WILSON, N.C. — November 11, 2016 — Renowned pianist Beth Levin returns to the Barton stage for her fourth appearance with the Barton College/Wilson Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Nov. 20 at 3 p.m. The orchestra’s annual fall concert, conducted by music director Mark N. Peterson, will be held in Barton College’s Kennedy Family Theatre on campus.
Levin and the orchestra will perform Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 20 in d-minor, and the orchestra will also present Haydn’s “Symphony No. 45,” often called “The Farewell Symphony,” as a result of the unusual final movement where the orchestra is instructed to leave the stage one by one until there are only two players left to finish the movement.
Admission for the fall orchestra performance will be $10 at the door or by season ticket. All students within the community will be admitted free of charge as well as faculty, staff and students of Barton College. For additional information, please contact Mark N. Peterson at 252-399-6535 or mpeterson@barton.edu.
“It a truly wonderful thing to have Ms. Levin return to Wilson,” said Peterson. “Her reputation continues to grow both here in the United States and abroad through both her concert performances and her widely acclaimed CD recording “Inner Voice,” which features the music of Robert Schumann.”
Brooklyn-based pianist Levin is celebrated as a bold interpreter of challenging works, from the Romantic canon to leading modernist composers. “The New York Times” praised her “fire and originality,” while “The New Yorker” magazine called her playing “revelatory.”
Debuting as a child prodigy with the Philadelphia Orchestra at age 12, Levin was subsequently taught and guided by legendary pianists such as Rudolf Serkin, Leonard Shure and Dorothy Taubman, Another of her teachers, Paul Badura-Skoda, praised Levin as “a pianist of rare qualities and the highest professional caliber.” Her deep well of experience allows an intuitive connection with the great pianistic traditions, to Bach, to Mozart, to Beethoven.
Critics hail the immediacy of her performances. “Levin plays with a rare percussive audacity, making notes and phrases that usually rush by in the background stand out in high relief,” writes Richard Brody in “The New York Times.” “Her choice of adventure over suaveness,” stated David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “created a sense of barely controlled improvisation.”
Levin has appeared as a concerto soloist with numerous symphony orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Boston Civic Symphony and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. She has also worked with noted conductors such as Arthur Fiedler, Tonu Kalam, Milton Katims, Joseph Silverstein and Benjamin Zander.
Chamber music festival invitations have brought Levin to the Marlboro Festival, Casals Festival, Harvard, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Ankara Music Festival and the Blue Hill Festival, as she has collaborated with such groups such as the Gramercy Trio (founding member), the Audubon Quartet, the Vermeer Quartet, and the Trio Borealis, with which she has toured extensively. Her solo performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio, WGBH (Boston), WFMT (Chicago) and WNYC, WNYE and WQXR (New York).
For all her devotion to the Romantic canon, Levin remains committed to the performance of the music of our time, interpreting composers such as Henryk Gorecki, Scott Wheeler, Mohammed Farouz and Michael Rose, among many others. Her closest collaborators have been the composers David Del Tredici and Andrew Rudin, both of whom have written works for her.
Following the concert, the audience is cordially invited to meet the musicians at a reception, hosted by ARAMARK Higher Education, in the Bridgestone Americas Atrium of the Kennedy Family Theatre.
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