Program will include Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue!

American pianist Clayton Stephenson’s love for music is immediately apparent in his joyous charisma onstage, expressive power, and natural ease at the instrument. Hailed for “extraordinary narrative and poetic gifts” and interpretations that are “fresh, incisive and characterfully alive” (Gramophone), he is committed to making an impact on the world through his music-making.

Growing up in New York City, Clayton started piano lessons at age 7, and the next year was accepted into The Julliard School’s Music Advancement Program—a full scholarship program for under-represented students—where he lingered to watch student recitals and fell in love with music. He advanced to Juilliard’s elite Pre-College at age 10—with the help of his teacher at the time, Beth Nam, who gave him countless extra lessons without charge—to study with Matti Raekallio, Hung-Kuang Chen, and Ernest Barretta. Clayton practiced on a synthesizer at home until he found an old upright piano on the street that an elementary school had thrown away; that would become his practice piano for the next six years, until the Lang Lang Foundation donated a new piano to him when he was 17.

He credits the generous support of community programs with providing him musical inspiration and resources along the way. As he describes it, the “Third Street Music School jump-started my music education; the Young People’s Choir taught me phrasing and voicing; Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program introduced me to formal and rigorous piano training, which enabled me to get into Juilliard Pre-College; the Morningside Music Bridge validated my talent and elevated my self-confidence; the Boy’s Club of New York exposed me to jazz; and the Lang Lang Foundation brought me to stages worldwide and transformed me from a piano student to a young artist.”

Recent and upcoming highlights include concertos with the Houston, North Carolina, and Cincinnati Symphonies; festival appearances at Grand Teton, Grant Park, and Tippet Rise; recitals at Washington Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall; gala performances with the New York and Las Vegas Philharmonics; and collaborations with violinists Nikki and Timothy Chooi. He also joins the Hartford Symphony Orchestra as 2024–2025 Artist-in-Residence.

Clayton graduated from the Harvard-New England Conservatory (NEC) dual degree program in spring 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in economics at Harvard and a master’s degree in piano performance at NEC under Wha Kyung Byun. In addition to being the first Black finalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022, he received an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2024, won the inaugural Nina Simone Piano Competition in 2023, and is a 2025 Sphinx Medal of Excellence honoree.

“Stephenson is not just a remarkable virtuoso, but a poet, a dramatist and a master story-teller.”
—Gramophone

AWARD: 2022 Gilmore Young Artist

PROGRAM
MUSSORGKY:  Pictures at an Exhibition
ALBENIZ:  Iberia, Book I
ARLEN-JARRETT:  “Over the Rainbow”
GERSHWIN: Rhapsody in Blue

This concert is dedicated to Susan Kline, a piano technician and tuner who personally took special care of our pianos.

Read the Program Notes

Notes by Matt Goodrich

Russian architect and painter Viktor Hartmann died of a cerebral aneurysm on August 4, 1873, at age 39. Modest Mussorgsky, one of his closest friends, channeled his grief into a paraphrase of King Lear: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life—and creatures like Hartmann must die!” The following February, critic Vladimir Stasov organized a memorial exhibition of more than 400 Hartmann works at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, which Mussorgsky attended. That June, the largely self-taught composer—a civil servant by profession, increasingly haunted by alcoholism—composed Pictures at an Exhibition in approximately 20 days, writing to Stasov mid-creation: “Hartmann is boiling as Boris Godunov boiled—sounds and ideas hung in the air. I am gulping and overeating, and can barely manage to scribble them on paper.” The manuscript bears the subtitle A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann. Most of the artworks depicted in its movements have been lost.

The suite opens with a Promenade, Mussorgsky’s self-portrait walking the gallery. “My physiognomy can be seen in the interludes,” he told Stasov. The theme is marked “without cheerfulness, somewhat sustained,” and it returns between the pictures in shifting keys and moods. By the work’s end, the Promenade is absorbed into the pictures themselves.

The movements that follow make no concessions to what pianos are supposed to do comfortably. A gnome lurches in asymmetric jolts; “The Old Castle” suspends a troubadour’s song over a hypnotic drone; children quarrel in the Tuileries gardens in quicksilver figuration. Then Bydło, the Polish oxcart, grinds crookedly on massive wheels—Mussorgsky’s manuscript marks fortissimo from the first bar, the cart already on top of you.

“Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks,” costume sketches for a St. Petersburg ballet, among the few surviving Hartmann works, is a brief, skittering scherzo. “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle” sets two portraits of Polish Jews from Sandomierz in stark musical contrast, its characterization reflecting the caricature conventions and prejudices of its era. The marketplace at Limoges erupts in comic chatter. Mussorgsky scribbled a scenario in the margin: “M. de Puissangeot’s recovered cow, Mme. de Remboursac’s new porcelain dentures.” 

Then the suite darkens: In “Catacombs,” massive chords alternate with silence; Hartmann’s surviving watercolor shows figures examining skulls by lantern light. The following section, Con mortuis in lingua mortua (“With the dead in a dead language”), Mussorgsky’s own Latin coinage, transforms the Promenade over ghostly tremolos. A pencil note in the manuscript margin: “The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me towards the skulls, invokes them; the skulls begin to glow softly.”

