"A pianist with the Midas touch." –

MICHAEL BORISKIN has become recognized on five continents as one of the most imaginative and versatile American pianists of his generation. Whether the composer is Mozart or Beethoven, Brahms or Ravel, Copland or Gershwin, Perle or Lutoslawski, Mr. Boriskin offers "an adventure for the audience" (The New York Times). Each performance and recording attests to a vivid communicativeness, natural expressivity, and deeply musical virtuosity that have made him one of the most highly-regarded exponents of both old and new works.

Mr. Boriskin has performed throughout the U. S. and in over 30 countries. His extensive international itinerary includes the San Francisco, Seattle, and Utah Symphonies, New York Chamber Symphony, Polish National and Munich Radio Orchestras, American Composers Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, and UNAM Philharmonic of Mexico City, among many other orchestras. He has performed at many of the world's foremost concert venues, including Lincoln Center (on its Great Performers Series), the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, BBC in , South West German Radio, Theatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, Vienna's Arnold Schoenberg Center, Athens Festival of Music and Dance, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Library of Congress, and Istanbul International Festival. He is a familiar figure on National Public Radio and on American Public Media as performer, commentator, and host, and he has been heard on Performance Today, Studio 360, Marketplace, and many other programs. His innovative broadcast series CENTURYVIEW, celebrating piano works of the past hundred years, was enjoyed for three seasons by over one-million listeners on 200 NPR stations coast-to-coast. Mr. Boriskin is also a much sought-after guest with chamber ensembles worldwide, and has worked with the Borromeo, St. Petersburg, St. Lawrence, Penderecki, Ludwig, and Lark String Quartets, Dorian and Arioso Wind Quintets, and the New York Philharmonic Ensembles.

A prolific recording artist, Mr. Boriskin's impressive discography on BMG/Conifer, New World, Koch International, Albany, and many other labels ranges widely from Brahms and Tchaikovsky through the present, and continues to grow in depth and breadth. His recording on SONY Classical of Gershwin's complete works for piano and orchestra with the Eos Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Sheffer was awarded a coveted Rosette from Britain’s Penguin Guide to Recordings. He recorded five concerti for Newport Classic, including the rarely-heard Tchaikovsky Second and the Prokofiev First. He has four highly-acclaimed discs of postwar American piano works on New World Records, which have often appeared on “Best Recordings” lists of The New York Times and many other publications. On Bridge and Albany, he has recorded both of George Perle's towering piano concerti (the second of which was written for Mr. Boriskin). Other solo discs have been devoted to Brahms, Poulenc, Joplin (which appeared on Crossover Charts in the U.K.), and Lou Harrison, as well as concerti by Richard Danielpour and Edward Smaldone.

As The Times noted, Mr. Boriskin's lively programming is "a paragon of enlightenment," and he actively seeks, through content and presentation, to refresh and broaden the concert experience. His vast repertoire reaches back to the works of Rameau, Scarlatti, Bach, and other Baroque masters, and he has also worked with virtually every major American composer of the past 35 years.

Long ago, Mr. Boriskin broke the constraints of a traditional performing career, with major institutions enlisting his many talents. As Artistic and Executive Director of Copland House, he has guided the national emergence of this unique creative center for American music based at Aaron Copland's National Historic Landmark home. He has served over the years as an artistic advisor for programs and projects at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Tisch Center for the Arts at the 92nd Street Y, Columbia University's Miller Theatre, New Line Cinema, and the fabled Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles, and has traveled as an emissary for the U. S. Department of State and the U. S. Information Agency. For the New York Philharmonic, he played a significant role as piano soloist, chamber music collaborator, pre-concert lecturer, moderator, and program consultant at the orchestra's Completely Copland Festival. As Music Director for three seasons of the White Oak Dance Project, his collaborations with Mikhail Baryshnikov were celebrated throughout the dance and music worlds, and Mr. Boriskin oversaw the musical preparations and production of nearly 250 performances on 10 national and international tours. An accomplished writer, his articles have appeared in American Record Guide, Symphony, Chamber Music, Stagebill, Ballet Review, Piano and Keyboard, Clavier, The Piano Quarterly, and other publications, and he was a contributing author to the Schirmer book on Vladimir Horowitz.

