University of Iowa School of Music faculty and students traveled to Natal, Brazil to take part in the Making Connections Piano Festival. The festival – a collaboration between the UI School of Music and the Federal University of Rio Grande de Norte (UFRN) – revolved around five evenings of concerts where musicians from UI and several Brazilian universities came together through the universal language of music.
The festival was conceived by Dr. Ksenia Nosikova, co-chair of the UI School of Music piano department, and Dr. Joana Holanda, chair of the UFRN piano department and a University of Iowa graduate.
“Joana was one of my first students,” Dr. Nosikova explains, “while I was in Brazil, the summer of 2022 for a master class, Joana and I began talking about creating something with larger groups, attracting more diverse audiences, and that’s how the idea started.”
After a little more than a year of planning, Dr. Nosikova and Dr. William Menefield arrived in Brazil with five UI piano students – Craig Jordan, Neil Krzeski, Peter Bowen Liu, Canlin Qiu, Ana Yam – to partake in an exciting tour de force of both North American and Latin American piano repertoires.
The festival opened with a faculty concert where Dr. Nosikova and Dr. Menefield played alongside the Brazilian faculty. The second evening featured Brazilian students performing Latin American music. On the third evening, UI piano students and UI based Avita Duo (Ksenia Nosikova and Katya Moeller) received a long-standing ovation after performing piano music by North American composers such as Samual Barber, George Gershwin, Amy Beach, and Lowell Liebermann.
“There were two pieces I specifically learned for the festival,” Craig Jordan, a UI DMA candidate, describes the process of picking music for the festival. “Sometimes we’re so focused on playing Beethoven or Mozart or right now everyone’s playing Rachmaninoff, so it was really cool to have the opportunity to learn new music and focus on American composers.”
The programming also included an exciting evening of jazz and pop music performed by Dr. Menefield and musicians from the UFRN jazz department. "We filled the night with jazz standards because we just wanted everyone to have a good time,” Dr. Menefield recounts his time with the UFRN faculty, “of course, the language barrier was something to get over, but it really speaks to the power of music. Once we started playing, communication was easy.
The final concert brought twelve pianists across various universities in Brazil and the University of Iowa together to perform a moving, multimedia rendition of Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1979). “It’s a complex work,” Dr. Nosikova explains, “it’s one hour of everything from Baroque influence to jazz in variations that are very smartly put together.”
Rzewski’s piece was written as a tribute to the struggle of the Chilean people against the repressive regime of General Augusto Pinochet, who took power in 1973 after a coup d’etat against the first democratically elected socialist government in Latin America, President Salvador Allende.
For the performance, Rzewski’s 36 variations were divided amongst the twelve pianists, who shared the same piano on stage. “It was really special to collaborate with that many pianists,” says Dr. Menefeild, who closed the piece with an elaborate improvisation. “Pianists are isolated a lot of times, so just being in the room with other pianists and drawing from their energy was a unique and rewarding experience.”
Canlin Qiu, a pianist from China pursuing her doctorate in piano performance at UI, was among the twelve pianists participating in this final piece. “It was really lovely,” she describes her experience on stage, “we would turn the pages for the Brazilian performers, and they would turn the pages for us. It felt so natural, we didn’t even have to talk, it was like we were truly united through the music.”
The performance of The People United Will Never Be Defeated incorporated a multimedia presentation of social issues across the Americas. It was a moving display that really drove home the theme of the festival, connecting people across cultures.
“At one point I was crying a little,” Craig Jordan says, “during Dr. Menefield’s improv he started playing We Shall Overcome, and it blew my mind. Our struggles and our histories, they’re so related, and this song is about facing difficulties together.”
The final concert was honored by the attendance of May Baptista, the Consul General at the United States Consulate General in Recife, along with several staff from the Consulate.
In addition to the concert series, the festival included several masterclasses given by Dr. Nosikova and Dr. Menefield to Brazilian students, and UI students had the opportunity to work with Brazilian faculty. They also had the chance to explore the area, visiting both the beach and the world's largest cashew tree, but the most memorable moments were those made across the table over delicious Brazilian food.
“I keep telling people, you can’t get a bad pineapple there,” Ana Yam, a double major in music performance and biomedical engineering, jokes before elaborating on the friendships she made. “Honestly though, the best part for me has to be the people. I keep in touch with a lot of them and it’s so motivating to see their talent and passion. It would be great to get some of them to Iowa.”
Dr. Nosikova and Dr. Holanda originally decided on the theme Making Connections with exactly this in mind. “We wanted to connect people personally,” Dr. Nosikova explains, “because when you establish a personal relationship, like mine and Joana’s, it can survive many things and result in exciting projects like this. My hope is that someone will pick it up – one of the students, maybe – and expand the vision and the sense of hope.”
The concerts were all livestreamed and recorded, and can be viewed on the University of Iowa School of Music YouTube channel under the playlist titled “Making Connections Piano Festival – Brazil 2023.”
