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Event
GetClassical@ZincBAR
GetClassical@Zinc Bar
(Doors 6.30 PM and concert at 7PM)
25 General Admission and 15 Students/Artists
Great performance flair and exquisite pianistic technique have led pianist Matt Herskovitz on a genre-bending musical exploration, incorporating classical idioms with jazz- and world-music. Thanks to his "rare passion, ..precise sense of nuance..power, artistry and chops"(Le Devoir/ Downbeat), he has carved out his individual voice in his free style improvisations, arranging others and his own compositions. His prolific recording catalogue includes works as different as Glazunov's 2nd Piano Concerto, released on the Chandos label, to the pianist's "Solo-Album of the Year (Le Devoir)": Matt Herskovitz Upstairs. A captivating array of arrangements of works by Gershwin to Schumann to Dave Brubeck, it includes originals based on the classical canon by Herskovitz, like his Bach à la Jazz, his own arrangement on Bach's Prelude in C Minor, previously released on the Grammy-nominated EMI soundtrack for The Triplets of Belleville.
His collaborations with The Knights, the Brooklyn based eclectic Symphony Orchestra, which premiered his 2012 Concerto Grosso in Central Park's Naumburg Orchestral Concert Series, ravishing Canadian Violinist Lara St. John, Emmy-nominated Russian/American violinist Philippe Quint, as well as with his own jazz trio, cover Herskovitz's talent in all of its skilled facets at the piano and grand realm of musical imagination.
So much imagination in fact manifested itself in the Juilliard and Curtis Institute of Music's graduate's playing, that there was confusion with his initial placing within the concertizing business. "Apparently presenters just couldn't wrap their heads around a guy who was equally proficient in two musical disciplines; if you played jazz, you couldn't possibly be a 'real' classical pianist!" he says.
"However, I never really left classical entirely, so I worked it back in with my jazz arrangements of classical pieces. In the last four years I started getting more ambitious with this, arranging very difficult Chopin and Prokofiev Etudes, Schumann Toccata, and virtuosic Bach pieces, playing every note of the original versions while incorporating jazz and improvisation, which includes free improvisation as well as improvising (or 'blowing', in jazz jargon) over the chord changes of the music. As nobody else in the world is really doing this, at least not in the way I'm doing it, I decided that this was the way to go."
For GetClassical's series at Zinc Bar, Herskovitz will stick to some masterpieces of the "strict, classical canon" and let the audience follow his astonishing personal take on them.
"When I play Chopin's Berceuse, for example, which already sounds like a big, beautiful improvisation on its haunting ostinato, thinking of it like this gives it another dimension; the wonder of it unfolding, into not knowing what's coming up next," he explains.
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LocationThe Zinc Bar (View)
82 West 3rd St.
New York, NY 10012
United States
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