Double your pleasure as William Bolcom and Joan Morris inject Strathmore’s “Celebration of the Piano: From Bach to Boogie Woogie and Beyond” with their vibrant personalities and a lively focus on the American songbook from the World War II period.
The witty and provocative musicians are favorites of Washington audiences. Bolcom, an eclectic composer, pianist and professor, garnered raves for the 2007 Washington National Opera presentation of “A View From the Bridge,” his opera based on the Arthur Miller drama. It debuted in 1999 at Lyric Opera of Chicago and enjoyed a subsequent performance at the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 2002.
Bolcom’s enormous output of concertos, sonatas, symphonies, ragtime and cabaret songs is not equaled by another American contemporary composer. In 1988, he received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his “12 New Etudes” for piano. Recent honors include the National Medal of Arts in 2006, multiple Grammy Awards for his setting of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Requiem” in 2006 and Musical America’s Composer of the Year in 2007. In 2006, he was honored with a festival in Minneapolis-St. Paul of concerts, recitals and master classes built around his music.
Now retired as chairman of the University of Michigan Composition Department, he has trained many rising young composers such as James Lee III, currently on the staff of Morgan State University. Before sending them off with the sound advice to “never give up,” he versed them well in all genres of music and the wisdom of tasting and digesting every morsel, from ragtime to atonal dissonances.
“So many things in life are serendipitous,” Bolcom says. “Meeting my wife [Morris], meeting the head of the Chicago Lyric Opera, hearing the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and attending the Ragtime Society in Toronto.”
The effervescent Bolcom rhapsodizes about the chance encounters that have influenced his career. Nobody has been more influential than his better half, the chanteuse with moxie and a sixth sense for touching heartstrings and funny bones as the lyrics dictate.
Since 1973, Bolcom and Morris have romped through 20th century American popular songs and preserved their memorable performances in more than two dozen recordings. On stage and off, their conversations and observations overlap as rich ideas tumble about in their minds.
If you go
William Bolcom and Joan Morris celebrate the piano with music from the American songbook.
Where: Mansion at Strathmore
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday
Info: $25; 301-381-5100, strathmore.org
