“Music expresses just about every conceivable emotion: joy, sadness, angst, yearning, remembrance—you name it,” world-class pianist Janet Guggenheim said. “Like in life, one also feels the sense of anticipation, tension and resolution. It is a very dynamic situation, in which the performer can actually feel the audience listening.”
“Music expresses just about every conceivable emotion: joy, sadness, angst, yearning, remembrance—you name it,” world-class pianist Janet Guggenheim said. “Like in life, one also feels the sense of anticipation, tension and resolution. It is a very dynamic situation, in which the performer can actually feel the audience listening.”
Guggenheim will play piano alongside cellist Hamilton Cheifetz, a faculty member from the Portland State Department of Music, at the Lincoln Recital Hall Thursday, March 8. The event is part of the department’s Performance Attendance Recital Series.
The pair will play sonatas by early 20th century composers Sergei Prokofiev and Claude Debussy to represent the Russian and French classical music, respectively, of the era.
The Debussy sonata was written in 1915, shortly before the composer died.
“It’s only 11 minutes long, and it has a hundred different things in it,” Cheifetz said. “It’s a piece that has a lot of poignancy about it, but it also has edgy, jazzy things in there. It’s just an astounding piece.”
When Prokofiev, composer of Peter and the Wolf (1936), returned to the Soviet Union from the United States sometime during the Stalinist era, he was forced to write a letter rejecting all of his previous works, according to Cheifetz.
“[The Prokofiev sonata] is full of beautiful melodies and sentimental stuff, and then there’s some stuff that’s really powerful and dramatic,” Cheifetz said.
It was Guggenheim who recommended they perform the Prokofiev sonata.
“It is different each time because each performer has a slightly different interpretation, very subtle changes in how they perceive the piece,” she said. “Also, I find the more that I know the work, the deeper I can go into trying to understand what the composer intends. So yes, it’s old music, but it’s always new and fresh.”
Guggenheim has been playing piano as far back as she can remember.
“I think [my interest in music] began because I liked the illustrations in a nursery rhyme music book, and my dad played them and taught them to me, and it just caught on,” she said. “I also liked being excused from school to go to my piano lesson.”
Guggenheim attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she learned to sight-read music and played the piano for hours on end. And while a grad student at Juliard, Guggenheim worked at a teachers’ studio.
“I worked with some tremendously talented violinists and cellists, who became world-class musicians,” she said. “I was fortunate to continue collaborating with them on a professional level in concerts over the years.”
Eventually, Guggenheim was able to go on tours as a professional pianist.
“Concert tours enabled me to travel to Europe, Russia, China, Turkey, meet incredible people, have unforgettable experiences and see that music truly is a universal language that crosses many barriers and, regardless of culture differences, enables people to connect with one another,” she said.
Cheifetz has been playing the cello since he was seven years old in Chicago.
“My parents [inspired my interest in music],” he said. “My mother played the violin and my father was an amateur pianist…So I got excited about it right away, I started working at it, I kept practicing.”
Cheifetz, who has been teaching at PSU since 1997, began his professional career at age 18.
“I knew somebody who knew somebody in Chicago,” he said. “They called me to do a freelance job, and I guess I did well enough in the first couple jobs that they asked me back, and so I got more work.”
Cheifetz and Guggenheim belong to a group of faculty musicians called The Florestan Trio. Cheifetz is one of the original members of the trio, and Guggenheim joined the group in 1995.
“We played together for fun, and our music making clicked,” Guggenheim said. “We basically share the same intuition, we’re on the same wavelength and then we are able to apply our intellects to our instinctive feelings about the music.”
“The magic and mystery of music is that it’s an elemental, human thing that we all share and has the power to change the way you feel, whether you know why or not,” Cheifetz added.
