Internationally Lauded Pianist Ian Hobson Performs Six-Concert Series of Complete Piano Music of Debussy & Ravel at Subculture, New York City

SOUND IMPRESSIONS: THE PIANO MUSIC OF DEBUSSY AND RAVEL
Nov 29, 2017; Dec 13, 2017; Feb 7; Feb 28; April 4; April 18, 2018

The immensely versatile and renowned pianist Ian Hobson, whose playing has been described by Gramophone as “intensely alive to expressive nuance, textural clarity and elastic shaping,” will perform Sound Impressions: The Piano Music of Debussy and Ravel, a six-recital cycle of the complete solo piano works of the two composers, at SubCulture, 45 Bleecker Street (between Bowery and Lafayette Streets.) Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. To purchase, please visit www.subculturenewyork.com. The series will take place over the course of six months, from November 2017 to April 2018, featuring six Wednesday evening concerts as follows:    

November 29, 2017, 7:30 p.m.

Ravel                            Minuet in C-Sharp Minor
Debussy                       Danse Bohémienne
                                      Deux Arabesques
                                     Morceau de concours
                                      Images (1894)
Ravel                            Gaspard de la Nuit
Debussy                       Préludes, (Book 2) 

December 13, 2017

Ravel                            Menuet Antique
Debussy                       Ballade
                                      Le Plus que Lente
                                      Epigraphes Antiques
Ravel                            Pavane pour une Enfante Défunte
                                      Prélude
Debussy                       Le Petit Nègre
Ravel                            Sonatine
Debussy                       Children’s Corner

February 7, 2018

Ravel                            Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn
Debussy                       Hommage à Haydn
                                     Pièce pour piano
Ravel                            Jeux d’eau
Debussy                       Rêverie
Ravel                            Valses nobles et sentimentales
Debussy                       Images, (Book 1)
                                    Suite Bergamasque

February 28, 2018

Debussy                       Berceuse Héroïque
                                     Valse Romantique
                                     Mazurka
                                     Nocturne
Ravel                            Sérénade Grotesque
                                      Miroirs
Debussy                       Préludes, (Book 1) 

April 4, 2018

Ravel                            À la manière de Borodine
                                    À la manière de Chabrier
Debussy                      Masques
                                     D’un cahier d’esquisses
                                     L’isle joyeuse
                                     Danse (Tarantelle styrienne)
                                     Estampes
Debussy                      Images, (Book 2)
Ravel                            La valse

April 18, 2018 

Debussy                       Pour le piano
                                      Élégie
                                     Pièce pour l’oeuvre du “vêtement du blesse”
Ravel                            Le tombeau de Couperin
Debussy                      Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon
                                     Études

Mr. Hobson’s recitals will explore Debussy’s revolutionary quest to reach beyond traditional harmonic means to portray people and nature in an ambiguous yet still immediate reality; as well as Ravel’s brilliant, sometimes darkly-menacing solo piano works which tease the imagination with skillfully wrought intimations of spooky fairy tales, faraway places, and Gothic fantasies.

Pianist and conductor Ian Hobson—called “powerful and persuasive” by The New York Times— is recognized internationally for his command of an extraordinarily comprehensive repertoire, his consummate performances of the Romantic masters, his deft and idiomatic readings of neglected piano music old and new, and his assured conducting from both the piano and the podium. 

In addition to being a celebrated performer, Mr. Hobson is a dedicated scholar and educator who has pioneered renewed interest in the music of such lesser-known masters as Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Hummel.  He has also been an effective advocate of works written expressly for him by a number of today’s noted composers, including Benjamin Lees, John Gardner, David Liptak, Alan Ridout, and Yehudi Wyner.

