Canaan, N.Y. — You may remember pianist Zhu Wang from his performance accompanying violinist Randall Goosby at Saint James Place in December 2021. Both musicians are affiliated with Young Concert Artists, an organization Clarion Concerts looks to when they want to find the best of up-and-coming young classical musicians from the New York City and Washington, D.C. areas. Wang is an excellent collaborative pianist, but if you want to hear him really shine, you need to catch him in a solo recital, which you can do on June 10 at 3 p.m. when Clarion Concerts holds it annual gala event at a dairy farm in Ancramdale, N.Y.
A native of Hunan, China, Wang made his Carnegie Hall debut after winning First Prize at Young Concert Artists’ 2020 International Auditions and was listed on the New York Times’ “Best of Classical Music 2021.” He subsequently appeared at such venues as the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, the 92nd Street Y, Morgan Library, Shanghai Concert Hall, Davies Hall in San Francisco, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. A Juilliard School graduate and masters candidate at the Curtis Institute, Wang’s teachers have included Fou Ts’ong and Robert McDonald.
On June 10, Wang will perform a program of works by Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Liszt, and Schubert.
This week, I spoke with Clarion Concerts President Dave Hall and learned about the organization’s history, mission, and future aspirations. I also picked up a few important details about the June 10 gala. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I understand you’ve selected an impossibly gorgeous spot for your annual gala.
It’s in Ancramdale, N.Y., at a private dairy farm, and the views are incredible. It’s a big, beautiful, open spot, the cows may be lowing in accompaniment to the music, and the first lucky 30 who spend an extra 25 bucks on the ticket will get a hayride up to the top of the mountain where New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut meet.
This is our annual fundraising gala, and we always try to do something really special. Not only is the setting wonderful, but so is Zhu Wang, the pianist who collaborated with the amazing Randall Goosby in 2021. He gave his premiere concert at Carnegie Hall a couple of years ago, and the New York Times ranked it as one of the best concerts of the year. He’s just an amazing player and a really, really nice guy, very personable. He’s a great match for this event, because our concerts are usually held in concert halls, often in the evening, and while they tend to be pretty casual, our galas are usually in the afternoon in some kind of cool, barn structure. So the atmosphere is almost like a picnic, and I think Zhu is a great match for that. He’s playing some really excellent pieces, and he’s just an incredible musician. So we’re really excited to have him.
And the piano will be freshly tuned?
Absolutely. It’s being delivered that morning, along with a technician who will be twiddling away at it until the concert begins. So it will be perfectly in tune.
And we’ve got a tent, so if the weather is inclement, it’ll be OK. We’re counting on good weather, of course, but even if it’s not perfect, the views and the atmosphere will still be good. And we always have wine and good stuff to nibble. It’s a really nice social occasion.
I remember Zhu Wang as Randall Goosby’s accompanist.
Wang and Goosby are both Young Concert Artists, and they’ve both won the competition. They are really dazzling players, and it was so cool to have them both on the same program.
How long has Clarion Concerts been active?
This is our 66th year of presenting concerts. Newell Jenkins founded Clarion Concerts in 1957 and, after a while—it was Manhattan-based—he brought concerts up here, where the Roeliff Jansen concert choir performed.
Jenkins specialized in baroque music until his death in 1996, when the Clarion Concerts up here split off from the Clarion Concerts in Manhattan. And the two organizations have been independent since that time. And so, after Jenkins’ passing, Sanford Allen, the former New York Philharmonic violinist, who lives in Hillsdale, led the organization up until 2014.
Allen was a really interesting guy who definitely broadened our mission. He began commissioning new music, and, being the first African American full-time member of the New York Philharmonic, he made a special effort to commission works by Black and other composers of color and to engage Black performers of color as well, which was sort of natural and a matter of fact, and that’s something we’ve continued since he left in 2014.
But under Eugenia Zuckerman’s leadership, we’ve continued to feature Black artists, as well as folks of other ethnicities, of course, and we’ve continued commissioning music. Over the last couple of years, over the pandemic, it’s been a little bit tricky, finance-wise, to keep up that tradition. But we’re hoping to get back to it soon. Among our recent commissioned works, I’d say the majority of them have been from Black composers.
I think after the last couple of years of racial reckoning, every presenting organization in the U.S. has had to take a look at itself. Are we part of the problem, or part of a solution? And we gave ourselves an OK grade. But we realized there was more we needed to do, so we kind of redoubled our commitment and just became more conscious of that, even presenting a Zoom panel discussion with a couple of young Black leaders in classical music who had a lot to say and a lot to teach at that time. So those circumstances kind of made us look at what we were doing and recommit more forcefully.
How many American presenting organizations do you think would use the phrase, “racial reckoning” the way you have used it? In other words, is Clarion Concerts an outlier?
I don’t know. I think in the last couple of years there were a lot of arts and other organizations that found Black executive directors and artistic directors that were fully qualified to lead organizations. So I think a lot of them did take a step back. And we are hearing much more programming of music from Black composers by orchestras and in other series, and that’s great. So I think there’s definitely some movement.
It’s hard to say how evolved any one person in the U.S. is when it comes to understanding race and racism. It takes a special effort. I am a person of color myself, so I have a little bit of a sense of certain aspects of race in America. And I was fortunate enough in my younger days to have a couple of Black friends who were gently instructive to me at a time when I needed it. And I have a Black family, as well, that has made it more of a personal interest.
I had a conversation with Sanford Allen around the time we presented the panel discussion, and I said to him that while I always knew we were doing that kind of programming, I wasn’t as thorough in my thinking and my commitment, personally, as I might have been. I just took it as a matter of fact that we were doing it, and I didn’t think of us as being especially unique in that way. I realize now, thinking back on it, that we were fortunate to be led by a Black classical artist. I was quite natural for him because of his long years of leadership. It just became part of our mission.
In addition to presenting artists of color and commissioning new music and bringing classical music to local audiences, Clarion has an educational arm, as well. We do what we can to bring our artists into area public schools, and we’re in the process of reestablishing some long-term commitments to area schools that were disrupted by the pandemic. So that’s high on our list of priorities as well. And do you remember the nice piece you wrote when Clarion presented Amir ElSaffar’s Iraqi ensemble at the Stissing Center?
Oh yeah!
We’re expanding our idea of what classical music is, beyond European classical music, to recognize South Asian classical, Arab classical, and more. And we hope, as we get back on our feet financially and begin to broaden things again after the pandemic, that we will take other opportunities to present more concerts of non-European classical music.
Also, it’s worth noting the venues we play. We present concerts at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, Hudson Hall in Hudson, and, more recently, we’ve started doing performances at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains. The area is rich in great concert halls, so we feel really fortunate that we have so many awesome concert venues to choose from.
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Hear YCA pianist Zhu Wang on June 10 at 3 p.m. at Clarion Concerts’ annual gala event in Ancramdale, N.Y. Tickets are $75, and for an extra $25 donation to Clarion Concerts, the first 30 guests to make a reservation will get a hayride. Admission is free to students pre-K through graduation. Tickets are available here or at (413)-551-9901.
