integral to expansion in more non-traditional programs. García-León said that collaboration is key to “where music is heading.” He hopes to connect the School of Music with other areas of the University and beyond.

“We need to start with enhancing collaboration from what is closest to us, within the [School of Music], but also — and very importantly — with other areas of the university,” García-León said. “So that, as it develops, it can expand to the New Haven area and beyond. I hope students will relish the opportunity to create community wherever they are, starting at the [School of Music] and Yale, and later on, wherever they go.”

García-León has performed as a solo piano recitalist at prestigious venues around the world, including the Big Hall at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and the St. Petersburg International Music Festival. He is a member of the Northeast Chapter of the College Music Society and the Music Teachers National Association. 

“It is an honor and a privilege to serve [the students and faculty at the School of Music] in every way I can,” García-León said.

The School of Music offers three graduate degrees: master’s degrees in music and musical arts, and a doctoral degree in musical arts.

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