Happy Valentine’s Day weekend!
For our 36th edition of Weis Center Sessions, we present one of our favorite Bucknell musical couples, Qing Jiang (pianist) and Daniel Temkin (composer). In this session, Qing performs the second movement of Daniel’s piece, Dreamed Landscapes, called “Glaciers crumbling, assembling.”
Praised by the New York Times as a “fiery musician” whose playing is “vigorous and passionate,” Chinese-born pianist Qing Jiang has performed to acclaim across the United States and abroad, including Alice Tully Hall, Weill Hall, as well as the UK’s Snape Maltings Hall, and China’s Shenzhen Poly Theater. Jiang is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University, and Piano Faculty at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival in Maine. Passionate about Chamber Music and contemporary music, Jiang has performed alongside Itzhak Perlman, Gil Kalish, as well as with members of the Emerson, Juilliard, Shanghai, Kronos, Jasper, and Parker string quartets. She collaborates often with husband Daniel Temkin, who is also on the music faculty at Bucknell.
Composer Daniel Temkin is known for crafting works filled with rich detail and visceral beauty. Praised for capturing an “immensity” and “demonstrating an allure too difficult to convey in words” (Houston Chronicle), Daniel’s works have been noted as “direct, convicted and beautiful” (Incident Light) and praised as “sweet and simple…like a memory stream in an American vernacular” (Philadelphia Inquirer). Daniel’s music has been heard worldwide with leading orchestras and music festivals, and he has been featured in broadcasts with NPR’s “Performance Today,” PBS Philadelphia’s “WHYY” series, WWFM.org, and RTHK national radio in Hong Kong.
Of the second movement, “Glaciers crumbling, assembling,” Daniel says, “I wanted to capture the beautiful rumbles one can hear in glacier fields. As brittle ice cracks, a small ping gives way to a larger crescendo, with snow tumbling forward, only to repile, reform, and rebuild into something entirely new. In this movement, the piano’s music sounds in different registers, with low rhythmic spurts suggesting the disintegrated ice particles, and larger singing chords that rise upwards to suggest stark mountains and towering barren ice walls.”
To hear more of the piece, please visit: www.danieltemkincomposer.com
Recorded at and produced by the Weis Center for the Performing Arts at Bucknell University.
ENJOY!