Department of Music

• Saturday, September 18, 2010
• Brooks Hall Commons
• 2:00 p.m.
• Free

Moderated by Michael Puri, Associate Professor of Music Theory in the McIntire Department of Music at U.Va.

Mimi Tung, a member of the piano faculty at U.Va. since 1991, graduated from The Juilliard School of Music. She has performed as soloist with the Boston Pops, San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Pops, St. Louis Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, and Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra, among others. A review in The Washington Post found in her performance of a Beethoven concerto a “perfect balance between clarity and rhapsody” as she “swaggered through the imperial flourishes of the first movement, and infused the finale with a strong spirit of dance. This is a pianist who knows how to attack and release Beethoven’s phrases, how to let them accrue weight, how to point their rhythms in a way that carries the listener forward….”

Andrew Willis performs in the US and abroad on pianos of every period. He recorded the “Hammerklavier” sonata and several other Beethoven sonatas in the first complete recording of the cycle on period instruments, a project directed by Malcolm Bilson and presented in concert in New York, Holland, and Italy. Other recordings include Schubert lieder with soprano Julianne Baird and a recital of 20th- century American piano music, including Martin Amlin’s Sonata No. 7, composed for Willis. A past president of the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society, Andrew Willis holds degrees from Curtis, Temple, and Cornell and is on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he directs the biennial Focus on Piano Literature.

The pianist and scholar Roberto Poli is a passionate advocate of the music of Chopin. The center of his current interest is the recording of the composer’s complete works; supported by the European label Onclassical, this project is now in its fourth volume. His book, The Secret Life of Musical Notation: Defying Interpretive Traditions (Amadeus Press, 2010), is a historical survey of notational symbols, based on the analysis of manuscripts and early editions and focused on Chopin. In 1998 Roberto moved to North America from his native Italy to study with Russell Sherman, under whose guidance he received a Master’s Degree and the Artist Diploma at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Faculty member at the Preparatory School of the NEC, he is also Artist in Residence, Co-chair of the Piano Department, and Artistic Director of The Chopin Symposium at the Rivers School Conservatory in Weston, Massachusetts.

Michael Puri has taught at U.Va. since 2004. He writes mainly on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French and German music, with special attention to Ravel and Wagner. In addition to grants from various foundations including Mellon, Ford, Javits, Woodrow Wilson, Whiting, and the American Philosophical Society, Michael received the 2008 Einstein Award from the Americal Musicological Society. His book, Decadent Dialectics: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire in the Music of Maurice Ravel, will be published early next year by Oxford University Press. He is also a classical pianist with undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Musik- Akademie in Basel, Switzerland.

This event is part of the Chopin Bicentennial Celebration at the University of Virginia (September 16-19, 2010), which is sponsored by the Page-Barbour Fund, the Mcintire Department of Music, the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the American Institute of Polish Culture, the Chopin Foundation of the United States, the Slavic Literatures and Languages Department, the Media Studies Department, and by an Arts Enhancement Grant from the Vice Provost for the Arts to increase access and engagement with the Arts. For a listing of all festival events please visit: http://www.virginia.edu/music/chopin.