He has had a long and extensive commitment to education, and has been affiliated at various times with the Mannes College of Music, Manhattan School of Music, City University of New York, University of , Purchase College Conservatory of Music, and many other important institutions. He has also brought music to life in master classes, residencies, workshops, and guest lectures at campuses around the world.

As The New York Observer noted, "Michael Boriskin is an American pianist who grew up in Long Beach, Long Island to become one of the world's most valuable piano virtuosos." He was born in to a family long active in music and the visual arts. He attended public schools on Long Island, and pursued his musical studies at The and the City University of New York at Queens College.

Photo: Gabe Palacio

PRESS

NEW YORK TIMES "The entire performance was an adventure for the audience -- gripping, spontaneous yet tautly controlled." FANFARE "Michael Boriskin is a brilliant pianist who has done as much as anyone for contemporary music.” SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE "Boriskin’s a brilliant musician who spins the most intricate passage work with the grace and ease of a skilled flycaster or perfect dancer."

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (UK) "Boriskin ranges wide in his sympathies, proving warm in his understanding of divergent composers and capable of penetrating insights into each of them."

DIE WELT (GERMANY) "A MUSICAL DISCOVERY [Headline]…A pianist of the highest rank -- a piano recital which was extraordinary in every respect. Boriskin is a thinking pianist with a strong sense of form who also knows how to project the emotional power of music."

THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER "Boriskin is a highly finished artist with a firm commitment to the long line, a gratifying sense of tonal differentiation, a clear wit, and a romantic temperament."

LOS ANGELES TIMES "Boriskin's playing exhibited equal parts suavity and elan."

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE "Boriskin is one of the most skilled and versatile pianists of his generation."

THE WASHINGTON POST "Boriskin understands what the composer wants and communicates his ideas provocatively and with authority."

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG (GERMANY) "Brilliant, well-developed technique, almost inexhaustible reserves of strength, as well as a natural feeling for the large-scale structures."

THE GLOBE AND MAIL (CANADA) "Boriskin is a sensitive and virtuosic player."

PENGUIN GUIDE “Boriskin brings dazzling yet totally unforced bravura from ever nimble fingers. The performances [Gershwin] have a superb sense of style and are for our time what Bernstein's famous versions were for the 50's & 60's."

BUFFALO NEWS “A concert that will be remembered for a long time, with the irrepressible Michael Boriskin as soloist [Shostakovich Concerto No. 2]. Boriskin played with wit and sensitivity, and showed tremendous style. At the snap-bang end of the first movement, it actually hurt not to applaud.”

By PHILLIP LUTZ

Amid the awards crowding the walls of Aaron Copland’s former home in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y., hangs a neatly framed movie advertisement with a modest distinction of its own: The ad, from a 1961 issue of Variety, focuses its sales pitch on the composer, Copland, not the star or the director. The novel approach suggests the centrality of the score and its creator to the enterprise.

The movie died at the box office — an early indie titled “Something Wild,” it may have succumbed to controversy over its sexual images, considered graphic in their day. But the ad’s invocation of Copland emphasizes that the composer’s currency extended well beyond the few signature ballet scores and the ubiquitous concert work “Fanfare for the Common Man” for which he is best known today.

It is a point that Michael Boriskin, the artistic and executive director of the nonprofit group Copland House, is constantly trying to make. And it is one that will be front and center when Copland House and the Jacob Burns Film Center, in Pleasantville, N.Y., join forces from Oct. 17 through 20 for a short festival featuring screenings of six Coplandscored films — among them “Something Wild” — and a concert of Copland chamber works. “This project is to shine a light on these two lesser known but equally great aspects of the work,” Mr. Boriskin said.

Seated behind a long hardwood table that dominates the studio in the Copland home — a rustic getaway in the woods of northern Westchester County that is both a national historic landmark and the Copland House headquarters — Mr. Boriskin was clearly animated by the prospect of the presentations. And fittingly so, as he guided the choice of material, will play piano with the Music From Copland House ensemble, and is to answer audience questions on the first two nights of the screenings.

