A Half Century of American Piano Music
Roger Sessions Five pieces (1975)
Robert Helps Nocturne (1973)
Elliot Carter Two Thoughts About the Piano (2006-7)
Milton Babbitt: Post Partitions (1966)
Jerry Kuderna is a specialist in music of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is also a Berkeley institution, due to his many performances over the years, and his Friday noon lecture-recitals at the Berkeley Arts Festival space. Some memorable performances include the 2001 premiere of Daniel Brewbaker's Piano Concerto No. 2, "To Kalon;" and the 2002 U.S premiere of Galina Ustvolskaya's 4th Symphony under Kent Nagano; and the West Coast premiere of Elliott Carter's monumental Piano Concerto in 2006.
He studied at the San Francisco and New England Conservatories, where his principal teachers were Robert Helps and Rudolf Kolisch, and at Juilliard with Adele Marcus. He holds a Ph.D. from New York University, where he worked with Eugene List. He wrote his dissertation on the piano works of Milton Babbitt and recorded Babbitt's Phonemena for the New World Records historic anthology of American Music series. He has performed the premieres of works by many American composers including Alden Jenks, Milton Babbitt, Richard Swift, Robert Helps, and Herbert Bielawa. In addition he has performed numerous concertos for piano and electronic sound, including the American premiere of Philippe Manoury's Pluton, a work in which the electronic MIDI-generated sounds respond to the piano in real time.
Cost: $10 - $15