TURNmusic presents Micahel Arnowitt, piano
Sunday, April 12, 2026 at 4:00 PM
The Phoenix Gallery 5 Stowe Street, Waterbury Vermont
Tickets sliding scale $15-30, available for purchase here.
Details
Vermont favorite Michael Arnowitt returns to the state to perform a piano concert of lively, evocative, and emotionally moving music. Featured are a set of absorbing compositions by Claude Debussy: his classic “From Dawn to Noon on the Sea” from La Mer is full of the sonorous and colorful impressionist music Debussy is most famous for, while his prelude “The Interrupted Serenade” shows us that Debussy was also very much a people person, as the music vividly depicts personalities in a scene , conversing and displaying all their human emotions and foibles.
Other highlights of the program include music from the piano sonatas of the great Black American composer George Walker, showcasing the dynamic, sparkling, and powerful music of this outstanding composer. Walker was the first Black concert pianist, in the period after World War II, to perform the major piano concertos with America’s leading symphony orchestras. Olivier Messiaen’s The reed warbler, from the composer’s Catalog of Birds collection, wonderfully evokes scenes of nature and bird song, while the Canadian musician John Kameel Farah’s “Little Beginning” creatively blends the style of the Renaissance composer William Byrd with elements from Middle Eastern musical traditions
From recent decades Michael Arnowitt will perform an excerpt from the UK composer George Benjamin’s spacious and beautiful “Sortileges,” the present-day Ukrainian composer Victoria Poleva’s spiritual, dramatic, and expressive Sonata quasi una fantasia, and Michael Arnowitt’s own well-received creation “The Stream,” based on a reflective and meditative selection from Bach’s Well-Tempered Keyboard.
The concert also features music by Prokofiev written during World War II when the Russian composer had been evacuated far from the front lines, music at turns poetic, nostalgic, and even jazzy, and the exciting finale to Bartok’s Sonata for piano, a spirited piece influenced by the folk melodies and rhythms of Bartok’s native Hungary.
Michael Arnowitt lived in central Vermont from 1985 to 2017 when he immigrated to Canada. He now lives primarily in Toronto but also lives part-time in Marshfield, Vermont.
Program pieces
Claude Debussy: Étude no. 8 Pour les agréments (For the ornaments);
De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From dawn to noon on the sea), from La Mer, transcribed for piano by Lucien Garban; and
Prélude “The interrupted serenade”
Victoria Poleva: Sonata no. 2 “quasi una fantasia” (2011)
George Walker: Variations on a Kentucky Folksong (from his Sonata no. 1) and Adagio non troppo and Presto from his Sonata no. 2
Michael Arnowitt/J.S. Bach: The Stream, based on Bach’s Fugue in C-sharp minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1
[intermission]
Sergei Prokofiev: Andante caloroso and Precipitato from Sonata no. 7, op. 83
John Kameel Farah: Kleiner Anfang (Little Beginning)
George Benjamin: excerpt from Sortilèges (1981)
Olivier Messiaen: excerpt from “Catalogue d’oiseaux no. 7 La rousserolle effarvatte (The reed warbler, from Catalog of Birds)
Bela Bartok: Allegro molto, finale from Sonata for piano
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About the Performer
Pianist, composer, and event organizer Michael Arnowitt is one of the most creative musicians of today. His imaginative musical landscapes, extraordinary sense of touch at the piano, and warm onstage personality have delighted audiences in concert halls around the world. He has given piano performances in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Russia, and Korea, and has performed as piano soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing piano concertos of Bach and Beethoven and with the Kyiv Chamber Orchestra under Roman Kofman.
His past creative projects have included “If Music Be the Food of Love,” a performance of classical and jazz music about food with the simultaneous serving to the audience of the food tastes that inspired the composers, and a collaboration combining his piano improvisations with the live creation of paintings on stage by visual artists. In 2013, his composition “Haiku Textures” for three cello soloists and orchestra was premiered, the three cellos symbolizing the three lines of a Japanese haiku poem. He has also performed with the photographer Marjorie Ryerson a special multi-media program “Water Music” where piano music about water is combined with the projection of water photographs and readings on the subject of water written by leading musicians of today. The Washington Post said of a concert Michael Arnowitt performed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., “he played with an exquisite sense of touch, color and musical imagination.”
His life and music is the subject of a documentary film, “Beyond 88 Keys,” filmed in both the USA and Europe. The documentary has been broadcast on public television, shown at a variety of film festivals and venues including the Rode Pomp, an arts center in Gent, Belgium and the Anthology, a theater in New York City’s East Village, and is now available online on the Vimeo platform. His current projects include “Sense & Sound,” a new concept of a multi-sensory performance event where he will be collaborating with a scent artist, textiles designer, chef, botanist, and a wood sculptor to create a novel concert where the audience will be presented music paired with related simultaneous experiences in all the senses – touch, smell, sight, and taste. Michael Arnowitt is currently working on a book of essays about music, “What Makes Great Music Great,” to be published by the Vermont-based Fomite Press.
Performer website:
Performer YouTube channel “Michael Arnowitt Music”: