LEWISTON – Maine pianist Frank Glazer, a musician of international stature, will perform a program of music by four composers closely linked with Vienna Sunday, March 9, at Bates College.
He will perform music by Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms at 3 p.m. in Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. The concert is open to the public at no cost.
Glazer, who turned 93 in February, is heir to a pianistic tradition dating back to early in the last century. “He has thought everything through and tried to get at the core of what the music is about. Everything he does is about that,” said colleague James Parakilas, a pianist himself and the James L. Moody Jr. Family Professor of Performing Arts at Bates. “And he has a wonderful way of making a line sing.”
Glazer’s March 9 program includes Haydn’s Sonata in C major; Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat major (D. 960); Beethoven’s Phantasie (Op. 77); and Brahms’ Six Piano Pieces (Op. 118) and the “Scherzo: Rasch und Feurig.”
A resident of Topsham, Glazer has been a resident artist at Bates since 1980. His lengthy career includes numerous recordings and premieres of contemporary music, his own television program in the 1950s, and countless solo recitals and performances with orchestras and chamber ensembles, including the New England Piano Quartette of which he was a founder.
He taught at the Eastman School of Music for 15 years before coming to Maine in 1980. With his wife, Ruth Glazer, now deceased, he founded the Saco River Festival, held in Cornish every summer.
In the 1930s, Glazer studied with Artur Schnabel, a leading interpreter of the Viennese masters, and with Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal compositions were the antithesis of Viennese lyricism.
Glazer was 21 when he made his New York debut at Town Hall Oct. 20, 1936. That event (recreated at Bates on its 70th anniversary in 2006) marked the start of a performing career that finds this artist creatively robust in his 90s.
“I don’t know what retirement means,” said Glazer. “I’ve worked all my life to get to this point, where I like the sounds I hear.”
For more information about the concert, call 786-6135.
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