Those screenings, to be held at the Burns center, will open Oct. 17 with “Appalachian Spring,” a seldomseen cinematic version of the Martha Graham ballet released in 1958 and featuring Graham dancing to Copland’s Pulitzer Prizewinning score. The second night (Oct. 18) will feature movies based on the John Steinbeck tales “The Red Pony” (1949) and “Of Mice and Men” (1939), in which Copland introduced a spare aesthetic that contrasted with the lush romanticism of the film scoring of the time. “Copland’s film music was really innovative in charting a different artistic course,” Mr. Boriskin said.

The third night (Oct. 19) of screenings will offer Spike Lee’s 1998 film “He Got Game,” which places familiar Copland themes in a modern urban context, and William Wyler’s 1949 film “The Heiress,” which won an Academy Award for best original score. Running for a total of just 15 of the film’s 115 minutes, the score achieves maximum impact with a minimum of judiciously placed musical interludes.

“To define a profile with those limitations,” Mr. Boriskin said, “and doing it sporadically and trying to connect it all over the course of a film, it’s a significant accomplishment.”

For all Copland accomplished in “The Heiress,” his achievement may be no less impressive in the last offering (Oct. 20), “Something Wild.” Directed by the Actors Studio veteran Jack Garfein and starring Carroll Baker, it featured the last score Copland worked on and the only one he wrote in the Cortlandt Manor home, where he spent the last 30 years of his life. There, at age 60, Moviola at hand, he was able to examine the film frame by frame without leaving his studio.

The effort paid off, said Brian Ackerman, the programming director at the Burns center. While Copland had dealt with grim subject matter before, the sexual violence depicted in “Something Wild” prompted him to depart from the soaring populism he so famously nurtured and revisit the hardedge modernism of his early concert work. The resulting score seems fresh 50 years on, Mr. Ackerman said. “He’s modern in such a way that it still works,” he said.

The modernist sensibility will also suffuse the pieces Mr. Boriskin has chosen for the live performance on the afternoon of Oct. 20 at the Merestead estate in Mount Kisco, N.Y., a county historic site that has a partnership with Copland House. Titled “Sonorous Images: Copland’s Chamber Music,” the performance in the onetime living room of Merestead mansion will feature Copland’s Piano Quartet, from 1950, and his Sextet, a reworked Short Symphony that had its premiere in 1939.

The reworking, which was intended to simplify an orchestration many found unplayable, did not rid the piece of all its complexities. On hand to sort out what is left of them will be Curtis Macomber and Karina Canellakis on violins, Leslie Tomkins on viola, Alexis Pia Gerlach on cello, Derek Bermel on clarinet — and Mr. Boriskin, whose presence Ms. Tomkins deemed crucial. “He knows the ins and outs of it,” she said.

______“The Film Music of Aaron Copland,” at the Jacob Burns Film Center, 364 Manville Road, Pleasantville, N.Y., Oct. 17 through 20. For information: burnsfilmcenter.org or (914) 7475555. “Sonorous Images: Copland’s Chamber Works,” at Copland House at Merestead, 455 Byram Lake Road, Mount Kisco, 3 p.m., Oct. 20. For information: coplandhouse.org or (914) 7884659.

LIFE & ARTS

AMBPO conductor JoAnn Falletta, right, applauds pianist Michael Boriskin after performing Dmitry Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Op.102. This was at Kleinhans. {Photo by Robert Kirkham / Buffalo News} Robert Kirkham/Buffalo News

An unforgettable lesson in Russian poetry for BPO BY: Mary Kunz Goldman / The Buffalo News |

Music Director JoAnn Falletta is conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra this weekend in an all-Shostakovich program, a concert that will be remembered for a long time. It starts with the Piano Concerto No. 2, with the irrepressible Michael Boriskin as soloist. After intermission comes the massive Symphony No. 13, featuring Russian bass Mikhail Svetlov and the men of the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus.

