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MICHAEL BROWN Peter Halstead
Cathy and I first met Michael through Beethoven. And through Tali Mahanor, whom we
had met only a few days before. We were talking about old pianos with Wu Han at the opening of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (at which Michael played), and Wu Han said, “If you love old pianos, you have to meet Tali.” I went over to see Tali the next day, and we spent much of the day talking about pianos. Tali Mahanor is the resident piano guru of Lincoln Center, many of whose pianos are in fact lent to them by Tali. A few days later, Tali invited me to a recording session she had arranged uptown. When I walked in, Michael was playing Beethoven’s Eroica Variations in the acoustically gorgeous hall of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Academy is an honor society of architects, artists, composers, and writers. It was founded in 1904 with charter members including Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Edward MacDowell, and Henry James. In 1923 the Academy moved to its current location on Audubon Terrace on West 155th Street in Washington Heights; a second, adjoining building, designed by Academy member Cass Gilbert and completed in 1930, includes a 730-seat auditorium, where Michael was recording. 4
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The engineer was the renowned Leszek Wojcik, head of the recording studio at Carnegie Hall, who had been engaged by our new friend Tali. Tali had toured the country for many years with Eugene Istomin, maintaining his piano, which had been owned by Vladimir Horowitz. The Istomin tour was how many small towns in America first heard classical music. As Istomin told the story, I came up with the idea of touring like we used to do before airplanes could cross continents and oceans in a few hours! We used to travel by train from one city to another, which were rarely separated by more than two or three hundred miles. I did that at the beginning of my career. All the great artists passed through the small towns, and the great pianists travelled with their own pianos and tuners. This was normal, because in small towns there were no concert pianos in good condition. If we had a concert in Chicago and others in California, the managers were able to find concerts in five or six cities in between. Obviously, today it’s much more complicated, and very expensive. We pianists have to adapt to all kinds of instruments, often mediocre or worse, even in big cities. We’re the only ones in this situation! Violinists, cellists, all wind players travel with their own instruments. For sensitive and demanding pianists, it is an ordeal, sometimes a nightmare. In addition, there are fewer and fewer qualified piano tuners. This profession is not valued as it should be since it requires extreme competence. at Tippet Rise
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Approaching my sixtieth birthday, after more than forty years of career, I reached the conclusion that either I would stop, or I would find a solution to make music in conditions which allow me to enjoy it. After a lifetime dedicated to music, I no longer want to fight with pianos, I want to give myself and the audience the greatest musical satisfaction. And it is not possible to do this without a good piano, well prepared, that I know perfectly well. So either I stopped or I transported my own pianos! General Motors ended up providing a truck], complete with air-conditioning and a tailgate to load the pianos easily. All I had to do was hire a driver who would also be a specialist in moving pianos, and a tuner. What a tuner she is, Tali Mahanor! She has an extraordinary ear, she is obsessed with the piano, and, better still, she and I hear the piano the same way. She doesn’t read music, but she plays extraordinarily well. She’s travelling with the driver, ahead of me. Sometimes, for the shorter distances, I also travel in the truck. I give about fifty concerts a year in the United States, playing in ideal conditions.
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It was Tali who was producing the three-day session, with Michael and his friends Adam Golka and Roman Rabinovich, who were terrifyingly demanding in their assessments of one another, as good friends should be. The albums of all three friends have since come out on First Hand Records. Roman was working on a Haydn sonata cycle, and Adam on a Beethoven sonata cycle. Michael recorded the Eroica Variations as well as Bernstein’s Touches, four of Mendelssohn’s preludes and fugues, and two pieces he had written. Shortly afterwards, Michael opened the inaugural concert of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, along with its co-director, Wu Han, and Anne-Marie McDermott, the artistic director of the Bravo! Vail summer music festival. Michael played the Mendelssohn Piano Trio in D Minor. The next summer Michael and Adam came to Tippet Rise to perform and record. Some of their concerts appear in our Films section, and a few of the pieces they recorded for First Hand Records can be heard in high-resolution in the Downloads section.
