Miller Theatre Presents Bach Keyboard Concertos With Dinnerstein, Pratt, Farouk And Early Music With Tallis Scholars

Miller Theatre at Columbia University School of the Arts continues its BACH and EARLY MUSIC series with Bach Keyboard Concertos, the final concert in the Simone Dinnerstein-curated Bach series features pianists Simone Dinnerstein, Wael Farouk, Awadagin Pratt with Ensemble Baroklyn, on Thursday, December 8, 8:00 P.M. at Miller Theatre (2960 Broadway at 116th Street.

Tallis Scholars will present Hymns to the Virgin. The Virgin Mary has served as inspiration for artists of all forms, including composers since the earliest days of sacred music. The Tallis Scholars - "the rock stars of Renaissance vocal music" (The New York Times) - return to perform a selection of such inspired works from both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, ranging from Josquin to Pärt. Taking place Saturday, December 10, 8:00 P.M.
Church of St. Mary the Virgin (145 W. 46th Street)

American pianist Simone Dinnerstein is known as "an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity" (The Washington Post). Her self-produced recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations in 2007 brought her considerable attention, with The New York Times calling her "a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation." She has made thirteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard classical charts, with repertoire ranging from Couperin to Glass. Her most recent album is Undersong (Orange Mountain Music, 2022), the final installment in the trilogy of albums she recorded during the pandemic.

The New York-based pianist's schedule has taken her around the world, playing with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai, and the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, which she brought from Cuba to tour the United States for the very first time. She has also played in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Seoul Arts Center, and the Sydney Opera House.

Performance highlights include Piano Concerto No. 3, a composition by Philip Glass for her that was co-commissioned by twelve American and Canadian orchestras; New Work for Goldberg Variations, a collaboration with choreographer Pam Tanowitz; and the premiere of André Previn and Tom Stoppard's Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Aspen music festivals, working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet. Most recently, she created her own string ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs from the keyboard. Their performance of Bach's cantata Ich Habe Genug in March 2020 filmed live at Miller Theatre and streamed to audiences was the last concert they gave before New York City shut down.

Last season, she gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she has conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein's painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives's Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord). She premiered Richard Danielpour's An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos placed throughout Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. She also performed the work live at Columbia University's Butler Library for Miller Theatre's Live from Columbia virtual concert series. She also joined Renée Fleming, the Emerson String Quartet, and Uma Thurman for performances of André Previn and Tom Stoppard's Penelope at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.

Dedicated to her community in Brooklyn, Dinnerstein founded Neighborhood Classics in 2009, a concert series that raises funds for music education programs in New York City schools, and Bachpacking, a music program for elementary schools. A graduate of The Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music, Dinnerstein is on the faculty of the Mannes School of Music.

Wael Farouk, piano
waelfarouk.com

Praised as a "formidable and magnificent pianist" by the New York Concert Review, Egyptian-American pianist Wael Farouk is known for his groundbreaking performance projects. In 2021, Dr. Farouk gave a performance of Rachmaninoff's concerti Nos. 1, 2, and 3 in a single evening with the New Philharmonic Orchestra and Conductor Kirk Muspratt, which the Chicago Tribune described as a "history-making concert."

Dr. Farouk commands a vast repertoire of more than 70 concertos and 60 solo programs, spanning from Scarlatti to Bolcom, and including the complete piano works of J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff as well as the complete sonatas of Prokofiev, Scriabin, and Schubert. He has appeared as a soloist with such orchestras as the North Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, the Saint-Etienne National Orchestra, the Academy of the Arts Orchestra, the Manhattan Symphony, and the Cairo Symphony Orchestra. Since 2014, he has performed 30 different recital programs featuring the complete solo piano works of Rachmaninoff and Brahms, as well as Brahms's complete piano chamber music. Other programs included works by Chopin, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel, Bolcom, Busoni, and Godowsky; the complete Transcendental Etudes by Liszt; Bach's The Art of Fugue, and Beethoven's Hammerklavier. He has also performed the complete piano concertos of Rachmaninoff, Brahms, and Beethoven (including all five Beethoven concertos in a single concert). In 2017, he gave the African premiere of the monumental Busoni piano concerto with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra. His solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 2013 was described as "absolutely masterful."

Dr. Farouk received his B.M at the Cairo Conservatory followed by a Fulbright Fellowship, which brought him to the U.S. to study with Marilyn Neeley at the Catholic University of America. He received an M.M. from Converse College and a D.M.A. degree from Rutgers University. Dr. Farouk is on the piano faculty at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, and the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Born in Pittsburgh, Awadagin Pratt began studying piano at the age of six and three years later began studying violin after moving to Normal, IL with his family. At the age of 16, he entered the University of Illinois where he studied piano, violin, and conducting. He later enrolled at the Peabody Conservatory of Music where he became the first student in the school's history to receive diplomas in three performance areas - piano, violin, and conducting. In 1992, Pratt won the Naumburg International Piano Competition and two years later was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Johns Hopkins in 2008 and an honorary doctorate from Illinois Wesleyan University in 2012.

