DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL
What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?
It is very important for musicians not to copy anyone else, rather search and discover your own individual and unmistakable style. It is a long creative process, but in the end it brings you much more joy and makes your music unique and more remarkable.
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Who or what inspired you to take up the piano and pursue a career in music?
My musical beginnings were not as idealistic as I would expect to hear from many others, but they did have an impact.
When I was 6, my family moved to a small house in Minnesota. The previous owners left a piano in the basement since they did not want to move it. This piano we inherited was over 100 years old and after tuning, we discovered it held tinker toys, playing cards, and candy wrappers. It was not loved before, but it became mine. I think because of that, I always see a piano as the holder of stories. I immediately personify it and believe the piano should be cared for so it can teach others. I love playing unfamiliar pianos (especially late 19th and early 20th century Steinways) to see what the piano will teach me.
I majored in piano performance as an undergraduate at the Eastman School of Music. As a student, my primary motivators were other musicians—faculty and graduate students. I played a great deal of chamber music and I was profoundly inspired by the instrumental and vocal professors especially violinist, William Preucil and mezzo-sopranos Jan DeGaetani and Marcia Baldwin. My favorite experiences were playing chamber music, premiering contemporary works, performing with the Eastman Musica Nova Ensemble (I performed George Perle’s Concertino for Piano Winds, and Timpani with them among other pieces), and performing with the Eastman Wind Ensemble. I am thankful for the doctoral conducting students who taught me how to perform in an ensemble. Pianists are not often granted those opportunities.
I don’t think I still thought of music as a career, however, until after I graduated. I questioned if I should continue studies. I didn’t seem to follow the same path as other pianists and I believed you could learn from every musical experience (solo, chamber, ensemble, playing for dance classes, performing as a church musician) so I was not focusing on a particular career and I was not interested in participating in competitions. I just had the desire to learn. I desperately wanted to be surrounded by many other musicians who could teach me what they knew, whether it was the music of Mahler, Art Tatum or Led Zeppelin.
I was one week from graduation when I would say I received the inspirational talk. Rebecca Penneys, who was not my piano teacher at the time, called me in to her studio. She heard from one of her students that I had significant fears/doubts about pursuing music as a career. I had never had a conversation with her before that, but her words made the difference. I still find her insights from that conversation to be invaluable.
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What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
It may sound simplistic to say this, but the biggest challenges of my career have been developing that career in the first place and then sustaining it. I can honestly say that I have loved my professional life, but for years it involved a huge amount of hard work and uncertainty about the future, together with the constant battle of trying to juggle travelling and working at unsociable hours with bringing up a family. These pressures are common to many freelance professions, but we pianists inhabit a world overcrowded with dazzling talent and I can’t think of a single moment over the years when I have felt I could take my career for granted. The musical challenges (of which there have been many!) have felt easy by comparison.
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What have been the greatest challenges/frustrations of your career so far?
It is always a challenge to start on a new project. Since I work in different countries I think it is a challenge to “read” the different cultures, what you say in one country doesn’t necessarily mean the same in another. That is sometimes a challenge.
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What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
As composers, we are always looking to build relationships with performers, conductors, and performing arts organizations. There is a fine balance in terms of how one goes about navigating this path. For me, the greatest challenge has been learning to accept when someone simply does not respond to my voice and/or aesthetic. Art is subjective, but that is sometimes difficult to remember when you truly believe in a piece.
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Developing the emotion complexities of a character:
I start from the character and motivation, and the inner workings and thoughts of a character, and this usually draws you close to a voice and a mannerism or a physicality. For example with Alison in The Affair, I get to play both sides of that character – my version from her point of view, she was someone suffocated by grief and self-loathing, so she appeared more shy, shoulders hunched, eyes averted, quiet. In Noah’s point of view, she came across as predatory vixen, so my body language was entirely different. She came across as much more confident, and in charge of her own choices.
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Who or what inspired you to take up the piano and pursue a career in music?
I didn’t really pick piano at first. I wanted to play the organ. I loved the sound of it, the huge range of colours and mainly the music of Bach. When I was 9 and it was time to enter the conservatory in Bari it was mandated that I take five years of piano before making the switch to the organ. And here I am, still playing the piano! I never really chose to pursue a career, it just happened, step by step.
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