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The piano they chose was Istomin’s and Horowitz’s CD-18, offered to Tippet Rise by Marta Casals Istomin, who ran the Casals Festival with her husband Gene for many years in Puerto Rico, where they hosted Mstislav Rostropovich, Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, Eugene Ormandy, Sir John Barbirolli, Yehudi Menuhin and Krzysztof Penderecki, among many others. Marta later served as artistic director of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. We were introduced to Marta through Tali, from whom all blessings seem to flow, some of them reflected in the pieces you can now download in a few minutes from our Downloads Library. We are grateful to Michael for his friendship, his compositions, and his flawless pianism, and we marvel at the many coincidences which illuminate our many mutual enthusiasms.
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MICHAEL BROWN
Cementing my own art in stone terrifies me. I have spent my whole life practicing the
piano and writing music, and each day is motivated by the potential for improvement from the last. I don’t know how anyone could ever feel ready to put something unchangeable down forever, yet the music of Ravel and Medtner speaks to me on a gut level. I felt that I could communicate something personal with them. Ravel is a composer who spoke to me from an early age—I used to listen to his piano music on a perpetual loop. Medtner, on the other hand, is relatively new to me and was introduced to me by two friends, Adam Golka and Tali Mahanor. Medtner’s Improvisation No. 2, Op. 47, is a rarely played gem, and there are only a handful of recordings. In learning more about it, I discovered that there were sketches of additional movements that have never been heard before. But more on that later. I was seduced by his sonic world and puzzled by this strange, neglected masterpiece that exists today without a vast recorded legacy. The Ravel and Medtner work together as a fitting pair—two early-20th-century artistic statements for the piano that paint evocative fantasies on nature and fairy tales. I knew that if I were to record them, I would need the encouragement of friends who know me better than I know myself. Friends who don’t filter anything and don’t hold anything back. I’ve surrounded myself with not one of these types, but two—Adam Golka and Roman Rabinovich. For more than a decade, they have been my family—my life source.
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They have filled in gaps and holes in my life. We used to reside close by in uptown Manhattan (until Roman got married and fled to Calgary); we would play music for one another, exchange ideas, and passionately argue—all ingredients for lifelong friendships. In 2016 we shared similar feelings that the process of making recordings is often divorced from an inspiring musical atmosphere, and we wanted to see if we could transfer our dynamic together into the recording studio. So we tried an experiment—we took turns recording and producing albums for one another at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. It was there that our mutual friend and piano technician Tali Mahanor invited Peter Halstead to stop by our recording sessions and observe our process. His insights into the minor variation in Beethoven’s Eroica Variations helped me to capture a more natural approach. He told us about his new Tippet Rise Arts Center and its state-ofthe-art facilities, and we followed up with him for another recording project three years later. Tippet Rise was the ideal setting. We were able to leave the stress of New York City for the peacefulness of rural Montana. I was a little worried that doing these projects again with Adam and Roman would rock our friendships. The first time we recorded was overall a positive experience, yet it was full of webs of psychological complexities among all of us. Adam, in particular, isn’t easy to produce. He is brilliant, yet he not only expects the producer to point out a million details in the score to work out but also needs someone to assuage his doubts. Nothing enrages Adam more than the phrase “keep it simple.” at Tippet Rise
