Thundering cascades filled the Cosmos Club’s rococo Warne ballroom together with fragile single notes hanging in the air with inescapable tension when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra pianist Eric Huebner performed former fellow Roger Reynolds’s (Japan, 1966-71) Piano Etude No. 7, Migration during the Institute of Current World Affairs centenary celebration.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s longtime interpreter, Huebner played for an audience of alumni, trustees and friends transfixed by a virtuoso recital that seamlessly segued Frederic Chopin’s Etude Op. 25, No. 7, the reference point for the final piece, Reynolds’s Piano Etude No. 11, Calligraphy.
Reynolds and Huebner bookended the spectacular performance with discussion about the etude’s origins as an exercise for performance practice as well as the later stretching of the genre’s limits, with Reynolds generously explaining how a performer’s version of a composition can become a work of art on a level with the original.
Leaving the hall with a new appreciation for the power and possibility of the humble etude, audience members would have well understood Claude Debussy, who wrote after completing his own spectacular Etudes: “Forgive me—I sound as if I’ve just discovered music.”
Roger Reynolds’s Etudes, in Huebner’s interpretation, are available on Spotify.
