LEWISTON — Bates College artist-in-residence Frank Glazer will perform piano music spanning the centuries from Haydn to Hovhanesson Friday, May 11, at Olin Concert Hall.

The 7:30 p.m. concert is free, but tickets are required. For tickets and more information, call 786-6135 or email olinarts@bates.edu.

Recently featured on American Public Media’s program “The Story,” the 97-year-old Glazer, of Topsham, has had a distinguished international career that includes numerous recordings, solo recitals and performances with orchestras and chamber ensembles.

With his wife, the late Ruth Glazer, he founded the Saco River Music Festival, held for many years in Cornish. He has been an artist-in-residence at Bates since 1980.

Glazer’s May 11 program includes Haydn’s Sonata in E minor, Hob. XVI/34, one of seven sonatas (out of some five dozen in all) that the composer set in a minor key. In its key modulations and dramatic transition from second to third movements, this piece from the composer’s “Sturm und Drang” period anticipates Beethoven.

Glazer will also perform two works by Beethoven: the “Phantasie,” Op. 77, and the Sonata in E major, Op. 109. The former captures Beethoven’s adventurousness, seamlessly passing through eight keys, three meter changes and an array of tempos.

The latter, one of Beethoven’s last sonatas, is less dramatic and more lyrical, more intimate, than its predecessors and concludes with an intricately constructed theme-and-variations set.

Glazer will also perform the following:

* “Jhala,” by 20th-century American composer Alan Hovhaness, which incorporates Indian and Southeast Asian elements into a more traditional sonata form. The title refers to an Indian musical technique that alternates between melody and drone to build to a climax.

* Busoni’s “Turandot’s Frauengemach,” the most popular of a series of six elegies that marked the achievement of the composer’s mature and impressionistic style. Based on the folk tune “Greensleeves,” the music is adapted from an orchestral suite that Busoni based on the play “Turandot.”

* “Hulan,” which comes from a collection of Czech dances by Bedrich Smetana, a founding father of Czech music. This popular piece depicts a woman pining for her soldier lover.

* The second of Franz Schubert’s sonatas to be published, the Sonata in D major, Op. 53, D. 850, which is markedly quicker than its companion works and presents considerable challenges to the pianist.

Copy the Story Link