By Steven Mark
smark@staradvertiser.com

Award-winning pianist Sara Buechner will perform the opening recital of the Aloha International Piano Festival at the Hawaii Convention Center this Saturday.

Her program covers an astonishing breadth of the piano repertoire, from Mozart to modern, from the Western Europe to the West Coast, from the Far East to the East Coast. She also will be presenting a workshop Friday on composers whose works have been preserved on piano rolls, and will be performing on June 19 at the Atherton Performing Arts Studio.

She comments about her upcoming appearances:

When Lisa Nakamichi invited me to play the opening recital of this year’s Aloha International Piano Festival, I was of course honored, but also felt a certain responsibility to make my recital a kind of annunciatory event, one that exemplifies an all-embracing pianistic experience. Maybe a simpler way to put that is with the old adage, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

In addition to the old (Mozart) and borrowed (transcriptions of Bach) and blue (Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue), I felt the ‘new’ was particularly important. Classical music is often seen as something from older centuries, suitable only for aging audiences — and that just couldn’t be further from the truth. For me, the music I live with, practice and play and teach every day of my life, is vibrant and vital, and gives life its very meaning and richness of experience.

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It’s an important responsibility of us classical performers to embrace new music, and to encourage new composers who have important things to say. So this program has more new music than I usually include on my programs. I also wanted to play a variety of music that reflects on my own unique life experience, which has embraced many years of living in New York, the west coast, Japan, and increasing amounts of time in Hawaii as well.

From Japan I am offering music of two pretty unknown composers. The first, Kouji Taku, was a pianist and composer who studied in Paris in the 1920s, returned to Japan where he became head of the Tokyo Geddai School of Music, and then quit that job on his 60th birthday because he wanted to spend his days playing jazz in Tokyo piano bars….That insoucient spirit wholly fills his delightful Variations on a Theme of Poulenc. The theme that Taku uses is one of the best-known to all piano students (the first of Poulenc’s Mouvements Perpetuels) so I think the teachers and pupils in the audience will have a lot of fun hearing how that theme is treated — with blues, bossa nova, samba rhythms, even cha cha cha. It’s a little like Maurice Chevalier meeting Elvis Presley.

Yukiko Nishimura, who briefly studied piano with me in New York some years ago, is also a great jazz aficianado, and has mostly written very successful scores for percussion and brass ensembles. But I love how she writes for piano, and so I commissioned her to write a set of 10 Etudes (French for “studies,” or pieces of a difficult technical nature) for me. … I’ll be premiering the first three on my recital. I’m particularly proud to offer a “first hearing” to my (Hawaii) audience. It’s like unwrapping a Christmas present, very special indeed. The pieces are very lovely, touching and highly imaginative. There’s a nice surprise in the third piece which I can’t give away here.

I also wanted to bring a little of Vancouver with me to Honolulu, in the form of three pieces I commissioned from three composers over the last seven years, when I moved from the Bronx to Vancouver. This is the first time I’ve played these three pieces as a set, so I’m calling the whole of it “A Vancouver Triptych.”

The first piece, by my (University of British Columbia) colleague Stephen Chatman, is called “Mountain Spirit,” is a powerful evocation in musical terms of the imposing mountains of the Canadian Rockies, which I can see every day from my apartment window. Steve is a great lover of nature, as well as the mountain paintings of Canadian artist Lawren Harris. So I asked him specifically to try to codify the sweeping feeling of those mountains in this brief work.

The second Vancouver piece is a short Elegy by Dorothy Chang, a Chinese-American composer also on the faculty of the University of British Columbia. This is a profoundly sad meditation written at my request to honor the memory of a teenaged piano student I had who died tragically young.

The last Vancouver piece is … by one of my own students, a brilliant young composer, just 21 years old, named Jared Miller. He’s just been accepted into Juilliard for his graduate work, but many Canadians are already buzzing about his talent, and his music has already been played by major Canadian orchestras.

This virtuosic tour de force of Jared’s is called “Instincts.” It calls for tremendous agility and energy, and I was honored that he wrote such a difficult piece for me, clearly figuring the Old Prof could knock it off. Well, it certainly is one of the hardest and most visually exciting things I’ve ever performed, and I think the audience is going to love it!

In regard to the workshop on piano rolls and “crossover music” of the 1920s: There is a vast amount of American keyboard music from the period 1920 – 1940 that was clearly conceived as non-classical. It would include the improvised foxtrots of George Gershwin, the novelty rags of Zez Confrey, but also a large amount of pieces both notated and non, by people whose names are obscure to us now: Pauline Alpert, Dana Suesse, Louis Alter, Raie da Costa. … A lot of these people who went into popular music by way of recordings, radio and player piano rolls, were classically trained. It’s one reason they handled structure and proportion in their music so convincingly.

In my workshop I’ll talk a bit about these composers, discuss and play some of the music they wrote, and help put it into some historic perspective so that some of the teachers and students who attend might be interested to get involved in it, too. My (Atherton) recital (includes) music in this vein, by Gershwin, Suesse, Confrey and Alpert.

BELOW IS the complete schedule of public events for the Aloha International Piano Festival and Competition.
Unless noted, recitals are $20 general admission and $5 for students; masterclasses and the workshop are $15 and $5.

Saturday, June 12
Solo Piano Competition – free admission
9 a.m.–5 p.m., Liliu Theater, Hawaii Convention Center

Opening Concert: Sara Davis Buechner Recital
7:30 p.m., Liliu Theater, Hawaii Convention Center

Sunday, June 13
Young Pianists Recital – free admission
2 p.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A

Monday, June 14
Masterclass by Norman Krieger
10 a.m., Hawaii Convention Center , Room 317A

Wednesday, June 16
Masterclass by Sean Botkin
10 a.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A
Norman Krieger Recital: “Beethoven Favorites”
7:30 p.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A

Friday, June 18
Workshop by Sara Davis Buechner
10 a.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A

Saturday, June 19
Concerto Competition-free admission
9 a.m.-12p.m., Hawaii Convention Center
10 a.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Room 317A

Festival Finale Recital with Chamber Music
7:30 p.m., Hawaii Convention Center, Liliu Theater
Pianist Sean Botkin, violinist Ignace Jang and cellist Mark Votapek
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Videos of Sara Buechner in performance can be viewed at: http://www.sarabuechner.com/video.html