PORT TOWNSEND — Pianists Michael Stephen Brown and Julio Elizalde perform Piano Extravaganza! at the Olympic Music Festival finale this weekend.
Concerts will be at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the Wheeler Theater at Fort Worden. Tickets are $40, available online at www.olympic musicfestival.org.
Brown and the festival’s artistic director, Elizalde, will perform works for solo and duo piano including Mendelssohn’s finger-busting Andante and Allegro Brillant and Ravel’s mesmerizing Rhapsody Espagnole.
Brown has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.”
Winner of the 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Brown has recently performed as soloist with the Seattle Symphony, the National Philharmonic, and recitals at Carnegie Hall, the Mostly Mozart Festival and Caramoor.
As a composer, his Concerto for Piano and Strings (2020) was co-commissioned by the Gilmore Piano Festival and the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra in Poland, and it was premiered by the Kalamazoo Symphony with Brown as soloist.
Elizalde is a multi-faceted artist who enjoys a versatile career as soloist, chamber musician, artistic administrator, educator and curator.
He tours internationally with world-renowned violinists Sarah Chang and Ray Chen and has performed alongside conductors Itzhak Perlman, Teddy Abrams and Anne Manson. He has collaborated with artists such as violinist Pamela Frank, composers Osvaldo Golijov and Stephen Hough, baritone William Sharp, and members of the Juilliard, Cleveland, Takács, Kronos and Brentano string quartets.
