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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact | Beth Sorensen |
PIANIST ALECK KARIS TO PLAY AT REED
Aleck Karis, a world-renowned contemporary and classical pianist, will play a concert of works by Debussy, Carter, Bach, and Birtwistle on Wednesday, November 14, at 8 p.m. at Reed College in the Kaul Auditorium. The concert, which is sponsored by Reed’s division of the arts, is free and open to the public. For more information, call 503/777-7755.
Karis has recorded for Nonesuch, New World, Roméo Neuma, Centaur, and CRI Records. His solo debut album for Bridge Records, featuring music of Chopin, Carter, and Schumann, was nominated as best recording of the year by Opus magazine (1987). He has also recorded the music of Mozart, Stravinsky, Davidovsky, Glass, Carter, Babbitt, and many others.
He has recently appeared with New York’s Y Chamber Symphony, St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra, the Richmond Symphony, and the San Diego Symphony. He has been featured at leading international festivals such as the New York Philharmonic’s Horizons festival and the Warsaw Autumn Festival.
At Reed, Karis’s concert will start with Images, Book II, by Claude Debussy and Night Fantasies by Elliot Carter, a piece written in 1980. "A piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night," writes Carter. The second half of the concert will start with Toccata in e minor by J.S. Bach and end with Harrison’s Clocks, a piece written in 1998 by Harrison Birtwistle that continues his preoccupation with time and the idea of musical mechanisms.
Karis studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. He was awarded a solo recitalists’ fellowship by the NEA and has also been awarded two Fromm Foundation grants "in recognition of his commitment to the music of our time." He is currently professor of music at the University of California—San Diego.
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