“Baba-Yaga” erupts—the witch’s hut on chicken legs, Hartmann’s clock design reimagined as a ferocious ride that drives without pause into “The Great Gate of Kiev,” Hartmann’s unbuilt triumphal arch now erected in sound. The Promenade theme returns as apotheosis—carillon bells ringing across the full span of the keyboard. Many listeners know this finale through Maurice Ravel’s brilliant, effective 1922 orchestration. But pianist James Boyk observes that the piano original carries a moral weight the orchestration does not. It is rawer, lonelier—one instrument carrying the gravitas of an entire world a man composed to remember his friend.

***

After intermission, the program crosses from Russia to Spain, a Spain Isaac Albéniz conjured from Paris in 1905. Scholar Jacinto Torres wrote that Albéniz “felt and wrote Iberia from the distance of exile, from nostalgia for his land.” What emerged was music of extraordinary sophistication, Andalusian folk idioms filtered through French impressionist harmony, flamenco’s biting rhythms woven into some of the most ferociously difficult piano writing ever conceived. Olivier Messiaen called the four books of Iberia “the wonder of the piano.” Fearing it unplayable, Albéniz nearly destroyed the manuscript. In 1909, his friend Enrique Granados, upon learning of the composer’s death, wrote a letter consisting of a single word: Iberia!

The three pieces of Book I make the piano sound like something else entirely—the rasp and strum of a flamenco guitar, stamp of a dancer’s heel, wail of a singer’s voice carrying across a courtyard. The dynamic range is staggering, from barely audible whispers to passages marked quintuple forte.

Evocación, the only movement without a geographical title, embraces the entire country in a single gesture. Its southern fandango melody yields to a northern jota, and the piece drifts through modulations in the rare key of A-flat minor, seven flats darkening the harmony into something luminous and strange. The mood is profoundly interior, Spain refracted through haze and distance.

El Puerto snaps to life with the foot-stamping zapateado of the port town of Santa María near Cádiz, all bustle and salt air. Faster, fiercer rhythms cut through the dance, and Debussian whole-tone coloring shimmers beneath the rhythmic stamping like heat rising off the harbor. For all its energy, the piece ends quietly, the port receding as if seen from a departing ship.

El Corpus en Sevilla, the book’s climactic achievement, depicts the Corpus Christi procession through flower-strewn Seville streets. Distant drumrolls announce the march. Then a saeta—the piercing flamenco lament sung from balconies to the passing image of the Virgin, a cry of religious ecstasy rooted in cante jondo—breaks through the procession, the piano evoking flamenco guitar beneath a raw vocal line. The movement builds to a thunderous climax before the procession recedes into silence.

***

George Gershwin called Harold Arlen “the most original of all of us.” Arlen and lyricist Yip Harburg wrote “Over the Rainbow” in 1939 for The Wizard of Oz, sung by a Kansas girl who dreams of somewhere else. After an early screening, MGM executives cut it for slowing the movie; it survived only because producer Arthur Freed threatened to walk. Judy Garland’s performance led to the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and she spent the rest of her life inseparable from it.

The piece arrives here today via two cocreators: first, Keith Jarrett, a musician who across a half-century career refused every boundary between idioms. Jarrett never published an “Over the Rainbow” transcription; what we have are multiple live concert recordings, each one different in crafting the melody in the moment. From these performances, Clayton Stephenson has fashioned his own composite version. “It’s not ‘Over the Rainbow,’” he notes, “there’s ‘Somewhere’ as well. I’m going to combine a little bit of some other stuff that he’s done into that transcription.” A classical pianist with a jazz ear, building something new from an improviser’s legacy, and in the process, doing exactly what Gershwin did a century ago.

George Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue in a few frantic weeks in January 1924. For the premiere, he played the solo part with passages left blank on the page, improvising in real time and nodding to cue bandleader Paul Whiteman. Gershwin later said that he’d heard the complete piece on a train to Boston, “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” A clarinet trill slides into a wailing glissando—a rehearsal joke by clarinetist Ross Gorman that Gershwin immediately claimed as his own. From there the music moves between strutting jazz-band swagger, aching blues, and one of the great slow melodies of the 20th century, arriving like a long exhale after so much rhythmic energy. The work achieved instant fame but its merits were hotly debated. Leonard Bernstein asserted that you could rearrange its sections without doing any harm—then added that the tunes themselves are “inspired, God-given.”

Tonight, Stephenson performs Gershwin’s own solo piano version, in which the orchestral material folds into the keyboard writing: the clarinet’s wail, brass tuttis, string cantilena, all reimagined for ten fingers. “The fun part is I get to do both roles—the orchestra and the piano soloist. The goal is to have widely different colors.” For Stephenson, Rhapsody in Blue is personal geography: “This piece is to me like New York, where I grew up. You can hear the bustling of the city, the energy, the taxis, the little jazz clubs on the side of the street.” Stephenson observes classical performance as a kind of improvisation—“The notes stay the same, but the way I can play the notes always changes, kind of like in jazz.” It is a fitting last word for an evening in which the piano is asked to become a gallery, a procession, a somewhere over a rainbow, and a city at full tilt.