Ravinia 2019, Issue 7, Week 13

5:00 PM SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 2019 BENNETT GORDON HALL MIGUEL ZENÓN, jazz saxophone † DAN TEPFER, jazz piano † Ravinia debut DAN TEPFER, piano Born in France to American parents, his mother an opera singer and grandfather a jazz pianist, Dan Tepfer began classical piano studies at age 6 at the Paul Dukas Conservatory in Paris. While completing a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, he played extensively on the city’s jazz scene and also had a brief stint as an opera conductor. Tepfer earned a master’s degree in 2005 from the New England Conservatory under the guidance of Danilo Perez, and he soon established himself in New York playing alongside the likes of jazz innova- tors Steve Lacy, Paul Motian, Bob Brookmeyer, Joe Lovano, Ralph Towner, Billy Hart, and Mark Turner. A meeting with saxophonist Lee Konitz sparked an immediate partnership that resulted in the 2009 album Duos with Lee , which featured many free-improvised pieces. Around the same time, Tepfer completed his solo album Twelve Free Improvisations in Twelve Keys , a precursor to his blockbuster 2011 album, Goldberg Variations/Variations , on which he performed Bach’s keyboard mas- terwork as well as his own jazz variations on each movement. Variations were also a part of his first two albums, Before the Storm (2005) and Oxygen (2007), which featured arrangements of standards by John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, and Michael Jackson alongside Tepfer’s original works. His 2013 album with Ben Wendel, Small Constructions , included arrangements of tunes by Thelonious Monk, as well as Handel and Messiaen, and his soundtrack to the independent film Movement and Location was voted the best original score at the Brooklyn Film Festival in 2014, the same year he was awarded the Charles Ives Fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, he became a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, where he composed Solar Spiral , a piano quintet premiered at Ravinia that year. Following his trio disc Eleven Cages (2017), Tepfer reteamed with Konitz for the 2018 album De- cade . His latest disc, Natural Machines , is the culmination of a project melding his improvisations with original algorithmic response programs on a Yamaha Disklavier “player piano.” Dan Tepfer made his Ravinia debut in 2014 and tonight marks his third season at the festival. Bach included in this second, independent man- uscript, dated “Köthen, 1723,” a preface explain- ing his pedagogical intent in the Inventions and Sinfonias: “Sincere Instruction, in which lovers of the keyboard, especially those who are keen to learn, are shown a clear method, not only (1) of learning to play clearly in two parts, but also, after further progress, (2) of dealing well and correctly with three obbligato parts. At the same time, they are shown not only how to come by good ideas but also how to develop them well. Above all, however, they are shown how to ar- rive at a cantabile style of playing, while also ac- quiring a strong foretaste of composition.” Once Wilhelm Friedemann and Bach’s other students completed this course of study, they progressed to more advanced instruction in keyboard and compositional technique through the Well-Tempered Clavier , Book 1, a set of 24 preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys that Johann Sebastian compiled in 1722–23. –Program notes © 2019 Todd E. Sullivan Wilhelm Friedemann Bach RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 108