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Reviews
Reviews and excerpts
| TOKYO | "His concert revealed a total one-ness of music and performer...a musician whose playing is altogether sui generis....He...melts, as it were, into each composition." | (ONGAKU NO TOMOMUSIC JOURNAL) |
| THE HAGUE | "A serious and first rate pianistic talent... [his] interpretation was characterized by a constant inner authority." | (HET VADERLAND) |
| CHUR | (*Switzerland) "A pianist who could soon conquer our concert halls." | (NEUE BÜNDER ZEITUNG) |
| NIJMEGEN | (The Netherlands) "A concert never to be forgotten." | (DE GELDERLANDER) |
| LOCKHAVEN (PA) | "His performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with the (Philadelphia) Festival Orchestra remains one of the most memorable occasions of this auditorium's recent history." | (J.S. LOCKHAVEN STATE UNIVERSITY) |
| WASHINGTON, D.C. | "One could not help wondering why his arrival (on the East Coast) had been delayed so long." | (J. MCLELLAN THE WASHINGTON POST) |
WILLEM IBES
A debut recital in New York and Washington, D.C., at the age of almost sixty! And by a man whom Marguérite Long, the internationally renowned interpreter of Debussy and Ravel, described over thirty years ago as destined to be un très grand pianiste. Why the delay?
Willem Ibes’ love of teaching is undoubtedly a great part of the answer. For, although he has given many solo-recitals and concerts with chamber music ensembles and orchestras in this country as well as abroad, since 1957he has been a dedicated professor of piano, music history, form analysis and piano literature at Saint John’s University, a small Benedictine liberal arts college in Collegeville, Minnesota.
Indeed, instead of a brilliant concert career as envisioned by his teacher, his professional life seems to have been well attuned to a monastic tradition that goes back almost two millennia, offering a pattern of living that is quiet, unglamorous and, on the outside at least, uneventful, but with opportunity for reflection, inner growth and development.
Willem Ibes was born in 1930 in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. After finishing the Gymnasium in his hometown, he spent a scholarship year at Saint John’s in Minnesota, and another three years at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He then went to Paris for three years as the student of Marguérite Long; after two more years of study in psychology and philosophy at Nijmegen University, he accepted the invitation to return to Saint John’s University.
Often, during the university’s January Term, Mr. Ibes may be found in the California desert, leading a group of students in Zen meditation, a discipline he himself pursues assiduously both at home and abroad. Last spring during a tour of Japan, eh combined concretizing in several major cities with a retreat at Hosshinji in Obama, an experience he describes as “every bit as grueling as I had expected it to be, and worth every slow-moving second of it.”
Mr. Ibes has performed a large part of the concerto repertoire with a variety of orchestras, such as the St. Paul Chamber, the Minneapolis Civic, the Amsterdam Conservatory and the Pueblo Symphony. Later this season he will again be soloist with the Civic Orchestra of Minneapolis in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto.
The second half of the program, devoted largely to Fauré and Ravel, merits a comment of its own, since during his years in Paris Willem Ibes showed neither (in his words) “an affinity nor any real fondness for French music.” But the spirits that lingered in the suite of 43, rue Molitor where he went for his weekly cours must have been powerful and possessed of the longue patience which Rodin deemed indispensable to an artist. These programs are, in part, a testimony to their and Mr. Ibes’ perseverance.
-Jon Hassler
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1992
CLASSICAL RECORDINGS
by Joseph McLellan Washington Post Staff Writer
Pianist Willem Ibes came as a bit of a surprise when he made his Washington debut in 1990 at the Kennedy Center; he was then approaching his 60th birthday, an artist of the highest quality, a professor of music and a teacher of Zen at the St. John's University in Minnesota, and completely unknown on the East Coast. He will not be a stranger when he returns to the Terrace Theater on Thursday. This time, his arrival is preceded by a record (Westmark 2911) with a program that he played in the Grand Auditorium of UNESCO in Paris in 1990: two barcarolles and a nocturne by Faure, Chopin's Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27, No. 2; Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and Beethoven's Sonata in C Minor, Op. 111, all interpreted with a style and grace to match his sure-handed, unobtrusive technique. In his notes on the Beethoven, he says that it journeys to "that world where matter and spirit stand no longer in opposition, where time seems to have ceased." His performance makes it sound that way.
Copyright 13.7.2001