No "Cookie-Cutter" Pianist
Visit pianist Awadagin Pratt’s web site and you’ll not only learn all about him, you can have some fun, too.
Try “Java Games” at www.awadagin.com and see how fast you can find the composers’ names embedded in the applet there. (There are 20 in a 324-letter grid spelled every which way.)
Or try the slider puzzle and “help Awadagin get his act together” (no cheating by clicking the “Solve” button).
It’s all part of the distinctive image of the 41-year-old in dreadlocks and beard, who took the music world by storm by winning the prestigious Naumburg Piano Competition in New York in 1992, the first African-American to do so.
Pratt, who will perform Beethoven’s Fantasia for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra (“Choral Fantasy”) with the Cincinnati Symphony and May Festival Chorus at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Music Hall, had been told that his playing was too distinctive, also.
Too distinctive, at least, to impress the judges at international competitions.
Awadagin (pronounced Ah-wa-DAH-jin) recalled an incident early in his career in an interview last week in his studio at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where he is associate professor of piano and artist-in-residence.
“While I was at Peabody (Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore) I made the finals of the American Pianists Association competition in Indianapolis. A former New York Times critic was one of the judges, and he told me my playing was too different, too unique to enter competitions. He was essentially saying that what had happened there (he didn’t win) would continue to happen.”
That did not deter Pratt, however. “In ’92, Naumburg wrote a letter about how during a time where it was fashionable to decry competitions and their ‘cookie-cutter winners,’ they were proud to announce their competition. I wrote a letter back and said I was one who had been told he is not cookie-cutter enough to win, but I’d give it a shot.”
His showing, which included Liszt’s “Funerailles,” bowled over the jury. He felt like he would “represent himself well,” he said, but “didn’t expect to win.”
“It had been a very difficult year because I had failed two recitals at Peabody. In the artist diploma program, passing has to be unanimous. There are seven faculties and it has to be 7-0. I had one that was 6-1 and they were both overturned eventually, but it just caused a very difficult year.”
Winning was a “huge relief,” he said, if for no other reason because he could get off the competition treadmill. He knew he had won something “big,” but not exactly what that the consequences would be.
“It was like, OK, I’m getting some money ($5,000). They told me we’ll have some concerts for you next year, but I didn’t know it was going to be 50 concerts” (plus a recording contract and professional management).
He made his CSO debut in 1994 at Music Hall (Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4) and is now one of the top pianists before the public today.
Former dean Douglas Lowry enticed him to CCM in 2004, and he has made his presence known in Cincinnati in solo recitals, chamber music, the “Music Now” festival, the CCM fund-raiser “Pianopalooza” and on CSO concerts. He performed with the CSO in April, 2005 in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, but this week’s concerts are his first with music director Paavo Järvi, a friend with whom he “hangs out” when they are both in Cincinnati, he said.
A resident of Northside who thinks he’d like to move downtown, Pratt loves teaching and provides makeup time for his students when he is away on tour. “When I am here, the students can find me,” he said.
Born in Philadelphia to a nuclear physicist and a social worker, Pratt grew up in Normal, Illinois where his parents were on the faculty of Illinois State University. His father, Theodore Pratt, was born in Sierra Leone and had played the organ in his teens.
“He loved classical music, so that was the only music in the house, really,” said Pratt, who ascribes his ear for color and sonority on the piano to his exposure to mostly orchestral music as a child.
He and his younger sister Menah both studied music and tennis. Awadagin began piano at 6 and violin at 9. He entered the University of Illinois in Urbana on a violin scholarship at 16. He was ranked regionally in tennis and might have gone in that direction (he received scholarship offers for tennis, also) but decided to follow his heart.
“I felt like if I didn’t have music in my life every day I wouldn’t be happy.” He left Urbana to seek more a more intensive conservatory environment. Peabody accepted him on both violin and piano. Although he earned degrees there in both violin and piano, plus a graduate degree in conducting, he made piano his career focus during that first year in Baltimore.
“The first year I was there, I tied for first place in the concerto competition. I tied with a guy who just the year before had gotten second place in the Chopin Competition. It was like, wow, if I want to, I’m in this gig somewhere.”
The clincher was repertoire -- much larger for piano than violin – and the hurdle posed by the Paganini Violin Caprices, a requirement for violin competitions. “I wasn’t a person that did up-bow staccato and that show-offy kind of stuff,” he said.
He still plays the violin, however, and enjoys coaching piano students who collaborate with violinists. “It’s cool because I know these pieces from both sides,” he said. He also plays tennis twice a week.
Interestingly, Pratt had reached an entry point as a conductor at the time he won the Naumburg Competition.
“In April (Naumburg was May) I made the semi-finals of the Xerox/Affiliate Artists program for conductors. I had 15 minutes of an audition with the Louisville Symphony, and there was a guy who was trying to get some conducting going for me later on. That was the first year that I’m playing concerts, so that train got de-railed, but I was close to being in the mix.”
He has conducted “in fits and starts” since then. He worked with New York Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel the year before coming to CCM. “I had done his competition and played with him (as a pianist). Whenever I was in New York, he had me onstage for rehearsals, and before and after he would help me prepare stuff I had going on. To be able to ask him questions and have an answer and a score where it’s marked was pretty fantastic.”
When the conducting bug bites, it bites hard, Pratt conceded. “It’s been a virus for many years.” He began in Urbana, leading concerts for student composers, and has conducted orchestras in New Mexico, Ohio (Toledo Symphony), North Carolina and Illinois.
He has his sights set on the podium now.
“It’s something I intend to be doing consistently in ten years.”
Awadagin Pratt performs Beethoven’s Fantasia for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and May Festival Chorus led by Paavo Järvi at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Music Hall. Also on the program are Beethoven’s “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” and Richard Wagner’s Prelude to “Die Meistersinger,” “Forest Murmurs” from “Siegfried” and “Tannhauser” Overture. Tickets are $19-$79.25. Call (513) 381-3300, or order online at www.cincinnatisymphony.org.
(first published in The Cincinnati Post Sept. 13, 2007)