With a vivid onstage presence, dazzling technique, and keen musicality, pianist Olga Kern is widely recognized as one of the great artists of her generation, captivating audiences and critics alike. She was born into a family of musicians and began studying piano at the age of five. At seventeen, she was awarded first prize at the Rachmaninov International Piano Competition, and in 2001, she launched her U.S. career, winning a historic Gold Medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition—the only woman in the last 50 years to do so.

A Steinway Artist, Olga is a laureate of several international competitions. In 2016 she was Jury Chairman of both Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition and the first Olga Kern International Piano Competition, where she also holds the title of Artistic Director. In December 2021, Olga was Jury Chairman of the 1st Chopin Animato International Piano competition in Paris, France. In coming seasons, she will continue to serve on the juries of several high-level competitions. Olga frequently gives masterclasses and since 2017 has served on the piano faculty of the Manhattan School of Music. Also in 2017, Olga received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (New York City). In 2019, she was appointed the Connie & Marc Jacobson Director of Chamber Music at the Virginia Arts Festival.

Olga has performed with many prominent orchestras, including the St. Louis Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Detroit Symphony, and the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.) as well as Czech Philharmonic, Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, Pittsburgh Symphony, São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Iceland Symphony, Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, and Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra. She was a featured soloist on U.S. tours with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine; and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in 2018, 2019, and 2022, and during the 2017–2018 season, she served as Artist in Residence at the San Antonio Symphony. Highlights of the 2022–2023 season included performances with the Dallas Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria, National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland), and the Colorado Symphony. She performed recitals for the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation in Salt Lake City and the National Conference for Keyboard Pedagogy in Chicago as well as in Ostrava, Czech Republic; Milan, Italy; Virginia Beach; Chicago; New York; and San Francisco.

The 2023–2024 season has included monumental performances of Rachmaninov’s four piano concertos and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the Austin Symphony and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. Olga appeared with the Czech Philharmonic on a nationwide telecast. The season includes engagements with Santa Rosa Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Toledo Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Asheville Symphony, Prague Symphony, Taipei Symphony, and Tokyo Symphony as well as a tour of South Africa. She performs recitals with the American Pianists Association in Indianapolis, the Tuesday Musical Club of San Antonio, the Ljubljana Music Festival, and The Gilmore Piano Festival.

In 2012, Olga established the Kern Foundation “Aspiration,” which supports talented musicians around the world. Olga’s discography includes a Harmonia Mundi recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and Christopher Seaman; her Grammy-nominated disc of Rachmaninov’s Corelli Variations and transcriptions; and Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Warsaw Philharmonic and Antoni Wit. Other notable releases include Chopin’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3 and SONY’s release of Rachmaninov’s Sonata for Cello and Piano with Sol Gabetta. Olga released a new CD in 2022 on the Delos label of Brahms and Shostakovich quintets with the Dalí Quartet. Olga is a Steinway Artist.

She is featured in award-winning documentaries about the 2001 Cliburn Competition: The Cliburn: Playing on the Edge, They Came to Play, and Olga’s Journey.

Olga’s iconic dresses are designed by Alex Teih (New York), and her jewelry is designed by Alex Soldier (New York).

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Born 1906, St. Petersburg
Died 1975, Moscow

Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, op.10

In the fall of 1924, a music student sat down at his desk in frosty St. Petersburg to complete a graduation requirement: He had to write a symphony. Dmitri Shostakovich got the first two movements done by December and the third in January 1925. Then he stopped. A friend was dying, and the composer had to force himself to complete the finale in April. He pressed on to finish the orchestration on July 1, satisfying the assignment.

But what he had written was not just an academic exercise. Premiered in St. Petersburg on May 1, 1926, Shostakovich’s First Symphony went around the world like a shot. Bruno Walter led it in Berlin the following year, Stokowski conducted the American premiere in 1928, and even Arturo Toscanini (no particular friend of new music) introduced it to New York Philharmonic audiences in 1931. Almost overnight, an unknown Russian music student had become a household word—and for good reason. Unlike the other “student” symphony to make it into the repertory, Shostakovich’s piece is a mature work of art by a composer with a distinct voice and in command of all the resources to bring that voice to life.

