Piano Professor Robin McCabe produces this quarterly series highlighting music by composers influenced by folk and fairy tales. Each concert features a pre-concert lecture by a UW faculty scholar and music performed by top UW Music students.
Lecture: Professor Denyse Delcourt
“And the Wolf Ate Her: The Dark Side of Fairy Tales”
Program
Schumann: Three Fantasy Pieces for Cello and Piano, Opus 73
Tenere e con l'espressione
Vivace, Facile
Rapidamente e con il fuoco
Youngbin Kim, cello; Lorenzo Marasso, piano
Atanas Ourkouzounov: “Three East Tales,” for flute and guitar
The Fox’s dance
The Red Elf’s Lullaby
Dracula Caprice
Elise Kim, flute; Lucas Victor, guitar
Maurice Ravel: from “Gaspard de la Nuit”
Ondine
Scarbo
Hexin Qiao, piano
INTERMISSION
Robert Schumann: from Fantasy Pieces, Opus 12
Des Abends
Aufschwung
In der Nacht
Traumes Wirren
Minsun Kim, piano
Maurice Ravel: The Don Juan and Dulcinea Songs
Romanesque Song
Epic Song
Drinking Song
Jared White, baritone; Dhayoung Yoon, piano
Guest Lecturer Bio
Denyse Delcourt
Denyse Delcourt is a writer and a medievalist. She has published two novels: Gabrielle au bois dormant (Editions Trois 2001) and Rouge (Lévesque Editeur 2015). She is the author of L'Ethique du changement dans le roman français du Moyen Age (Geneva: Droz, 1990); the editior of French Fairy Tales: Essays on a Major Literary Tradition (Cognella 2011), and the co-editor (with Stephen Nichols) of De Theoria: Early Modern Essays in Memory of Eugene Vance (MLN 2012). Her articles on French medieval romances have appeared in Le Moyen Français, The Romanic Review, Medieavalia & Humanistica, Medieovo Romanzo, and MLN, among others. She has been teaching at the University of Washington since 1990. Other teaching experiences include Queens (Canada), Emory, Northwestern and Duke universities. Her teaching and research interests are Old French language and literature, contemporary Québécois literature and French fairy tales.
Celebrated pianist Robin McCabe has established herself as one of America’s most communicative and persuasive artists. McCabe’s involvement and musical sensibilities have delighted audiences across the United States, Europe, Canada and in nine concert tours of the Far East. The United States Department of State sponsored her two South American tours, which were triumphs both artistically and diplomatically.
As noted by the New York Times, “What Ms. McCabe has that raises her playing to such a special level is a strong lyric instinct and confidence in its ability to reach and touch the listener.” The Tokyo Press declared her a “pianistic powerhouse,” and a reviewer in Prague declared, “Her musicianship is a magnet for the listener.” Richard Dyer, the eminent critic of the Boston Globe: ‘Her brilliant, natural piano playing shows as much independence of mind as of fingers.”
Her recordings have received universal acclaim. Her debut album for Vanguard Records featured the premiere recording of Guido Agosti transcription of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. Critics praised it as “mightily impressive.” Stereo Review described her disc of Bartok as “all that we have come to expect from this artist, a first-rate performance!” She was commissioned to record four albums for the award-winning company Grammofon AB BIS in Stockholm, which remain distributed internationally, including the CD “Robin McCabe Plays Liszt,” (AB BIS No. 185).
McCabe earned her bachelor of music degree summa cum laude at the University of Washington School of Music, where she studied with Béla Siki, and her master’s and doctorate degrees at the Juilliard School of Music, where she studied with Rudolf Firkusny. She joined the Juilliard faculty in 1978 then returned to the UW in 1987 to accept a position on the piano faculty. In 1994 McCabe was appointed Director of the School of Music, a position she held until 2009. McCabe holds a Michiko Morita Miyamoto Professorship in Piano at the School of Music and has previously held a Ruth Sutton Waters Professorship and a Donald Petersen Professorship in the School of Music.
McCabe is a dedicated arts ambassador and advocate for arts audience development, frequently addressing arts organizations across the country. With colleague Craig Sheppard, she has launched the highly successful Seattle Piano Institute, an intense summer immersion experience for gifted and aspiring classical pianists.
The winner of numerous prizes and awards, including the International Concert Artists Guild Competition and a Rockefeller Foundation grant, McCabe was the subject of a lengthy New Yorker magazine profile, “Pianist’s Progress,” later expanded into a book of the same title.
In 1995 McCabe presented the annual faculty lecture — a concert with commentary — at the University of Washington. She is the first professor of music in the history of the University to be awarded this lectureship. Seattle magazine selected McCabe as one of 17 current and past University of Washington professors who have had an impact on life in the Pacific Northwest. In 2005, to celebrate its 100th year as an institution, The Juilliard School selected McCabe as one of 100 alumni from 20,000 currently living to be profiled in its centenary publication recognizing distinction and accomplishments in the international world of music, dance, and theater. Today she is a highly- sought teacher at the University of Washington, with students from around the world seeking admission to her studio.
McCabe performs regularly throughout the United States, and has made several tours of South Korea, Japan and China. In 2022 she has been appointed Artistic Advisor to the Beijing Royal School, an elite private K-12 institution which is evolving an international Arts curriculum She appears often as an invited jurist for international piano competitions, most recently in New Orleans, San Antonio, and Vancouver, Canada. In 2016 she served on the jury of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition. In March of 2022 she served on the jury for the Hilton Head International Piano Competition.