Ravinia 2019, Issue 7, Week 14

Natural uoituevuI D A N T E P F E R WA S A L R E A DY E N J OY I NG considerable recognition and success as a New York–based jazz pianist when he released an album in 2011 that would shake up his career and win him a whole new audience in the classical world. Titled Goldberg Variations/Variations , the concept was both simple and radical. Tepfer played each of the 30 variations in the celebrated original 18th-century work by Johann Sebastian Bach followed by an improvised variation of his own. “Everyone loves the ‘Goldberg Variations,’ ” he says, “and there is something about the project that on the face of it sounds kind of awful. It sounds like something that could spectacularly fail.” But just the opposite happened. Tepfer, then 29, quickly won over skeptical fans of the original work, and he was asked to play his ver- sion in major classical venues like Wigmore Hall in London and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Since he began presenting the full set of variations publicly in 2012, he estimates that he has performed it some- where between 70 and 150 times, and requests keep coming in. There was talk of him doing an encore performance this summer at Ravinia, where he brought the opus for his venue debut in 2014 and most recently appeared in 2016, with one of the variations spearheading a pro- gram of original works. Instead, Tepfer proposed the possible premiere of a related project, Inventions/Reinventions , and Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman, who books the festival’s entire concert schedule, quickly agreed. So, the pianist will present that new undertaking at 2:00 p.m. on August 31 and follow it with a duo concert three hours later with Puerto Rican–born jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón, a 2008 winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” They will perform selections from a recording set to be released in early 2020. JOSH GOLEMAN 22 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 26, 2019 – MAY 9, 2020