Allen Shawn: Etudes for Piano

OPEN TO PUBLIC | Pianists Yoshiko Sato and Allen Shawn present the premiere performance of Shawn's Etudes for Piano (2016-18). The Etudes are in three Books, of nine etudes each. Shawn will play Books I and III; Yoshiko Sato will perform Book II. The concert will last approximately one hour.

A composer of a large catalogue of orchestral and chamber music, Allen Shawn has also composed three chamber operas, songs, piano music, and music for ballet, theatre, and film. He was the recipient of a 1995 Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an Academy Award in music from the Academy in 2001. His music is recorded on Opus One, Bay Cities, Northeastern, Sono Luminus, and Albany records and is published by Boosey and Hawkes, Galaxy Music, and GunMar Music. He is active as a pianist and is the author of four books: Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); Wish I Could Be There (Penguin, 2007); Twin (Viking, 2011); and Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician (Yale University Press, 2014), as well as articles for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The Musical Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Times Magazine. BA, Harvard; study with Nadia Boulanger; MA, Columbia University. Shawn has taught at Bennington since 1985.

Pianist Yoshiko Sato studied in Keio University in Tokyo, at The Hartt School of Music in Connecticut, and École Normale de Musique de Paris in France. She has won numerous prizes in several competitions. She has given recitals in Japan, the United States, France, and Switzerland and has appeared as soloist with the Manchester Symphony Orchestra, the Orquestra de Cambra de L’Emporda in Spain, the Hartt Symphony Orchestra, and with the Sage City Symphony. In 2009, Sato and tenor Thomas Bogdan released a recording of Hungarian folk song settings by Bartok and Kodaly. Sato’s recordings of Allen Shawn’s Childhood Scenes, and Nocturne for Y can be heard on CDs from Albany Records. In 2014, Sato performed Childhood Scenes and Shawn’s Jazz Prelude No. 2 for the Antonia Franceschi Dance Company at the Ailey Center in New York City and in performances on the island of Malta. Beginning in fall 2015, she and her colleague pianist Christopher Lewis embarked on a concert series devoted to the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven. The performances will take place at Bennington College and at venues in the surrounding Bennington community. Sato has been a piano accompanist at Bennington since 1999.