The piano concerto is like a diamond – compact, chiseled and sparkling. The massive Symphony No. 13, in contrast, is a big boulder of a piece, based on the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, most notably “Babi Yar,” about a massacre of Jews that the Nazis carried out and the Soviet regime lied about. It’s rare to hear this symphony live (the last time the BPO played it was almost 40 years ago). And what hits this performance out of the park is that Yevtushenko is on hand to read his poetry.

Yevtushenko, who is 79, is a thrilling presence. He is a big, tall man, walks elegantly with a cane and gestures vividly with his huge, expressive hands. Though he now lives in Tulsa, Okla., his accent is such that you can understand only about a third of what he says. When he praised our “or- KES-tra” and said Falletta was an “irreesistibly charming conductor,” you had to smile out of pure pleasure. He declaimed “Babi Yar” partly in Russian and partly in English. What a spirit he has. And what a spirit this concert has.

This is the first time the BPO has performed that effervescent piano concerto. It’s an amazing little piece, full of syncopated dance rhythms, like Prokofiev ballets, and long lines of octaves zig-zagging this way and that. The middle movement, the Andante, soars like a romantic movie theme, as lovely as Rachmaninoff.

Boriskin and the orchestra’s musicians played with wit and sensitivity. Everyone was crisp and in sync. Boriskin showed tremendous style. He used a score, but he seemed to have internalized the music’s rhythms. His playing, though quiet and controlled, has zip. At the snap-bang end of the first movement, it actually hurt not to applaud. The Andante sang. The orchestra’s long introduction was muted and haunting. After the concerto, going into the symphony was like going into a tunnel.

Hearing this music is like going to the Soviet Union. The desolate chimes, the muffled timpani, the sometimes brutal brass. Like Yevtushenko’s poetry, the music gives us not only the drama and tragedy of the country, but the static misery of it. The movement that tells of women standing in long lines to buy food, their pots and pans suggested by rattles from the percussion, created a terrible feeling of gloom.

Svetlov, who appeared in Buffalo earlier this year in Nickel City Opera’s “La Boheme,” has a fine voice and great diction and expressiveness. Like the Irish tenor or the Italian soprano, the Russian bass is a distinctive marvel and he did the tradition proud. He was passionate, he was oddly detached, he was funny and sardonic.

The men of the Philharmonic Chorus, prepared by Roland Martin, also came across well. There are interludes when the chorus has to echo Svetlov in rapid, intense rhythms, and the singers pulled it off. Falletta paced the piece well so that it built to several horrifying high points, until the symphony’s final notes died out gradually, like a sigh.

The concert, which takes place at Kleinhans Music Hall, repeats tonight at 8.

The Penguin Guide

Piano concerto in F: Rhapsody in blue: Second Rhapsody for piano and orchestra: Variations on ‘I got rhythm’

(M)***Classic fm Dig, 76505 57012-2 [id]. Michael Boriskin, Eos O, Jonathan Sheffer.

This is the most seductive pairing of the Rhapsody in blue and the Concerto in F to have come our way for a long time. The performances have a superb sense of style, and are for today what Bernstein’s famous versions were for the 1950’s and ‘60’s. Michael Boriskin is a native New Yorker, and he and Jonathan Sheffer immediately establish a partnership which brings an idiomatic and freshly individual approach to these two concertante masterpieces, which uniquely span the jazz world and the ethos of the concert hall. The keenly sophisticated and inventive ‘I got rhythm’ variations are no less glittering and are wonderfully infectious. The orchestral details throughout is a joy (especially illuminating in the less inspired Second Rhapsody), while in the concerto the big climaxes open out to engulf the listener expansively and ardently. Boriskin’s brilliant pianism is wittily skittish in the most infectious way, both in the Rhapsody and in the delectably played central section of the concerto’s slow movement. The finale brings dazzling yet totally unforced bravura from ever nimble fingers, matched by sparkling orchestral rhythms. The recording is first rate. This is not to be missed.

Musicians enjoy rare chance to collaborate By: Gwenda Nemerofsky

It often strikes me when I see a concert artist walk onstage at a performance how poised and calm they seem before they begin to play or sing. Whether seated at a piano or waiting during their musical introduction, their steely focus and patience is something to behold.

