Kapustin, Jazz Concert Etude No. 1

This past weekend, Professor Carol and I had dinner with friends, a husband and wife who had Carol as a professor when they were at SMU. They both went on to earn their doctorates in piano performance and, fortunately, have finally worked their way from Miami back to Texas. William Villaverde and Fabiana Claure have worked professionally as solo performers, as a duo, and significantly as entrepreneurs in the music world.

Of course, after dinner and discussions about careers, weather, politics, home repair, child-rearing, food and beverage, it’s time for someone (or more) to sit down and play some music. That’s what you do after dinner, isn’t it? Well, it should be, even if none of your dinner companions plays quite at the level of William and Fabiana.

After a couple of duos, William started playing jazz, including some of his own compositions. Coming from Cuba, the Latin influences are obvious in his works and often in his selection of works by other composers.

So one of William’s videos seems like the obvious choice for this week’s Performance Pick. But instead of focusing on Latin music, I decided to feature something by a Russian composer.

Nikolai Kapustin (b. 1937) received his education at the Moscow Conservatory. That put him in the middle of one of the great classical traditions and some of the best pianists of the time. He added to those influences an affinity for jazz, and his career as a composer from the 1950s on has focused on jazz idioms. It’s not improvisation, but rather written in an improvisatory style.

That combination of jazz and classical virtuosity is something Kapustin and William share.