About Dan Linder

Praised as a “pianistic chameleon” (Fanfare), Daniel Linder is a versatile pianist, chamber musician, and teaching artist. He has performed solo and collaborative recitals to high acclaim in venues across the United States and in the United Kingdom, France, and Denmark, and recordings of his performances have aired on KUAT Classical Radio in Tucson, AZ. Recent accolades include the Fresno Musical Club Susan Torres Award, and prizes in the James Ramos International Competition, the Seattle International Piano Competition, and the Los Angeles International Liszt Competition, among others.

Daniel is an avid performer of 20th- and 21st-century works. Recent highlights include a duo piano recital with Fanya Lin at the 2021 London Festival of American Music, the 2020 world premiere of Kay He’s multimedia work Lost in Colors, collaboration with the Russian String Orchestra in a performance of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1, and lecture recitals on Maurice Ohana’s Douze Études d’interprétation. His recordings of solo and duo piano works by Daniel Asia are included on Ivory II, released by Summit Records in early 2021.

Dr. Linder is Assistant Professor of Practice in Piano at the University of Arizona’s Fred Fox School of Music, where he serves as keyboard area coordinator, teaches applied lessons and piano literature, and teaches honors seminars in music. He has presented lectures on piano pedagogy and music teaching and learning at state and national conferences of the Music Teacher’s National Association (MTNA), and his article, A Multisensory Approach to Memorization was named 2018 ‘Article of the Year’ by CAPMT Connect, the e-Journal of the California Association of Professional Music Teachers (CAPMT). 

Daniel was named Outstanding D.M.A. Graduate by the Keyboard Studies Department of USC’s Thornton School of Music. Before moving to Los Angeles to complete his D.M.A. in piano performance, he earned an M.M in piano performance from the University of Arizona, and both a B.M. in piano performance and a B.A. in history from Northwestern University. His principal teachers are Bernadene Blaha, Dr. John Milbauer, Alan Chow, and Dr. Rose Chancler. Daniel grew up in the Adirondacks of northeastern New York.

Please visit www.drlpianist.com for more information. 

Program Notes

Gabriela Lena Frank: Nocturno Nazqueño

Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) is one of the most important and influential American composers and educators living today. Her music has been commissioned and performed by top artists such as Yo Yo Ma, the Kronos Quartet, and many orchestras including the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and San Francisco Symphony to name a few. Selected recent accomplishments include the 2020 Heinz Award for Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Latin Grammy for best Contemporary Classical Composition, and multiple Grammy nominations as both composer and pianist. She also serves as a mentor and teacher to younger composers through the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.

Frank often explores her rich multicultural heritage and incorporates many diverse influences into her work to create a sound which is uniquely her own yet immediately accessible and comprehensible. Frank was born in Berkeley, CA to a mother of Chinese-Peruvian descent and a father of Lithuanian Jewish heritage. Much of her music reflects her diverse background and upbringing, and is also strongly informed by her research into Latin American cultures. Frank has composed for nonwestern instruments including the Chinese pipa and zheng, and she has worked closely with musicians playing traditional instruments in Ecuador and Peru. While incorporating the influence of Asian, Native, and Latin American cultures, her music is also in alignment with the traditional western Classical canon and her works include orchestral tone poems, concerti, string quartets, and sonatas.

Frank has composed extensively for piano, and her works include a piano concerto, two piano sonatas, and several character pieces. Nocturno Nazqueño for piano vividly evokes the expansive figurations of the Nazca Lines, ancient geoglyphs that survive in the Peruvian desert, through multi-layered textures of repeated-note figures which grow and recede as the piece progresses. A simple repeated-note figure serves as the core material for the entire piece and is ingeniously developed into a multitude of figurations – for instance, in the first two pages alone the mysterious murmurings of the opening gradually evolve into more intense and vibrant patterns before reaching a climactic frenzy consisting of a rapid-fire left-hand tremolo below brilliant spiral figurations in the right hand. While idiomatic to the piano, many of these figurations are also evocative of guitar strumming and tremolo techniques.

Nocturno Nazqueño was commissioned by the Stecher & Horowitz Foundation for the 2014 New York International Piano Competition, and allows the pianist to showcase different types of virtuosity through its contrasting sections of fast rapid-fire passagework, complex multilayered textures, and wispy delicate transitions.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata Op. 101

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is among the most celebrated, well-known, and frequently performed classical composers in history. He made significant contributions to nearly every established genre of his day, and is widely recognized as an important transitional figure between the Classical and Romantic eras.

The Piano Sonata in A Major, Op. 101 is the twenty-eighth of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas, and it is often cited as the first of the five “late” sonatas. In the last period of his work, Beethoven continued to expand the established Classical forms and harmonic language and developed an increasingly unique style. His late works often feature beautiful lyricism, a personal harmonic language characterized by the exploration of dissonance, expanded register and dynamic range, and formal experimentation including cyclisicm and references to Baroque forms such as fugue, among other features.

The Piano Sonata in A Major, Op. 101 is divided into four movements which can be conceptually grouped into two pairs of alternating slow/introspective and fast/extroverted movements. The first movement is a condensed sonata-allegro form featuring flowing lyricism and counterpoint that might be evocative of string quartet texture, while the second movement is a lively march that explores the full range of the instrument with orchestral sonorities and shifts in register. The third movement is an operatic, recatitive-like interlude that flows without break into the fourth movement. The fourth and final movement is the largest and most dramatic of the sonata – an expansive sonata-allegro form movement featuring an extended fugato passage as the development.

One of the most captivating moments in the sonata is the seamless transition from the third movement into the fourth. The tragic longing of the third movement melts into a quiet recollection of the opening theme from the first movement of the sonata, which then grows into the determined and life-affirming music of the fourth movement. The return of the opening theme from the first movement at this point in the sonata is one of the most celebrated examples of cyclicism in Beethoven’s compositional output, but this was not a new technique for him – in fact he had explored cyclicism in his piano sonatas as far back as 1802 in the Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 27 No. 1 (the sibling of the “Moonlight” sonata, Op. 27 No. 2).

In his later works, Beethoven increasingly chose to write character indications for his compositions in his native German rather than Italian, which was the standard language of music in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Beethoven’s German indications in Op. 101 communicate deep and nuanced emotions which he may not have been able to express in Italian. For instance, he provides the instruction Langsam und sehnsuchtsvoll (slow and full of longing) for the third movement, and Geschwind, doch nicht zu sehr, und mit Entschlossenheit (Quickly, but not too much so, and with determination) for the final movement.