David Kaplan Tickets
Ravinia Pavilion | Highland Park, Illinois
The acclaimed pianist David Kaplan is bringing the fantasy-fantastic Quasi Una Fantasia to the Pavilion at Ravinia on 1 September 2024!
Musical magic is bound to happen when composition meets improvisation, and audiences are in for nothing but excellence, adventure, grace, and fire at David Kaplan's ebony and ivory fantasy festival!
Between the famous piano compositions of Beethoven, Couperin, and Schumann and the famously difficult works of Ligeti, Cerrone, and Cheung lies a grey area: improvisation – an element germane to all piano music. David Kaplan explores this grey area with striking imagination, creativity, and terrific virtuosity, reconciling the antique with the brand new, the sweet and the caustic, the minimalistic and the sprawling.
This is the one matinee recital any music lover, whether you are a fan of classical music or not, should see. Tickets are selling from only $53 and will sell out quickly, so get your tickets now!
He plays with great command, elegance, and character. He nails virtuoso passages and showcases a dazzling range of dynamics and emotional weight. One could almost say that it can’t be played more beautifully than David Kaplan can.
Quasi Una Fantasia is the talk among the who's who of classical music. With thoughtful curation, extreme diversity, and, of course, creative interweaving of classical and contemporary music, the program, spanning three centuries of piano music, is bound to dazzle and leave audiences breathless.
David Kaplan gives the nod to European modernism with the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s "Ballade" and her Hungarian counterpart György Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata No. 1”, and fearlessly exposes the turbulent and emotional underbelly of Andrea Casarrubios’s “Sandglass." He reconciles the antique “Unmeasured Prelude No. 13 in F Major” by Louis Couperin with the romantic Johannes Brahms’ “Intermezzo in F Minor Op. 118 No. 4” and Robert Schumann’s “Warum? Op. 12 No. 3”. The radical leaps of feeling and texture in Ludwig van Beethoven’s sense of play in “Piano Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major Op. 27 no. 1 (Quasi Una Fantasia)” and the intensely poetic and dark musical statements of “Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor Op. 27 No. 2 (Moonlight)” are a step in the direction of fantasy form, with hints of improvisation.
Audiences can also look forward to two works composed specifically for David Kaplan by Christopher Cerrone and Anthony Cheung. Each takes inspiration from the other, fearlessly delving into the avant-garde terrain of the prepared piano with the hyper-percussive “Passagework” and "Holding Patterns."
David Kaplan, an alumnus of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, has long been among the most sought-after pianists globally. He balances standout solo performances with meaningful and critically acclaimed collaborations such as the Attacca, Hausman, and Tesla String Quartets and regularly performs at some of the most exciting venues in the world.
David Kaplan is an assistant professor and inaugural Shapiro Family Chair in Piano Performance at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
The fantastic Bennett Gordon Hall, situated at the southernmost section of the Ravinia Festival grounds, is a 450-seat jewel-like auditorium that regularly hosts classical and jazz performances all year at the most affordable prices.
Get your tickets now and be transported to a world where composition meets improvisation!
