Born in Massachusetts, the heart of New England where the American Revolution was born, pianist Mackenzie Melemed is 60% on his way to performing his recital tour Keys Across America in every state in the nation, which began last year and will continue through 2028. Expectedly, Melemed has selected an all-American repertoire for this tour.
Traveling from Finland, where he has lived for six years, Melemed is beginning the spring leg of his ongoing tour in Salt Lake City with Americana, the upcoming concert of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation (March 13, 7:30 p.m., Jeanné Wagner Theatre at The Rose). For regular Bachauer audiences, Melemed’s program should be invigorating and fresh, as he performs both familiar and lesser-known works by the likes of Aaron Copland, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, Louis Moreau-Gottschalk, Edward MacDowell, Florence Price, Ned Rorem and major contemporaries Laura Kaminsky and Avner Dorman.
Melemed’s latest SLC appearance fits nicely, as Bachauer prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary. At 17, in 2012, he took fifth prize in the junior artists competition and then returned in 2018, where he advanced to the international artists’ competition semifinals. He also forged friendships with Stephen Beus, the 2006 Bachauer gold medalist who is on the Brigham Young University music faculty, and with John and Betsy Nagel, who live in Holladay, and hosted him for both competitions.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Melemed fondly recalled the experiences of his first visit to Utah. During the summer of his junior year, he applied to several piano competitions to determine his direction going forward in college. He also was interested in psychology and linguistics and was thinking about dual degree options at schools such as Oberlin and Harvard. “It was a turning point and I was encouraged by my success in competitions,” he said, adding that the experience set the stage to do concerts in the Czech Republic.
Melemed said staying with the Nagels, his first trip to the western U.S. etched lifelong memories of Utah for him. “We went to Park City and Kamas, where I had a mile high root beer float [at Hi-Mountain burger eatery inside an old drugstore],” he said. “When I came back six years later and stayed with them again, I felt like it was returning to my second home.” In between the two competitions, Melemed also visited the Nagels who were friends with an organist of the Salt Lake Tabernacle on Temple Square and arranged for him to play the instrument.
By the time Melemed participated in his first Bachauer competition at 17, he was already a veteran performer. It started with an appearance as a six-year-old diver in a television commercial for the AIG insurance company. When he started piano lessons at the age of four, his grandfather purchased an upright piano for one dollar at a yard sale. The young Melemed made enough money from that commercial to purchase an instrument worthy of a budding musician. By the age of seven, he had racked up a couple of hundred concerts for senior citizen centers and nonprofit groups. He learned to engage with audiences and at the age of nine, he was performing music such as Debussy’s Clair de lune in Tropicana Atlantic City. “I was having a ball,” he added. Soon his reputation spread nationwide, thanks to an appearance on the Rosie O’Donnell show.
On the other hand, Melemed also found sobering realities about honing his musicianship, after his audition to appear in the popular NPR From the Top fell short, due to critiques about the tempos and dynamics he had chosen for the music. With that, he pivoted to strengthen and finesse his musical voice. Between 2004 and 2008, he performed annually at the White House Holiday Open House for five consecutive years, and in 2007, just a year after beginning classical training, Melemed won the grand prize at the Bradshaw and Buono International Piano Competition and had his Carnegie Hall debut.
Confident about going forward with his piano artistry, Melemed also found an opportunity to indulge his love of languages. During a layover in Finland while traveling for the Czech Republic tour when he was 17, he was attracted to the unique vowel harmony and double consonants of Finnish, a language that inspired Tolkien’s Middle-Earth Elvish languages. While at Juilliard, he took electives at nearby Columbia University to learn the language. When he won first prize in the 2017 Maj Lind competition in Helsinki, his fluency in Finnish captured the media attention and brought invitations from the country’s top orchestras to perform as a soloist. Three years later, as the pandemic descended upon the globe, Melemed secured a visa to live in Finland.
He said that one objective in the repertoire he has selected for this current tour is to normalize the idea of picking American music to feature in concerts. His favorite experiences have been in more remote locations where some people have never attended a formal classical music concert previously. While many performing opportunities such as this week’s Bachauer concert will include side events including a master class for Brigham Young University piano majors, a school lecture-demonstration and a couple of private recitals, Melemed said one of his most memorable experiences was performing in Arkansas where the audience was almost entirely composed of music students who were not piano students. “The field energy for that concert was amazing,” he added.
Melemed will open Americana with an ideal fun piece to lasso the audience: Copland’s Buckaroo Holiday from Rodeo, the ballet composed for choreographer Agnes DeMille. This 1942 classic is, as Melemed cited, the American version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka.
Photo courtesy of the Nagels.
Americana includes miniature jewels from the history represented in Melemed’s native backyard, such as Amy Beach’s Ballade, op. 6, selections from Edward MacDowell’s New England Idyls, op. 62 and two pieces by Arthur Foote (Scherzo and Etude Arabesque, op. 42). Born in New Hampshire, Beach is the American parallel among Romantic composers whose reputation has emerged rightly as an important musical personality, just as Russia’s Nikolai Medtner, whose work was eclipsed by his contemporary Sergei Rachmaninoff. Beach’s work also caught the attention of Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, one of the foremost pianists and teachers in the America classical music scene during the early 20th century. Born in New York City, MacDowell, whom Melemed considers as the American counterpart of Robert Schumann, is now seen on a level as importantly as Gershwin.
Melemed’s program also nods toward two composers born in the American South: Louis-Moreau Gottschalk’s Union (Concert Paraphrase on National Airs) and Florence Price’s Meditation. Gottschalk takes a Lisztian approach in his 1962 amalgam of three national tunes that aroused Union pride during the Civil War: Star-Spangled Banner, Hail Columbia and Yankee Doodle. More than seventy years after her death, Price, who was among the first Black composers to gain national attention and the first Black woman to be recognized accordingly, has become more visible on concert programs.
Melemed also brings Utah premieres by two contemporary composers that he commissioned. As a commentary on the grief and sorrow of relentless war, Laura Kaminsky’s Threnody…October 2024 was commissioned as a contemporary response to Liszt’s Funérailles from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. The work is featured on his latest recording release Tulevaisuus (Bright Shiny Things label), where he asked three composers to write their musical responses to works by Bach, Liszt and Schumann.
Melemed also will perform Lament and Variations by Avner Dorman, which was written as a response to Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann. The artistic relationship between Melemed and Dorman goes back to 2012, when the pianist performed the composer’s Three Etudes at the New York International Piano Competition. Dorman wrote his Third Piano Concerto for Melemed, which he premiered in 2021. “Lament and Variations follows the principles of a traditional set of variations. The piece is a lament for the victims of the October 7, 2023, massacre of twelve hundred Israeli children, women, and men,” Dorman wrote in a program note. “At its core is the descending lamento bass, a musical gesture rooted in Renaissance and Baroque traditions, here set within an alternating metric framework of 7/16 and 10/16. These time signatures symbolize the date of the attack, embedding its memory into the music.”
Born in Indiana, Ned Rorem created a solid catalog of works for piano. Composed in 1948, when the 26-year-old composer was in Paris, his Piano Sonata No. 1 will be a great closer to Americana. The toccata in the final movement is filled with the expected Baroque sentiments of virtuosity, but it also signifies Rorem’s trademark crisp, wry humor, and totally unsentimental character which defined his American creative spirit.
For tickets and more information, see the Bachauer website.