Gilded Goldbergs, a reimagining of Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations, by the English composer Robin Holloway, will receive its New York premiere on Tuesday, February 7 at 7:30 p.m. at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.
The piece, written for two pianos, will be performed by Steven Ryan and Catherine Venable. The concert is one of five events in The Dessoff Choirs Midwinter Festival: Refracted Bach. Holloway initially wrote Gilded Goldbergs so that he could play Bach’s notoriously difficult keyboard work on two pianos with friends. Over a period of years he developed it into a concert-hall piece. It received its world premiere in 1998.
According to The Dessoff Choirs’ Music Director Christopher Shepard, who organized the Refracted Bach festival: “Robin, who taught for three decades at Cambridge, and was a music critic with The Spectator for many years, has a stunning breadth of musical knowledge. That expertise is in full evidence in the Gilded Goldbergs: not only does he refract Bach’s music through the prism of his own compositional style, but he also hits upon a number of other composers along the way.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Steven Ryan, pianist
For 13 seasons, Steven Ryan has been Dessoff’s accompanist and featured keyboard soloist. He has played celesta with the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall; piano, harpsichord, and portative organ with Dessoff; and synthesizer with the Moody Blues. Conductors he has collaborated with include Vladimir Ashkenazy, Charles Dutoit, Neemi Jäarvi, Sir Neville Marriner, Gerard Schwarz, and Maxim Shostakovich. Mr. Ryan is a regular accompanist at Montclair State
University, working with the choirs and in voice studios. In recent years he has performed in Russia and France, and played several solos with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and the Greater Trenton Symphony Orchestra.
Catherine Venable, pianist
Catherine Venable has been a pianist on Broadway for The Light in the Piazza, Curtains, Sondheim on Sondheim, Wonderful Town (as Brooke Shields’s rehearsal accompanist), Beauty and the Beast, The Apple Tree, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Anything Goes, The Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, My Fair Lady with the New York Philharmonic, Casino Paradise at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Where’s Charley? at Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert at Town Hall. Catherine is a staff accompanist at New York University and New Jersey City University. She
made her Weill Recital Hall debut in 2008 accompanying tenor Brian Cheney.
Robin Holloway, composer
Robin Holloway sang as a chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral and studied composition with Alexander Goehr as a teenager. He was a lecturer in music at Cambridge University for 32 years between 1975 and 2011, teaching a generation of composers including Judith Weir and Thomas Adès. His works of the 1960s show a modernist stance, culminating in the First Concerto for Orchestra (completed 1969). This attitude has remained one strand of Holloway’s thought as
demonstrated by such works as Evening with Angels (1972), the Second Concerto for Orchestra (1979), and two works for the London Sinfonietta, Aria (1979–80) and the Double Concerto (1987–88). His study of language, style, and quotation for his doctoral thesis, Debussy and Wagner, led him to explore a radical liaison of Romanticism and tonality, as in Scenes from Schumann (1969–70); the opera Clarissa (1976), premiered in 1990 at English National Opera under Oliver Knussen; and Seascape and Harvest (1983–4), composed for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle. Holloway’s discography includes premiere recordings of the Second and Third Concertos for Orchestra on NMC, the former winning the 1994 Gramophone Contemporary Record of the Year Award; the Violin Concerto and Horn Concerto played by Ernst Kovacic and Barry Tuckwell (recently re-released on the NMC label); and a CD reissue of Sea surface
full of clouds and Romanza (Chandos). Gilded Goldbergs and Fantasy Pieces and Serenade in C, played by the Nash Ensemble, are available on Hyperion. Two volumes of Holloway’s collected writings, Essays and Diversions, were published in 2003 and 2008.
Holloway’s works from the 1990s include Scenes from Antwerp written as the culmination of a residency with the Royal Flanders Philharmonic; Clarissa Sequence for soprano and orchestra, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas; and his First Symphony, premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Donald Runnicles at the 2000 BBC Proms. Recent works include a Fourth Concerto for Orchestra premiered by the San Francisco Symphony under Tilson Thomas in 2007; RELIQUARY, incorporating music by Schumann for the 2010 BBC Proms; and a Fifth Concerto for Orchestra premiered at the BBC Proms under the baton of Donald Runnicles in 2011. Robin Holloway is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes.