It's not only the possible nerves and anticipation the musician might be experiencing, but what's gone on behind the scenes to get them where they are that boggles the mind. Besides the decades of training and countless practice and rehearsal hours, there are often hectic performance schedules and lengthy travel agendas to contend with.

Take violinist Tim Fain, who will be playing opening night at Virtuosi Concerts with pianist Michael Boriskin Photo: TRISH LEWIS Michael Boriskin this Saturday, for instance. When we did our interview, he had just stepped off the stage after playing with the Orquestra Petrobrás Sinfônica in Rio de Janeiro.

He was scheduled to perform the following day with another Brazilian orchestra, the Barra Mansa Symphony. Next month, the 36-year-old is off to Melbourne, Australia, with his solo multi-media show Portals, which, upon return to his native U.S.A., he will continue touring. In between all this he is coming to Winnipeg.

Michael Boriskin may not tour quite as much these days, but his schedule is as busy as ever, and the diversity is what makes it especially impressive. He is a piano soloist, prolific recording artist, chamber musician, writer and educator and holds down the artistic director and executive director positions of Copland House, a creative centre dedicated to American musical heritage and to fostering greater public awareness and appreciation of that nation's composers and their work.

"I gave up sleep a long time ago," laughed the vibrant 60-year-old in a telephone interview from his home in Bedford, New York. "It takes a lot of compartmentalization," he said of his very full life. "I enjoy it. I was never interested in 'just' being a touring performer. I love performing, but the idea of spending life on the road doing concerts wasn't for me. I had too many interests to do a selection of music day in and day out. I enjoy working with people, forming collaborations."

His collaboration with Fain is one Boriskin obviously enjoys. "Tim is a wonderfully dynamic and musical artist. We met while doing a musical project at a summer music festival in Utah. We hit it off and really enjoyed working together. But our schedules go in such different directions -- we take every chance to work together."

Fain, on the other hand, thrives on touring. "I love to play as many concerts as I can and a wide variety of them," the Curtis Institute graduate said via email. "Whether it's soloist with orchestra, playing chamber music, or doing recital work, or collaboration with an artist from a different genre... it's all great. "Recently I've been doing a great deal of touring with my show Portals, in which I explore the yearning for human connection in the digital age with collaborators on screen, including , who directed and choreographed a dance film as the centrepiece of the evening along with a work I commissioned from and parts of 's poetry collection Book of Longing... It has been a thrill creating and touring with this... so I do spend a lot of time on the road. But I also just spent the entire month of August at home with my wife and three-year- old daughter, which was a nice change."

You may not know his name, but you've likely seen and heard Fain before, as he appeared onscreen and in the soundtrack of the 2010 hit film Black Swan. "I worked with Benjamin Millepied at New York City Ballet," Fain said getting the gig. "He asked me if I would like to be part of a new Darren Aronofsky movie... Having attended Juilliard and spent some time with dancers over the years, a psychological thriller about a ballerina seemed a perfectly natural mix of elements, not to mention my huge respect for , and so I said yes. It was a really memorable time."

Fain and Boriskin, with input from Virtuosi artistic director Harry Strub, have put together some top-notch repertoire for Saturday's concert, entitled Charisma. It includes the emotive Franck Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, Beethoven's melody-rich Spring Sonata (which Fain recalls first playing for his Grade 5 class at lunchtime in the cafeteria) some Brahms and Bach and American composer Pierre Jalbert's 2010 work, Wild Ambrosia. " He is a gifted composer with a distinctive voice," Boriskin said of Jalbert, "He writes very compelling music."

Boriskin, who also has a broadcasting background, plans to provide introductory remarks at the concert. "I enjoy trying to make the whole concert experience more inviting and casual," he said. "It leads to better receptivity in listeners and personalizes the experience. This is, after all, a decidedly human endeavour. What I'm doing isn't merely a job -- these things are my passion."

Between Fain's love of concertizing and Boriskin's passion, the audience should be in for a treat. The concert is at 8 p.m. at Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall in the University of Winnipeg. Tickets are $33/adults and seniors, $15/students, $5/ high school, available at 786-9000 or www.virtuosi.mb.ca [email protected] Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 20, 2012 D5

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