Pianist Michael Stephen Brown to Perform on September 16 with Rolston String Quartet at Asheville Chamber Music Series. 

The Rogue Valley Symphony announced its 2022/2023 performance season and ticket availability last Tuesday, July 5, featuring bold programs and world-renowned soloists such as Michael Stephen Brown. 

Michael Stephen Brown is set to perform his Concerto for Piano and Strings (2020) with the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra and conductor Joseph Swensen in Wroclaw, Poland at the Main Hall of the NFM on June 12th. The concerto has recently been performed in the US by various orchestras and was co-commissioned by the Gilmore Keyboard Festival and the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra.

Noctuelles, a new solo album from pianist-composer Michael Brown featuring two gems of the 20th century piano repertoire, was released January 22 by the British label First Hand Records.

Michigan’s Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra will present the long-awaited world premiere of Michael Brown’s Concerto for Piano and Strings on April 30, 2021, with Music Director Julian Kuerti conducting and Brown at the keyboard. Brown’s concerto—inspired by Beethoven and composed in 2020, a year rife with celebrations surrounding the 250th anniversary of that composer’s birth—was co-commissioned by the Kalamazoo-based Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra. The initial performances were originally scheduled to take place during the Beethoven year with the Gilmore Festival Orchestra under Kuerti and in Wroclaw, Poland, under NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra Music Director Joseph Swensen. Both had to be cancelled as concert life came to a temporary halt due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Brown composed the concerto while in residence at Copland House in Peekskill, NY. The three-movement work, he says, “seeks to integrate my own musical language with that of Beethoven, by weaving musical fragments of his various works into my own harmonic landscape. Specific Beethoven references include long pedal markings blurring harmonies and sonorities, as in the Largo of the Third Piano Concerto; extended use of trills; and the interweaving of small motivic fragments throughout the work. I have often dreamed of being a fly on the wall observing Beethoven playing his own creations, and I hope this may pay homage to him from the perspective of my being both a composer and a pianist.”

The Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra’s April 30 performance will take place at 7 pm EST and is being streamed on the orchestra’s website, where it will be available for viewing through May 30.