Tri-Valley residents will remember Anderson as a youngster who won the Livermore-Amador Symphony Competition for Young Musicians twice. Since then, he has won leading piano competitions and performed worldwide with top conductors.
Anderson views his program choices as pairings. In the first half, he will perform Mozart’s Sonata in E-flat Major together with Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat Major. “Mozart and Schubert are viewed as inhabiting the most divine realms of music, their art coming not from them but through them,” he explains. Mozart wrote this sonata with its unusually slow and lyrical first movement at the age of 19. Schubert wrote his sonata with its deep, other-worldly trill in the first movement only 2 months before he died at age 31.
In the second half, Anderson will pair Röntgen’s short sonata in C-sharp Minor with Brahms’s lengthy Sonata No. 3 in F Minor. Anderson says that these two composers “Forged their music through tireless working and re-working of musical material …” Ten years younger than Brahms, Röntgen has sometimes been dubbed the “Dutch Brahms,” but Anderson maintains both composers simply shared a musical aesthetic. Both held attitudes against virtuosic excesses.
Anderson is currently Professor of Piano and Chamber Music at the University of British Columbia. His musical education began in Pleasanton and Livermore at age four with a recorder class given by Renee Smith, followed by piano lessons with Eugene Masluk. He attributes his most formative training to Aiko Onishi during at San Jose State. His musical career began on a Fulbright scholarship in the UK at the Royal Northern College of Music and while studying privately in London.