UB Professor of Piano Emeritus returns to town for two concerts

During the more than three decades when he was a member of the Department of Music faculty at the University of Buffalo, Stephen Manes performed literally hundreds of times, both in solo recital, and as a member of chamber groups and as a soloist, as well, with the Slee Sinfonietta. Perhaps most remarkably, Manes has given three complete performances, over the years, of all thirty-two sonatas for piano by Beethoven, playing them from memory. Since retiring to his native city of Los Angeles, Manes has retuned at the beginning of every fall semester to perform at least one concert, and sometimes two, as is the case this month when he joins some of his former faculty members on a Slee Hall program, and a week later gives a solo recital on the Friends of Vienna series.

Slee Hall

On Friday September 8 at 7:30pm, Stephen Manes will join UB associate professor of piano Eric Huebner for what might be best described as a two-piano main course, with a spicy dessert, featuring percussion. The program includes two rarely programmed works by Mozart, the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, and the C minor Fantasy, K. 475, arranged for two pianos by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who was also a piano virtuoso. The program also includes the Ballade for Two Pianos by the Buffalo born composer Nils Vigeland, who has a long history of studying and performing with Lukas Foss, both at Harvard, and at UB, where he earned his PhD. For the second half of the program, Manes and Huebner will be joined by UB percussionists Tom Kolor and John Bacon for a performance of the always exciting Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110, a 1937 work by the modern master Hungarian composer Béla Bartók.

Tickets: Advance: $15 to $19, at the door: $22. Seniors/UB faculty, staff, alumni/non-UB students: $10 to $14, at the door: $17. UB students: free. Information: (716) 645-2921 or [email protected]

Friends of Vienna

Stephen Manes will open the 41^st season of the Friends of Vienna on Sunday September 17 at 3:30pm in the Unity Church, 1243 Delaware Avenue in Buffalo. His program is being billed as “Viennese Piano Music from Three Centuries”. Manes says that while he has always tried to include some works by Viennese composers in his frequent past appearances on this series, this is probably the first time that he has programmed an all Viennese recital. The works to be performed include Joseph Haydn’s charmingly humorous Fantasie in C Major, Hob. XVII/4, ‘Capriccio’, based on an Austrian folk song ‘Do Bäuren hat d’Katz valor’n (The farmer’s wife has lost her cat). Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major, Op. 101 was composed in 1816 for the piano playing Baroness Dorothea von Ertmann, and is generally considered to mark the beginning of the composer’s final period “where the forms are more complex, ideas more wide-ranging, textures more polyphonic, and the treatment of the themes and motifs even more sophisticated than before”. Manes has also programmed two selections, beloved of pianists and audiences alike, of Franz Schubert’s Impromptus Opus 142, No.3 and 4, a work published posthumously. The Klavierstücke, Op.119, the last composition for solo piano by Johannes Brahms, and Arnold Schoenberg’s 3 Pieces, Opus 11, a 1909 composition that is an important milestone in the evolution of Schoenberg’s compositional style, round out this well-designed program.

Tickets: $12; $5 students. Information: www.friendsofvienna.org. Please note: All spaces in the lot at the rear of the Unity Church are available for free parking on Sundays.