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Pianist Awadagin Pratt pays a return visit to Lafayette College’s Williams Center for the Arts at 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 18, honoring three great German composers—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms – with the help of violinist Beth Newdome and cellist Jennifer Kloetzel.
Pratt will open with a selection by Orlando Gibbons before launching a set of preludes and fugues by Bach. He will then measure his intellectual insights against the great landscape of Beethoven’s penultimate sonata, the D-Major Sonata No. 31, opus 110. Newdome and Kloetzel will join him in the second half of his program for Johannes Brahms’ Trio No. 1.
Tickets cost $15 and may be purchased by calling the Williams Center box office at 610-330-5009.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pratt began studying piano at age six. Three years later, after his family moved to Normal, Illinois, he also began studying violin. At 16, Pratt entered the University of Illinois, where he studied piano, violin and conducting. He subsequently enrolled at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music, where he became the first student in the school’s history to receive diplomas in three performance areas. In 1992, Pratt won the Naumburg International Piano Competition, and two years later he was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Pratt has been heard in recital in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, and other American music centers. He has appeared as soloist with, among others, the orchestras of New York, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Baltimore, Atlanta, Seattle, Detroit, Cincinnati, and New Jersey. His festival appearances include Ravinia, Blossom, Wolftrap, Caramoor, Aspen, and the Hollywood Bowl. Internationally, Pratt has toured to Japan, Germany, Israel, Switzerland and South Africa. His 1999-2000 season includes recitals at the Kennedy Center, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and Bermuda Festival, and orchestral appearances in Seattle, Puerto Rico, Honolulu, New Mexico, Buffalo, and Israel. Pratt also has performed at the White House at the invitation of President and Mrs. Clinton.
The musician was named one of the “50 Leaders of Tomorrow” in [ital]Ebony[ital] magazine’s 50th anniversary issue. Pratt’s most recent release features Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Handel, and his own transcription of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue.
Newdome is Associate Concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony; she joined the orchestra in 1991. She was born in Mansfield, Ohio, where she began violin studies with her mother at age three. She earned her bachelor’s degree and performer’s certificate at the Eastman School of Music under the tutelage of Charles Castleman. Before arriving in Atlanta, Newdome held positions in the Jacksonville, Columbus, and Dallas symphonies. She has been a soloist with the Atlanta Symphony, Dekalb Symphony, Mansfield Symphony, and Atlanta Community Orchestra, with which she premiered the violin concerto Comme un Ciel Dechire (“Like Sky Split Asunder”), written especially for her and dedicated to her by composer Tristan Foison. Newdome is a core member of the Georgian Chamber Players, which performs with guest artists of national and international renown, including frequent appearances with Pratt. She teaches at Spelman College and the Aspen Music Festival.
A graduate of the Juilliard School and a Fulbright Grant winner, Kloetzel has performed extensively across North America, Europe, and Asia. An avid chamber musician, she has appeared as guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and has collaborated with such distinguished artists as David Golub, Wu Han, Heiichiro Ohyama, Gary Hoffman and Paul Neubauer. After she performed with pianist Andre Previn at the La Jolla Chamber Music Festival, Kloetzel was invited to appear as one of his select “Rising Stars” for two seasons at the Caramoor Festival in New York. She has performed at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Rushmore Festival, the Sarasota and Aspen Music Festivals, the Prague Mozart Academy, and the St. Gallen Festival of the Alban Berg Quartet.
Kloetzel performed as cellist of the Cassatt Quartet during the 1995-96 season, and in 1996, co-founded the award-winning Cypress String Quartet. As a member of this San Francisco-based ensemble, Kloetzel was nominated as “Debut Artist of the Year” by National Public Radio’s “Performance Today” and was featured in [ital]Chamber Music Magazine[ital] as a “Generation X Ensemble To Watch.” The quartet serves each summer on the faculty of the Las Vegas Music Festival.
The 1999-2000 Performance Series at Lafayette College is sponsored, in part, by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Foundation for the Arts.