Valente Lecture and Concert: Stephen Drury

Conductor-pianist Stephen Drury will talk about the “Concord Sonata” by Charles Ives and then perform it. The sonata (his second) is one of the most definitive American piano works of the 20th century; each movement is named for leading figures of the Transcendentalism movement of the 19th century. 2024 is coincidentally the 150th anniversary of Ives’ birth.

About Stephen Drury

Drury has performed throughout the world with a repertoire that stretches from Bach to Liszt to the music of today. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. A champion of contemporary music, he has taken the sound of dissonance into remote corners of Pakistan, Greenland and Montana.

Drury’s performances of music written in the last hundred years, ranging from the piano sonatas of Charles Ives to works by György Ligeti, Frederic Rzewski and John Cage, have received the highest critical acclaim. Drury has worked closely with many of the leading composers of our time, including Cage, Ligeti, Rzewski, Steve Reich, Olivier Messiaen, John Zorn, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, Christian Wolff, Jonathan Harvey, Michael Finnissy, Lee Hyla and John Luther Adams. He has commissioned new works for solo piano from Cage, Zorn, Adams, Terry Riley and Chinary Ung, with funding provided by Meet The Composer, and has recorded the music of Cage, Ives, Zorn, Adams, Rzewski, Elliott Carter, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Colin McPhee, as well as works of Liszt and Beethoven. He has performed with John Zorn in Paris, Vienna, London, Brussels, and New York, and has conducted Zorn’s music in Bologna, Boston, Chicago, as well as the UK and Costa Rica. In 1995, he gave the first performance of Zorn’s concerto for piano and orchestra (Aporias) with Dennis Russell Davies and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Drury has appeared at the MusikTriennale Koln in Germany, the Subtropics Festival in Miami, and the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, as well as at Roulette, the Knitting Factory, Tonic, and the Stone in New York. At Spoleto Festival USA, the Angelica Festival in Bologna, and Oberlin Conservatory, he has performed as both conductor and pianist.