As a theme for programming recitals, the subject of dreams will always be a winner for performers and audiences. The universe of available music for this theme is vast enough for an equally wide scope of permutations. For Nocturnes and Nightmares, the theme of his upcoming solo concert, pianist Stephen Beus has taken a unique, imaginative approach that includes two short works by contemporary composers, a relatively unknown piece by the first female American composer who enjoyed wide success, one of the greatest 20th century piano sonatas by a Russian contemporary of Rachmaninov and a Liszt warhorse that will need no further introduction.
No stranger to regular audience members and followers of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation, Beus will perform Friday, Feb. 28, at 7:30 p.m. in the Jeanné Wagner Theatre of the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts, as part of Bachauer’s season concert series.
A native of Othello, Washington, Beus, who is on the music faculty at Brigham Young University, won Bachauer’s international junior competition at the age of 14 in 1996 and ten years later, after graduating from Juilliard, he was the only American finalist in Bachauer’s International Artists Competition. He won the 2006 gold medal with his performance of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto.
Four years ago, for a Bachauer recital that was filmed for streaming availability, Beus offered Lyrical Landscapes as his theme, with music by Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Mendelssohn and Marion Bauer. In Nocturnes and Nightmares, the inspiration of poetry is a prominent underpinning, in both dimensions of the theme.
Beus will perform selections from Lera Auerbach’s Ten Dreams, Op. 45, a relatively early work in the Russian-American composer’s oeuvre. Completed in 1999 as a commissioned work by Tom and Vivian Waldeck, the set had its debut in a 2008 concert in Germany. Auerbach, as accomplished a multidisciplinary artist as she is a composer, wrote about dreams in Excess of Being, a 2014 book filled with humor and aphorisms. She explained, “On the compositional process: I dream, then dissect the dream into sounds, translate the sounds into symbols, which can resurrect the dream.” In an interview with The Utah Review, Beus said that Auerbach’s pieces, capturing both pleasant dreams and nightmares, are “imaginative and unexpected.”
Keeping the theme, Aaron Jay Kernis’ solo piano suite, Before Sleep and Dreams (1990) is best described as the contemporary American version tipping its hat to well known earlier works such as Schumann’s Kinderszenen Op. 15, (Scenes From Childhood) and Debussy’s Children’s Corner. Kernis has won numerous prizes, including a Grammy and Pulitzer Prize. As the father of six kids, Beus resonates with the Kernis suite. “This is a wonderful set of pieces for the nighttime ritual of putting a child to bed, especially the two-year-old who still wants a little more playtime before the lullaby.”
For a good part of her career, Amy Beach’s music was rich in late 19th century Romanticism. Her 1892 Four Sketches, Op. 15, is representative of her extensive connections to poetry, which anchored a lion’s share of her compositions. In Dreaming, the third sketch, she sets Victor Hugo’s poetic verse to music: specifically, the opening stanza in, as translated, To The One Who Is Veiled: “You speak to me from the depths of a dream/Like a soul speaks to the living,/Like the foam from the shore,/Your dress flutters in the winds.” Beus said “I had not heard about this Beach piece until one of my students mentioned it,” adding that it is a good example of why it is important to tell the stories of underrepresented composers as often as possible. “It is breathtaking and ravishing music,” he added.
In addition to lyrical and poetic reverie, Beus will offer a plentiful bounty of keyboard fireworks. One ls Nikolai Medtner’s Sonata in E minor, Op. 25, no. 2. Known as the Night Wind Sonata, this Medtner work for solo piano is the longest in his oeuvre (running more than 30 minutes) and the most technically demanding he produced for the instrument. It is inspired by a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, which includes the verse, Night wind, night wind, why do you howl? This work has been compared in its manifestations of style, technique and emotional evocations to Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor.
In recent years, thanks to the impressive local bench of exceptional pianists, Utah audiences have benefited from learning more about Medtner, whose compositions often were eclipsed by those of Rachmaninov, his more widely known contemporary. “I have been playing Medtner’s piano literature, which still is not heard as much as it should be, and I have been fiddling and tweaking my performances of it [most recently in New York and the University of Alabama-Birmingham]. With this sonata masterpiece, I want to present it in the best possible way,” Beus said.
With the tailwind of the Bachauer gold medal in 2006, Beus took first place in the Vendome Prize International Competition in Lisbon and was awarded the Max I. Allen Fellowship of the American Pianists Association in Indianapolis. Beus has given recitals across the U.S. as well as in Kazakhstan, Russia, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Georgia, China, France, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Morocco.
Beus recalled how his first experience in 1993 as an 11-year-old participating in the Bachauer junior and young artists competition reoriented his direction as a performer. Hearing a performance of Liszt’s La Campanella by a young Chinese pianist during the competition, Beus said it “lit a fire in me,” adding that “I had never heard music-making like that before.” Over the last three decades, the results have unfolded magnificently for Beus, as a performer, teacher and as a father.
For tickets and more information, see the Bachauer website.