In retrospect, this symphony’s success should have been no surprise. This is fun music, alive with a fizzing energy that can be cheeky one second, lyric the next. At 18, Shostakovich already had an instinctive grasp on symphonic form, that unteachable ability to make basic ideas evolve into full-scale musical structures (even Schoenberg, who not an admirer of Shostakovich’s music, conceded that the young composer had “the breath of the symphonist”). Also apparent was Shostakovich’s assured command of the orchestra, with imaginative solos for winds and strings, unusual groupings of instruments, and a dynamic range that extends from the delicate to the ear-splitting.

An original voice rings out from the first instant, where a muted trumpet sets the piquant tone, and this Allegretto introduction presents theme—shapes that will evolve across the span of the symphony. At the Allegro non troppo, the clarinet spins out the saucy main idea (this symphony has a terrific part for solo clarinet), and the second subject arrives as a limpid, off-the-beat little waltz for solo flute (the ballerina from Stravinsky’s Petrushka was clearly dancing in young Shostakovich’s memory as he wrote this). After all its energy, this sonata-form movement vanishes in a wisp of sound.

The brusque start of the second movement, a scherzo marked Allegro, turns into a blistering dance for ricochet violins, and off the movement flies, enlivened by the sound of the piano, which had been silent until now. The central episode is introduced by a pair of flutes, whose wistful little duet gives way to a lugubriously slow return of the opening. This is a wonderful moment: Slowly the music eases ahead, then takes off, and Shostakovich deftly combines his main themes as the music races at white heat to a sudden stop. Three fierce piano chords crack through that silence, and the music disintegrates before us.

Writing to a friend just after completing these two movements, Shostakovich caught their character perfectly: “In general, I am satisfied with the symphony. Not bad. A symphony like any other, although it really ought to be called a symphony-grotesque.” And this points toward a curious feature of the First Symphony — it falls into two distinctly different halves. The grotesquerie of the first two movements gives way to a much darker tone in the final two. Solo oboe sings the angular, grieving main melody of the Lento, a subtle evolution of the first movement’s main theme, but in the course of this movement an entirely new idea begins to intrude: A six-note motto is stamped out by the trumpets and repeated across the remainder of the movement. The Lento fades away on faint echoes of the motto, and without pause a snare drum rushes us into the anguished beginning of the finale. This movement will be full of surprises, pitching between madcap energy one moment, dark chamber music the next, and it seems to race to a thunderous cadence. But this is a false ending. Out of that silence, the timpani stamps out the six-note motto (now inverted), and slowly this motto nudges the music ahead—gently at first, then faster, and then in a rush to the emphatic close.

Shostakovich died 50 years after he completed this symphony, and over that half-century he would compose 14 more. He would have one of the most difficult careers ever endured by an artist, a life tormented by suffocating political repression, foreign invasion, and personal tragedy. The First Symphony reminds us that the essence of Shostakovich’s mature musical language—a sardonic wit, a Mahler-like fusion of the tragic and the commonplace, and an assured handling of the orchestra—were all present in this dazzling music by an 18-year-old student.

—Program Note by Eric Bromberger

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Born 1732, Rohrau
Died 1809, Vienna

Piano Concerto in D Major, Hob.XVIII:11

The cliché about Haydn is that, while he revolutionized the string quartet and symphony, he had trouble with the concerto. His concertos are relatively few, and even fewer of them remain in the active repertory. While his symphonies and quartets can be daring and experimental, Haydn’s concertos are conservative, showing their roots in the baroque concerto and never really responding to the classical concerto of Mozart and Beethoven, with its virtually symphonic argument. Yet, one must still admit that Haydn wrote some first-rate concertos. His Trumpet Concerto remains, two centuries after its composition, the finest ever composed for that instrument, and his two cello concertos are widely played. Of his approximately 15 keyboard concertos, this one has made its way into the lasting affections of performers and audiences alike.

A certain amount of mystery surrounds the sparkling Piano Concerto in D Major. Although we know it was published in 1794, nobody is sure when it was written: There is no record of its premiere, and the original manuscript has not survived. Even the instrument it was intended for is uncertain. It is commonly called a harpsichord concerto, but Haydn referred to it as a concerto for clavier, and the first published version says that it can be played by either “harpsichord or piano.” But Haydn surely must have intended that as a sales pitch, for this music cries out for the resources of the piano: While the solo part has no dynamic markings, the markings in the orchestral parts suggest a range of expression possible only on the piano.