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We needed to take a walk after I said it to him to ensure the stability of our friendship. Roman, in general, is easier than Adam, but he can be quite stubborn. On certain days he had a tendency to withdraw into his own world and was going through a phase where he was convinced that he could hear better with earplugs. He would put them in, forget that we exist, and play the same phrase from a Haydn Sonata on a loop until we were losing our minds. I am not easy to produce either, in that I often have many questions and doubts about what I’m doing while recording. Sometimes I feel like I have to fight a war within my mind to get these recordings out. In the end we realized that we are all trying to find our way to get into the zone. Upon arrival we were met by an incredible team whose knowledge, skills, and devotion went above and beyond. There were three gorgeous pianos (exquisitely prepared by Mike Toia) awaiting our selection. Our chosen one, CD-18, was one of Vladimir Horowitz’s favorite pianos; it later belonged to Eugene Istomin. A midcentury New York Steinway with a wealth of colors and sonic complexities, CD-18 boasts a warm tenor register, a scintillating top, and a roaring bass. So we embarked on this crazy task—a week there to record Roman playing nine Haydn sonatas, Adam playing four Beethoven sonatas, and myself playing the Ravel and Medtner. Having the expertise and support of recording engineers Monte Nickles and Jim Ruberto 16
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weighing in at all times proved invaluable. After trying various combinations of microphones, we dove right in. Starting a project like this for me is like jumping into icy water. I somehow had to play these pieces at a level that I wanted while also navigating the inner complexities of my two best friends. It wasn’t easy. Tippet Rise made it possible. The cabins gave me a restful sleep each night—almost like it resuscitated me from the exhaustion of the previous day. Every morning I did a short meditation, followed by some stretches—some abs, some planks. I needed to be focused for myself and for them. The kindness of the staff kept us going—I have never before seen an environment where people are so accommodating, recording us from early morning until well after midnight. It was essentially a live-or-die situation—I needed to meet them at their levels, and I didn’t want to let anyone down. We had some necessary bumps in the road. Passionate disagreements created tensions that needed to be worked out, similar to group therapy sessions. There were definitely moments when we needed space from one another. But there were also moments of deep connection. We lived and breathed these recordings, which in the end became about so much more than the final product. We learned and grew deeper with one another and within ourselves—and yes, we are all still friends, friends that constantly fuel me during this current pandemic isolation. 18
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Often when I’m tucked away these days in my one-bedroom New York City apartment, I reminisce about my visits to Tippet Rise. I imagine the snow-covered Beartooth Mountains, the unparalleled plethora of pianos, the sculptures, and my fascinating discussions with the staff. A note of special thanks to all those from Tippet Rise who helped make this happen, and to Jeanne Reid White for thoughtfully organizing everything for us. I feel enormously grateful to Peter and Cathy Halstead for giving us the opportunity of a lifetime—to explore music and art in a poetic way and to deepen our understanding of ourselves. Each visit to Tippet Rise gives me a rush of excitement combined with a sense of tranquility, and I feel transported into a world of inspiration, presence, and beauty.
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Two Discovered Variations by Medtner On this album are first recordings of two recently discovered variations from
Russian composer-pianist Nikolai Medtner’s Second Improvisation. The work is a brooding set of variations depicting a fantastic, fairy-tale world of birds, elves, gnomes, goblins, and mermaids. First Hand Records director David Murphy alerted me to a line in Barrie Martyn’s Medtner biography stating that there may be unpublished variations to the Second Improvisation. I was immediately riveted and started a detective hunt trying to track them down. I contacted many Medtner aficionados throughout the world who received my request with great interest. One person led me to another, and finally I was led to the National Library of Canada in Ottawa, which contains 89 pages of sketches and drafts of the Second Improvisation in Medtner’s handwriting! Upon receiving the sketches, I was struck by several details. First, Medtner wrote several different sequence options for the variations. Further into the sketches, Medtner writes out the whole work. To my delight, there are two complete variations included here that were not in the published edition, as well as a fragment of another that he called “Waltz.” 22 Michael Brown
The first complete untitled variation has a tempo indication that reads Pesante (heavy; ponderous). The second he calls “La Cadenza.” Sincere, languorous, and sublimely gorgeous are just a few words that came to mind upon reading through this music. I was in love with these variations and determined to see how I could thoughtfully integrate them into the work. Through months of trial and error, I have come up with the order on this program— which is based on Medtner’s various order possibilities in the sketches, combined with my own aesthetic sense.
