There is a moment, in those first quiet notes of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, when the world seems to fall away and something deeply poetic and lyrical opens in its place.
This program's title comes straight from Beethoven himself: he called this beloved piece "Sonata quasi una fantasia," or "a sonata in the manner of a fantasy." And yes, the famous Moonlight Sonata will be performed live by David Kaplan in this program on September 12 at Rough Point in Newport.
Pianist David Kaplan has been called "excellent and adventurous" by The New York Times, and praised by the Boston Globe for "grace and fire" at the keyboard. As an orchestral soloist, he has appeared with the Britten Sinfonia at London's Barbican, the Deutsches Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin at the Philharmonie, and with the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Hawaii, and San Antonio, among others. As a recitalist, he has performed at the Ravinia Festival, the Sarasota Opera House, Music on Main in Vancouver, Strathmore, Washington's National Gallery of Art, and New York's Carnegie and Merkin Halls.
His program, "Quasi una Fantasia," explores the grey area between composition and improvisation, bringing together works that are improvisatory in some way — whether in the performative or interpretive freedom suggested by their content, or in the flow of ideas evident in the process of their composition.
Sometimes the fantastical element is counterintuitive: in the music of Ligeti, for example, it is the singularity of idea that lends an improvisational streak, even though its structure is rigidly planned and its performance tolerates little interpretive freedom.
All solo keyboard music is, in some sense, rooted in improvisation, since its original genre was the "prelude." The prelude was always the functional, public cousin of the private, perhaps dysfunctional "fantasy": it warms up a room, warms up an audience, warms up a "key," warms up a keyboard, and warms up a keyboardist. It prepares for something else to happen afterward — something more preconceived, and probably more substantial.
In keeping with Puddingstone's mission of uniting multiple art forms in one shared space, this program will be presented alongside a visual arts exhibition exploring the same theme — the space between structure and spontaneity, plan and instinct, composition and improvisation. Just as the music moves fluidly between the fixed and the free, the accompanying artwork invites the audience to consider how visual composition, too, can hold both rigor and freedom within a single frame.
Join us for an evening where the planned and the improvised are never quite as far apart as they seem — and where sound and image meet in that same creative space.
Doors open at 7:00 PM. Small bites and wine are included in the ticket price.