In his most recent season, Mr. Hobson presented a six-concert series in New York divided between Sub-Culture and Merkin Concert Hall titled Preludes, Etudes, and Variations – Downtown/Uptown focusing on outstanding examples of each genre by Chopin, Fauré, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and Szymanowski. The series also expanded the genres by presenting world premieres by Yehudi Wyner (Preludes), Robert Chumbley (Etudes), and Stephen Taylor (Variations). In an earlier season, Mr. Hobson performed the complete solo piano works and chamber music with piano of Johannes Brahms, titled  Johannes Brahms: Classical Inclinations in a Romantic Age. The New York Times’ critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim praised the opening performance in the series in her article “Ian Hobson, Powerful and Persuasive in First of Six Concerts”:

With his powerful sound and clear-eyed command of multiple voices, Mr. Hobson offered a reading of the Opus 25 set that was varied and exciting. He also vividly characterized each of Rachmaninoff’s 10 Opus 23 Preludes, from the boozy impatience of the fifth to the noble singing voice of the concluding Largo.

Mr. Hobson offered as well a persuasive and evocative first performance of Stephen Taylor’s “Variations Ascending,” a kind of evolutionary history of the world in 10 chapters, built around a musical representation of a single gene. (The New York Times, October 14, 2015)

Mr. Hobson continues his concerts as music director of the Sinfonia da Camera, a professional chamber orchestra affiliated with the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and College of Fine and Applied Arts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Mr. Hobson is the Swanlund Emeritus Professor of Music. Further recital and teaching engagements this season take Mr. Hobson throughout the United States and several times to South Korea, where he is a professor at the National University of Seoul. Mr. Hobson will also conduct at the Carnegie Mellon University in January 2018.

An artist of prodigious energy and resource, having to date amassed a discography of some 60 releases, including the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven and Schumann and a complete edition of Brahms’s variations for piano, Mr. Hobson is also in the process of recording a complete edition—the most comprehensive to date—of the works of Frédéric Chopin. Volume 12 of the series was praised by Colin Clarke in Fanfare: 

The recording […] is simply superb magnificently clear and holding the burnished sounds of Hobson’s piano perfectly at all dynamic levels. […] Hobson gives the lines plenty of space, nowhere more memorably than when suspended, without accompaniment, as if held free of gravity. Careful pedaling just escapes blurring in octave-dominated passages, and there is a great nobility towards the end. The sense, as the work completes, is of coming to the end of a very significant Chopin recital. All in all, this is one of the finest issues in Hobson’s ongoing, significant traversal of the complete Chopin works. (Fanfare, July/August 2016)

As guest soloist, Ian Hobson has appeared with many of the world’s major orchestras; in the United States these include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Florida, Houston, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and the American Symphony Orchestra and Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico. Abroad, he has been heard with Great Britain’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Scottish National Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and Hallé Orchestra, ORF-Vienna, Orchester der Beethovenhalle, Moscow Chopin Orchestra, Israeli Sinfonietta, and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Since his debut in the double role of conductor and soloist with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in 1996, Maestro Hobson has been invited to lead the English Chamber Orchestra, the Sinfonia Varsovia (including an appearance at Carnegie Hall), the Pomeranian Philharmonic (Poland), the Fort Worth Chamber Orchestra (Bass Hall), and the Kibbutz Chamber Orchestra of Israel, among others.

In addition, Mr. Hobson is a much sought-after judge for national and international competitions and has been invited to join numerous juries, among them the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (at the specific request of Mr. Cliburn), the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Poland, the Chopin Competition in Florida, the Leeds Piano Competition in the U.K., and the Schumann International Competition in Germany.  In 2005 Hobson served as Chairman of the Jury for the Cleveland International Competition and the Kosciuzsko Competition in New York; in 2008 he was Chairman of Jury of the New York Piano Competition, and in 2010 he again served in that capacity of the newly renamed New York International Piano Competition.

One of the youngest ever graduates of the Royal Academy of Music, Mr. Hobson began his international career in 1981 when he won First Prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition, after having earned silver medals at both the Arthur Rubinstein and Vienna-Beethoven competitions. Born in Wolverhampton, England, he studied at Cambridge University (England), and at Yale University, in addition to his earlier studies at the Royal Academy of Music.  A professor in the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Hobson received the endowed chair of Swanlund Professor of Music in 2000.