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MICHAEL BROWN Pianist and Composer
Michael Brown has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.” His artistry is shaped by his creative voice as a pianist and composer praised for his “fearless performances” (The New York Times) and exceptionally beautiful” compositions (The Washington Post). Winner of the 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Brown has recently performed as soloist with the Seattle Symphony, the National Philharmonic, and the Grand Rapids, North Carolina, New Haven, and Albany Symphonies. His recitals have taken place at Carnegie Hall, the Mostly Mozart Festival, and Caramoor. Brown is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, performing frequently at Alice Tully Hall and on tour. He was selected by András Schiff to perform on an international tour during which he made solo debuts in Berlin, Milan, Florence, Zurich’s Tonhalle, and New York’s 92nd Street Y. He regularly performs recitals with cellist Nicholas Canellakis, his longtime duo partner, and has appeared at numerous festivals, including Tanglewood, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Gilmore, Ravinia, Saratoga, Bridgehampton, Music in the Vineyards, Bard, Sedona, Moab, and Tippet Rise. He is also a successful and sought-after composer. 24 Michael Brown
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His Concerto for Piano and Strings (2020), which was co-commissioned by the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra in Poland, will be premiered by the Kalamazoo Symphony in 2021, with Brown as soloist. He was the composer and artist in residence at the New Haven Symphony for the 2017–19 seasons and a 2018 Copland House Residency Award recipient. He has received commissions from the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra, Concert Artists Guild, and Shriver Hall; the New Haven and Maryland Symphony Orchestras; Osmo Vänskä and Erin Keefe; pianists Jerome Lowenthal, Ursula Oppens, Orion Weiss, Adam Golka, and Roman Rabinovich; and a consortium of gardens. A prolific recording artist, he can be heard as soloist with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot in the music of Messiaen, and as soloist with the Brandenburg State Symphony in Samuel Adler’s First Piano Concerto for LINN Records. Other albums include Noctuelles, Ravel and newly discovered music by Medtner recorded at Tippet Rise (FHR); an all-George Perle CD (Bridge); and collaborative albums with pianist Jerome Lowenthal (CAG), cellist Nicholas Canellakis (CAG), and violinist Elena Urioste (BIS). He has plans to embark on a multiyear project to record the complete piano music of Felix Mendelssohn. Brown won first prize in the Concert Artists Guild Competition, as well as the Bowers Residency from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (formerly CMS Two). at Tippet Rise
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He also received the William Petschek Recital Award and is a Steinway Artist. He earned dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano and composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. Additional mentors include András Schiff and Richard Goode, as well as Brown’s early teachers, Herbert Rothgarber and Adam Kent. Brown lives in his native New York City with his two 19th-century Steinway Ds, Octavia and Daria. For more information, please visit michaelbrownmusic.com
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Ravel: Miroirs: IV Alborada del gracioso - Michael Brown
Produced by Adam Golka and Roman Rabinovich Engineered, edited, and mastered by Monte Nickles, assisted by Jim Ruberto DXD 24bit, 352.8kHz high-resolution recording and mastering Ⓟ & © 2021. Please click on the adjacent photo to play.
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Technical Specifications Recorded: 01/02/2019–01/10/2019 Recording Engineers: Monte Nickles, assisted by Jim Ruberto Sound Editor: Monte Nickles Denoised by: Jim Ruberto Mixed and Mastered by: Monte Nickles Performer: Michael Brown, Producers: Adam Golka, Roman Rabinovich.
Microphone preamps: Grace m108s Converters: Merging Technology’s HAPI and HORUS with Premium converter cards DAW: Merging Technology’s Pyramix
Recorded in Auro3D format for immersive playback in 32bit 384kHz DXD. Microphones used: Main array: Left: DPA 4006a Right: DPA 4006a Center: DPA 4006a Sur L: DPA 4041a Sur R: DPA 4041a Height FL: Schoeps MK2 Height FR: Schoeps MK2 Height RL: DPA 4041a Height RR: DPA 4041a Spot Microphones: DPA 4060a in Piano Schoeps MK2H for A/B Stereo pair 32 Michael Brown
Photography: James Florio, Jürgen Frank, Eric Petersen, Nada Navaee, Emily Rund Text: Michael Brown, Peter Halstead Flip Book Design: Craig M. White
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MICHAEL BROWN at Tippet Rise