This concerto establishes its character in the first instant. The usual marking for the first movement of a concerto is Allegro, but here Haydn specifies Vivace: even faster, vivacious. Virtually the entire movement grows out of the shining main theme, announced immediately by the violins and taken up by the piano on its entrance. Not only does this figure dominate the movement thematically, but Haydn pulls out bits of the theme and uses them as part of the accompaniment. The pianist plays virtually without pause here; there is a cadenza at the end, and Haydn builds the concluding cadence on the second measure of the main theme.

The spacious, singing slow movement is marked simply Un poco Adagio. Again, the orchestra introduces the main idea, and this grows increasingly ornate across the span of the movement, which features a good deal of expressive harmonic freedom. But it is the last movement that may be the most distinctive. Haydn specifies that this rondo-finale is all’Ungharese, which means “in the Hungarian style,” which in turn means “gypsy.” The piano leads the way with a jaunty tune that H.C. Robbins Landon has identified as being of Bosnian or Dalmatian origin. This rondo theme may not at first seem distinctively gypsy-like, but it is what happens along the way that explains the marking. Instantly Haydn begins to decorate this tune with grace-notes, and soon there are surprising key-shifts, sudden contrasts between loud and soft, and breathtaking energy. Good spirits prevail throughout, even in the minor-key episode, and this cheerful, shining music comes sailing home in a great blast of energy.

—Program Note by Eric Bromberger

SERGEI RACHMANINOV
Born 1873, Oneg, Novgorod
Died 1943, Beverly Hills

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, op.43

In the spring of 1934, Rachmaninov and his wife moved into a villa they had just purchased on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. They were delighted by the house, its opulent size, and its view across the beautiful lake, and Rachmaninov was especially touched to find a surprise waiting for him there: The Steinway Company of New York had delivered a new piano. Rachmaninov spent the summer gardening and landscaping, and he also composed: between July 3 and August 24 he wrote a set of variations for piano and orchestra on what is doubtless the most varied theme in the history of music, the last of Niccolo Paganini’s Twenty-Four Caprices for Solo Violin. Paganini had written that devilish tune, full of rhythmic spring and chromatic tension, in 1820, and he himself had followed it with 12 variations. That theme has haunted composers ever since. In the 19th century, Liszt (Transcendental Etudes), Schumann (Twelve Etudes de Concert), and Brahms (the two sets of Paganini Variations) all wrote variations on it, and they have been followed in the 20th century by Witold Lutoslawksi, Boris Blacher, and George Rochberg.

Rachmaninov described his new work to a friend as being “about the length of a piano concerto … the thing’s rather difficult,” but he had trouble deciding on a name. At first he was going to call it Symphonic Variations on a Theme by Paganini and then thought about Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra in the Form of Variations on a Theme by Paganini. In the end he settled on the simpler Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a title that places the focus on melody and somewhat disguises the ingenious variation technique at the center of this music. The first performance, with the composer as soloist, took place in Baltimore on November 7, 1934, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. Pleased and somewhat surprised by the piece’s success with the public, Rachmaninov observed dryly: “It somehow looks suspicious that the Rhapsody has had such an immediate success with everybody.”

The Rhapsody has a surprising beginning: A brief orchestral flourish containing hints of the theme leads to the first variation, which is presented before the theme itself is heard. This gruff and hard-edged variation, which Rachmaninov marks Precedente, is in fact the bass-line for Paganini’s theme, which is then presented in its original form by both violin sections in unison. Some of the variations last a matter of minutes, while others whip past almost before we know it; (several of the variations are as short as 19 seconds. The 24 variations are sharply contrasted, in both character and tempo, and the fun of this music lies not just in the bravura writing for piano but in hearing Paganini’s theme sound so different in each variation. In three of them, Rachmaninov incorporates the old plainsong tune Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), used by Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, and many others, including Rachmaninov, for whom this grim theme was a virtual obsession. Here it appears in the piano part in the seventh and tenth variations, and eventually it drives the work to its climax in the final variation.

Perhaps the most famous of Rachmaninov’s variations, though, is the 18th, in which Paganini’s theme is inverted and transformed into a moonlit love song. The piano states this variation in its simplest form, and then strings take it up and turn it into a soaring nocturne. This variation has haunted many Hollywood composers, and Rachmaninov himself joked that he had written this variation specifically as a gift “for my agent.”

From here on, the tempo picks up, and the final six variations accelerate to a monumental climax: the excitement builds, the Dies Irae is stamped out by the full orchestra, and suddenly, like a puff of smoke, the Rhapsody vanishes before us on two quick strokes of sound.

—Program Note by Eric Bromberger