Featuring Bartok’s monumental SONATA FOR TWO PIANOS AND PERCUSSION, DAN School pianists, Clare Marion and Jenna Simeonov, join forces with DAN School Professor of Percussion, Jamie Drake, and Montreal percussionist, Brydone Charlton.
FREE STUDENT TICKETS: The DAN School invites all youth to celebrate the arts with our $6 and $8 student tickets. New for this year, with the support of the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, the DAN School is removing further barriers by offering any available tickets for free to all students one week before each 2024/25 DAN School Faculty Artist Series concert. Up to two free student tickets can be ordered online using the discount code: STUDENTFREE
The performers for this concert have written of their excitement in presenting this concert as follows:
The combination of two pianists and two percussionists is rare, and understandably so. It’s not easy to find two beautiful grand pianos, an impressive set-up of percussion instruments, and enough space to house them all at once– let alone four players who are into the idea. The fact that it’s rare is ironic, considering how often pianists and percussionists collaborate with others. In particular, pianists and percussionists usually collaborate with instruments that produce sound entirely differently. Those instruments – strings, winds, brass – draw a bow or blow a stream of air to create sound, while the pianist and percussionist deal in a note’s first point of contact. They sustain, we attack.
And that’s why this type of collaboration is so utterly impressive and fun: we’re all of the same ilk when it comes to making noise. We all hit, attack, even create the illusion of sustaining a long phrase– and we do it with a unique sound world that can’t be mistaken for any other kind of chamber ensemble.
Our program celebrates this sound world. Tobin Stokes’ EL SOL DEL SUR (THE SUN OF THE SOUTH) is full of heat, radiating from sunny chord clusters and agile rhythms interwoven between the four of us. Béla Bartók’s SONATA FOR TWO PIANOS AND PERCUSSION is one of his most-performed works. He nods to sonata form, yet fills it with experimental sounds and leans hard into atonality, tritones everywhere, and upended rhythms. THE BLUE GUITAR, composed and arranged for our ensemble by our own Jamie Drake, was inspired by Wallace Stevens’ 1937 poem, THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR, which was in turn inspired by Picasso’s 1903 painting, THE OLD GUITARIST. Drake’s folk-like, modal sound complements the text: “Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar.”