{"id":2323,"date":"2013-05-28T14:39:16","date_gmt":"2013-05-28T18:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=2323"},"modified":"2013-06-05T17:18:18","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T21:18:18","slug":"renowned-pianist-finds-inspiration-in-unlikely-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/renowned-pianist-finds-inspiration-in-unlikely-places\/","title":{"rendered":"Renowned pianist finds inspiration in unlikely places"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"William<\/a>

William Wolfram<\/p><\/div>When the New York Rangers fell to the Boston Bruins in this year\u2019s playoffs on Saturday, few people probably took it harder than William Wolfram.
\nWolfram, a New York based pianist has always had an affinity for the original six team league, but also has a special place in his heart for the Edmonton Oilers. The Oilers, after all, when they were on their Stanley Cup winning streak in the 1980s, played hockey the way he always wanted to play the piano \u2013 creative, skilled, and fluid.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are teams that win with all sorts of different hockey styles,\u201d he says. \u201cThe New Jersey Devils won a couple of cups, but I would never want to play the piano the way they play. They won, they deserved it, but it was by essentially sucking the life out of the other team. It was a defensive system I just thought was so stultifying and boring.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey couldn\u2019t even fill their own arena a lot of the time and I would never want to play piano like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Filling arenas, or at least concert halls, is rarely a problem for the piano virtuoso, who has played the world\u2019s grandest concert halls, legendary smaller venues, and picked up numerous awards and honours along the way. But Mr. Wolfram is set to get back to his more intimate roots this Friday at the Aurora Cultural Centre as the final artist in this season\u2019s Great Artists Piano Series.<\/p>\n

The Great Artists series is facilitated by local musicians and award-winning record producers Norbert and Bonnie Kraft. The duo produce with the classical Naxos label and through this line of work, they have become friends with Mr. Wolfram.<\/p>\n

Whether he is playing the vast hall of Carnegie Hall or the vastly different dimensions of the Cultural Centre\u2019s Brevik Hall, Mr. Wolfram approaches each performance the same way, but keeping in mind the more intimate the venue the greater the chance of interacting and making a closer connection with the audience. <\/p>\n

Promising a program of Liszt, Schubert, Chopin, and Ligeti, he said he likes to create programs that flow together energetically, thematically, and melodically \u2013 but it is not as easy as one might think. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is exceptionally difficult,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can have the most brilliant intellectual plan that ties things together and while that is a nice idea, it doesn\u2019t guarantee you in any way, shape or form it is going to work as a program.\u201d<\/p>\n

For him, it is more about the interconnectivity of the pieces rather than mixing and matching composers or eras. One program he said that worked particularly well for him was a combo starting with Mendelsohn and culminating with Debussy\u2019s Footsteps in the Snow. These, he said, were \u201cdisparate\u201d pieces that stared out fast, \u201cworking towards a much greater stillness\u201d with \u201cFootsteps\u201d, which he describes as a \u201cvery slow, magical piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe energy level was coming down and everything was getting intimate and slower,\u201d he says. \u201cOdd things like that often work well, but it is hard to hit on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finding the right piece of music to spark the classical imagination in youngsters too is a difficult nut to crack, especially for someone like Mr. Wolfram who was raised on the music of The Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and the sounds of Motown, music that he himself still heads to, to this day, to unwind rather than Bach, Beethoven, and Brahams. His classically trained grandmother, however, got lucky when she played him Liszt\u2019s Hungarian Rhapsody.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just absolutely blew my mind,\u201d he says. \u201cI could not believe how exciting and thrilling it was and I practically played the old LP 800,000 times.\u201d
\nThat being said, although that set the spark, it was almost quickly extinguished as his parents and grandmother quickly locked him into long rounds of musical education and practice to the extent of which his initial excitement eventually turned to what he described as music \u201cbecoming the enemy\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t have fun and I couldn\u2019t have friends because I had to write, I had to practice,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I was a little bit older, I managed to get myself away from that and did it on my own, and I realised how honest to God I lived music. With a couple of different steps, my life could have taken a very different turn. Music was stopping me from being a social person and expressing myself as a human being and it is a miracle that didn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The father of two daughters, with artistic leanings not towards the piano, but to dance and movement, he says he is often asked by parents for advice in having their children stick with it, but avoiding the pitfalls of making music a prison.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fear is that if you don\u2019t control them, they are going to go off on their own and do something that isn\u2019t wise for them,\u201d he says. \u201cif you can find a balance, it is possible, but it is not easy to effect that balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Great Artists Piano Series concludes with Mr. Wolfram this Friday at 8 p.m. at the Aurora Cultural Centre (22 Church Street). Tickets are $20 and $25 for seniors and students and are available in person at the Centre or by calling 905-713-1818. Doors open at 7 p.m.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir When the New York Rangers fell to the Boston Bruins in this year\u2019s playoffs on Saturday, few people probably took it harder than William Wolfram. Wolfram, a New York based pianist has always had an affinity for the original six team league, but also has a special place in his heart for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-Bt","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 06:43:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}