Pratt has played numerous recitals throughout the U.S. including performances at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, Chicago's Orchestra Hall, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. His orchestral performances include appearances with the New York Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, National, Detroit, and New Jersey symphonies, among many others. Summer festival engagements include appearances at Ravinia, Blossom, Wolf Trap, Caramoor, Aspen, and the Hollywood Bowl. Internationally, Pratt has toured Japan four times and performed in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Israel, Columbia, and South Africa. In 2009, he was one of four artists selected to perform at the White House, including student workshops hosted by the First Lady Michelle Obama, and a concert for guests including President Obama. He has performed two other times at the White House, at the invitation of President and Mrs. Clinton. Pratt has also conducted programs with the Toledo, New Mexico, Vancouver (WA), Winston-Salem, Santa Fe, and Prince George County symphonies, the Northwest Sinfonietta, the Concertante di Chicago, and several orchestras in Japan.

Pratt's recordings for Angel/EMI include an all Beethoven Sonata CD, A Long Way From Normal; Live From South Africa; Transformations; and an all Bach disc with the St. Lawrence String Quartet. His most recent recordings are the Brahms Sonatas for Cello and Piano with Zuill Bailey (Telarc) and a recording of the music of Judith Lang Zaimont with the Harlem Quartet (Navona Records).

Pratt is currently a professor of piano at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati (CCM). He has served as the artistic director of the World Piano Competition in Cincinnati and is currently the artistic director of the Art of the Piano Festival at CCM. He also serves on the faculty of the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina where he coaches chamber music, teaches individual pianists, and performs chamber music and concertos with the festival orchestra.

The Tallis Scholars were founded in 1973 by their director, Peter Phillips. Through their recordings and concert performances, they have established themselves as the leading exponents of Renaissance sacred music throughout the world. Phillips has worked with the ensemble to create the purity and clarity of sound which he feels best serves the Renaissance repertoire. It is the resulting beauty of sound for which the Tallis Scholars have become so widely renowned.

The Tallis Scholars perform in both sacred and secular venues, giving around 80 concerts each year. In 2013 the group celebrated their 40th anniversary with a world tour, and now look ahead to their 50th anniversary in 2023. Prior to the cancellations caused by the pandemic, the Tallis Scholars had made 2,327 appearances worldwide.

Season highlights for 2022-23 include performances in Australia, New York, Boston, Amsterdam, Zurich, Paris, Italy, and London, in addition to their regular touring schedule around the U.S., Europe, and the U.K. In a monumental project to mark Josquin des Prez' 500th anniversary, the Tallis Scholars sang all eighteen of the composer's masses over the course of four days at the Boulez Saal in Berlin in July 2022.

Recordings by the Tallis Scholars have attracted many awards throughout the world. The latest recording of Josquin masses including Missa Hercules Dux Ferrarie (2022) was the winner of the BBC Music Magazine's Recording of the Year Award in 2021 and the 2021 Gramophone Early Music Award. This disc was the last of nine albums in the Tallis Scholars' project to record and release all Josquin's masses before the 500th anniversary of the composer's death in 2021.

Peter Phillips has dedicated his career to the research and performance of Renaissance polyphony, and to the perfecting of choral sound. He founded The Tallis Scholars in 1973, with whom he has now appeared in over 2,300 concerts and made over 60 discs, world-wide. As a result of this commitment Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars have done more than any other group to establish the sacred vocal music of the Renaissance as one of the great repertoires of Western classical music.

Peter Phillips also conducts other specialist ensembles. He is currently working with the BBC Singers, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Intrada (Moscow), and El Leon de Oro (Spain). He is Patron of the Chapel Choir of Merton College Oxford.

In addition to conducting, Peter Phillips is well-known as a writer. For 33 years he contributed a regular music column to The Spectator. In 1995 he became the publisher of The Musical Times, the oldest continuously published music journal in the world. His first book, English Sacred Music 1549-1649, was published by Gimell in 1991, while his second, What We Really Do, appeared in 2013. During 2018, BBC Radio 3 broadcast his view of Renaissance polyphony, in a series of six hour-long programs, entitled The Glory of Polyphony. In 2005 Peter Phillips was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. In 2008 Peter helped to found the chapel choir of Merton College Oxford, where he is a Bodley Fellow; and in 2021 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford.

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