Piano Spheres
A Los Angeles-based organization that supports and encourages the composition and performance of major new works for the piano.
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Gloria Cheng – Looking Above
March 28, 2023 @ 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Piano Spheres’ Emeritus Artist Gloria Cheng presents Looking Above, featuring music by and dedicated to beloved friends and collaborators from her remarkable musical career. An internationally renowned concert pianist, Gloria will offer two special rarities:
- an unpublished work that modern master composer Pierre Boulez wrote for her to perform at her wedding, entitled Court dérives à partir d’Éclat. Gloria has kept this piece largely private for many years but will now share it with Piano Spheres audiences.
- the concert premiere of Sonata in Darkness, by Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino, who tapped Gloria to perform it for the blockbuster film The Batman (2022).
This concert will take place March 28th at 8PM at Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School, 200 S. Grand Ave. 90012. For tickets and information please go to www.pianospheres.org.
The concert title refers to an avant-jazz work that Gloria will perform entitled Looking Above, The Faith of Joseph, by local star composer James Newton, voted Downbeat Magazine’s Best Jazz Flutist for a record-breaking 23 consecutive years and widely considered one of the premiere jazz flutists of all time.
The late local luminaries (and two of Piano Spheres’s most devoted supporters) composer William Kraft and pianist/composer Mike Lang will be remembered in performances of Translucences by Kraft, and Kreislerianic Variations on a Harmonic Palette of Robert Schumann by Lang.
Gloria will also play four movements from the brilliant 35-minute suite Seven Memorials, a moving paean to our planet by the strikingly original Illinois-based composer Stephen Andrew Taylor. She will round out the program with two Valsa Choro [“weeping waltzes”] by Brazilian composer Adelaide Pereira da Silva, and Sunrise, by the Russian jazz composer Nicolai Kapustin.
Michael Giacchino (b. 1967), Sonata In Darkness (2022), concert premiere
Adelaide Pereira da Silva (1928-2021), Valsa Choro Nos. 1-2 (1966)
William Kraft (1923-2022), Translucences (1979)
Mike Lang (1941-2022), “Kreislerianic”
Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), Courtes dérives à partir d’Éclat (1996)
James Newton (b. 1953), Looking Above, The Faith Of Joseph (2008)
Stephen Andrew Taylor (b. 1965) movements from Seven Memorials (2002-3)
Nicolai Kapustin (1927-2020), Sunrise, Op. 26 (1976)