Pianist Voronietsky Performing 25th UMaine Concert
Contact: Baycka Voronietsky, (207) 581-1257, George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
ORONO — After five decades of performing, pianist Baycka Voronietsky, associate professor of music, has a love-hate relationship with the stage.
She lives for the music, but she confides that she is privately uncomfortable with the silent formality of the classical concert stage — an uneasiness compounded by stage fright. Voronietsky, however, is comforted by her piano. The resonance of the first note dissolves discomfort. It is the key to listening to the music instead of thinking about it, she says.
“It is incessant listening,” says Voronietsky, who on Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m. at Minsky Recital Hall will perform her 25th annual concert at the University of Maine. “Once you start the first note you have to keep listening without projection of what can go wrong. It’s just being in the moment. Once you start, you go. I know the notes. I maneuver them.”
Polish-born Voronietsky is known campus wide and internationally for her command of the piano and passionate translation of the music of Bach, Chopin, Schumann and others. She performed professionally in Poland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Spain and Morocco before emigrating to New York at age 27. She has been featured with the Gdansk Philharmonic, performed on Radio Italiano, and on Spanish and Danish radio stations.
Voronietsky plans a program Feb. 13 of melodic nostalgic music by Romantic period composers. In spite of her discomfort with the concert venue, Voronietsky says she looks forward to this 25th annual performance, scheduled 25 years to the day from her first concert on the Orono campus.
“There is something about wanting to share what is so beautiful,” she says. “For this concert, I selected music, I think, that is closest to my heart. I think the basic theme is nostalgic, for what could have been, but what is not.”
Voronietsky acknowledges an appreciation for Chopin’s nostalgic reflections in two pieces she’ll perform in the first half of the concert, “Mazurka in C Minor, Opus 41, No. 1” and “Mazurka in C Minor, Opus 50, No. 3.”
Chopin was born and raised in Poland, moved to France at age 19 and seems to have expressed through this score second thoughts about his emigration, Voronietsky says.
“He combines Polish national folk dance-like rhythms with a French elegance,” she says. “There is a nostalgic quality as if he was missing Poland. He is moving in and out of sadness, pretending as if everything is fine.”
The first piece of the evening is a nocturne by Chopin, followed by Rachmaninoff’s “Etude-Tableau, Opus 39, No. 2.” “It’s based on a psalm for the dead,” she says, adding that she is dedicating the piece to a friend, Bangor physician Michael Solomon, who died recently. “It’s a very pensive, very somber, nostalgic piece.”
Another piece Voronietsky will perform is a Schumann sonata, whose “soft, romantic and melodious theme” is a reflection of the composer’s gentle obsession with his wife-to-be Clara, she says.
Other music on the program includes the musical poem “Desire” by Russian pianist Alexander Scriabin, a “Chopinesque” composer, she says, who wrote pensively and nostalgically from Paris in the late 19th Century.
In the second half of the concert, Voronietsky shares the stage with former UMaine music professor and pianist Katherine Ann Foley, whose long-time friendship Voronietsky would like to celebrate in a dual performance. They will play “Tears” from Rachmaninoff’s “Suite, Opus 5, No. 1,” and five movements of “Silhouetten, Opus 23” by Anton Arensky, a Russian composer and student of Rimsky-Korsakov, whose music is considered to have been influenced by Mendelssohn.
Voronietsky emigrated to the United States from Europe in 1969 to pursue a career teaching music. A classically trained concert pianist in her native Poland since the age of seven, Voronietsky studied under maestros in Poland and Venice and received a master’s degree in performance from the F. Chopin Warsaw Conservatory of Music. She studied and performed in New York, California and Massachusetts before earning a second master’s degree, in piano performance and pedagogy, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She came to the University of Maine in 1979.
Today, she says, she approaches music, teaching and — reluctantly — the stage with a Zen-like philosophy. “I would just like people to come and her me play, not knowing how many masters I have had and where I played,” she says. “You could say I play music entirely for its own beauty. Just like I grow flowers, but I don’t sell them. It’s for the love of it and what comes out of it is the performance. Here, I have to show my students that I can play so they will listen to me as a teacher.”
Minsky Recital Hall is in the Class of 1944 Hall. Admission is $10.