Internat’l piano festival to feature 4 teachers, 23 students.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
A week’s worth of performances continues today at The Gallery Inn
By PEGGY ANN BLISS
Special to The STAR
When you own a small hotel filled with grand pianos and a museum full of treasures, what do you do with it?
If you are sculptor Jan D’Esopo, you fill your beds with music-loving travelers and your grands with pianists of all sizes, ages and nationalities, playing anything from Liszt to Nicodé, from Mozart to Astor Piazzolla.
This week, the 12th annual edition of the Ian Hobson International Piano Festival, one of D’Esopo’s most prestigious events, opened at The Gallery Inn in Old San Juan. Front and center is a four-star international lineup of pianists/docents who are sharing their considerable skills with 23 talented pianists on at least six pianos, including the pièce de résistance, the 1937 nine-foot, 1,000-pound Steinway Model D, which D’Esopo’s father, Dr. Joseph D’Esopo, a medical professor and serious amateur pianist, bought from the Yale University School of Music. It was later brought to Puerto Rico and has held a place of honor in The Gallery Inn for half a century.
Every night there are new performers on this venerable instrument, starting with the professors until the students catch up. The concerts, which are free for the local public, are being held every night at 7 through Saturday.
In the exclusive opening lineup are Hobson, Israeli Boaz Sharon, Romanian Camelia Goila and Chinese Muen Vanessa Wei. They will also spend the week polishing the already advanced skills of 23 young pianists from around the world.
Each participant in the free workshop will get four master lessons and two public concerts in a unique 16th-century milieu. All expenses, including room and board, will be free of charge, thanks to the substantial subsidy from the Puerto Rico chapter of the Steinway Society.
Hobson, who is also an orchestra conductor, is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where he founded the Sinfonía da Camara, a chamber music group. He is also a professor at Florida State University.
A specialist in the Romantic repertoire, Hobson has 60 records to his credit, including the complete works of Chopin, Beethoven and Schumann.
A worthy successor
Hobson’s pupil Wei grew up on the Chinese island of Gyangu, known as the “Piano Island” for its long musical tradition. She started studying piano at age 4 and at 15 the family moved to Beijing, where she completed the first stage of her musical education at the Beijing Conservatory. She now has a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana. Wei recently made waves with her recordings of unknown works by Jean Louis Nicodé, a Pole of Huguenot descent known for his late Romantic compositions characterized by a novel polyphony.
Another of Hobson’s former students at Urbana is Goila, who got her earlier music training at Academia de Música George Dima in her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s economic and cultural hub with its major university. Goila is the daughter of the late acclaimed clarinetist Ian Goila, with whom she made several recordings.
Veteran professor Sharon, one of the world’s most prominent experts in pedagogy, is director of piano studies for the Young Artists Program at Boston University Tanglewood Institute. At the Belgium Conservatory, he studied under the revered piano teacher Stefan Askenase, known for his direct connections with Romantic composers Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin through their pupils.
Sharon is also a prolific recording artist specializing in 20th-century French and Brazilian music, especially composers Claude Debussy and Darius Milhaus.
The 23 students and their docents began arriving over the weekend, settling into their rooms courtesy of The Steinway Society and D’Esopo, owner of the inn for the last six-plus decades. They concentrated on testing the pianos, meeting their roommates and not getting lost in the centuries-old labyrinth of art-filled chambers.
The concerts by the teachers began Monday and continue today, Tuesday, with two performances.
By Wednesday it will be time for the students to show their stuff. And by Sunday, they will be ready to pack their bags, full of magic memories of a colonial art-filled week that has advanced their own gifts to the cultural world more than they can ever measure.
The Gallery Inn is on the corner of San Justo Street and Norzagaray Boulevard. For information on individual concerts, call (787) 722-1808.
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