WHITTIER COLLEGE BACH FESTIVAL CLOSES WITH
A FIRST:
A SOLO HARPSICHORD RECITAL
The 77th Whittier
College Bach Festival will conclude on Sunday evening, April 6, at 8:00 with a
solo harpsichord recital by alumnus Raymond Erickson, '63, a protégé of Margaretha Lohmann, the founder of the Whittier
College Music Department and its Bach Festival. The Festival one of the oldest
among nearly forty in the United States.
Although Erickson performed in
the Bach Festivals of 1960-63 during his undergraduate years at the College on
the piano, on this occasion he is giving the first solo harpsichord recital
ever presented at the College, with the theme of “Bach and his Contemporaries.”
In addition to works by Bach, François
Couperin (“The Great”), Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Domenico Scarlatti, Erickson
will also incorporate the lost 18th century tradition of
improvisation into the program, a regular feature for many years of his
concerts on both piano and harpsichord.
Although born in Minneapolis of
Chicagoan parents, Erickson's family moved to Whittier when he was ten, and he
attended St. Mary's School and Cantwell High School before coming Whittier on a
major national scholarship. While an undergraduate he gave several solo
recitals (including the first concert in the Whittier College Chapel),
performed the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Whittier College-Community
Orchestra (a critic characterizing him as “a performer of power and musical
perception”), and participated in the Bach Festivals. Graduating with High Honors,
elected to Omicron Delta Kappa, and named “Man of the Year” by the Associated
Men's Association of the College, he then went to Yale to pursue the Ph.D. in
musicology.
While at Yale, Erickson was
accepted by the famous harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick as one of a handful of
private students; further private studies with pianist Nadia Reisenberg and
harpsichordist Albert Fuller, both Juilliard faculty, followed upon his move to
New York, where in 1971 he joined the faculty of Queens College of the City University
of New York. There he subsequently became the founding Director of the Aaron
Copland School of Music there as well as the College's Dean of Arts and Humanities
before retiring in 2008. In 1975 he was elected to the faculty of the new
Doctoral Program in Music at the City University's new Graduate Center, and
ever since he has taught part-time there; he also has taught at Rutgers
University, The Juilliard School, and directs a summer workshop at Queens
College, “Rethinking Bach,” that has been invited to Japan in 2014.
Erickson has led a two-pronged career
as scholar and performer. Author or editor of four books—one of which, The
Worlds of Johann Sebastian Bach (2009), is dedicated to the memory of
Margaretha Lohmann—he is an internationally recognized Bach scholar, but also a
popular pre-concert lecturer for Lincoln Center and other New York musical
organizations. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for
the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
As a performer, he has appeared
in thirty of the continental United States, Italy, Germany, and Austria, and in
2014 will make his debut in China and Japan. He was soloist in the New York
first period-instrument performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 (New
York Times: “brilliantly played”) and was a participant in the first
American recording of the complete Brandenburg Concertos on period instruments.
The German press has hailed his improvised piano preluding as “genius in the
manner of Clara Schumann,” the great nineteenth-century pianist famous for her
improvisations.
Erickson's honors include the
Endowed Chair in Music at the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa), Honorary
Membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the William H. Scheide Research Award of the
American Bach Society, and decoration by the German government with the
Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit.
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