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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Pianist to perform with string quartet


Hulbert
 (The Spokesman-Review)
Travis Rivers Correspondent

Duane Hulbert thought he might enjoy a career as a Broadway singer, but the sound of his musical life took a different direction.

Hulbert, who became a concert pianist instead of a Broadway star, will join members of the Spokane String Quartet on Sunday for a concert at The Met.

He will begin the program with solo piano works by Bach and Glazunov, then perform Schumann’s Piano Quartet with violinist Kelly Farris, violist Tana Bachman and cellist Helen Byrne.

Hulbert, now in his 19th year as head of the piano faculty at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, grew up in the Midwest.

“No one in my family was particularly musical,” he says, “but whenever we would visit my grandmother, I was attracted to the piano. And unlike my cousins, who would see how much noise they could make on it, I’d just play single notes and listen to the sounds. Or so my mother tells me.”

Hulbert began taking piano lessons at 9, an age by which many concert pianists are making their public debut.

“I was lucky that playing the piano came pretty easily for me,” he says. “But when I was in high school I still most enjoyed singing in the musicals we did each year, and I thought singing might be the direction I would take.”

The piano won out, and Hulbert hoped to enter the Juilliard School in New York.

“I auditioned, but I didn’t make it the first time,” he recalls. “I went to another conservatory for a year, and it was not a happy experience. So I worked really hard, reauditioned for Juilliard and was accepted.”

Hulbert remained in New York through a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at Juilliard and a doctorate at the Manhattan School of Music. He was the first prize winner in the 1980 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition and later took prizes at the Leeds Competition in England, the Paloma O’Shea competition in Spain and the American Music Competition in New York.

The solo portion of his performance Sunday will feature infrequently played piano works by Alexander Glazunov, one of Hulbert’s longtime favorites.

“When I entered the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1982, they sent me a list of the required pieces and there was the Second Sonata by Glazunov,” Hulbert says. “I’d never heard this piece and it was out of print in this country.

“So I went over to the library in Lincoln Center, and they had a copy and let me make a photocopy of it. Glazunov was said to have been a really fine pianist, and he certainly writes like someone who could play brilliantly.”

Hulbert’s experience led to a project for Bridge Records to record all of Glazunov’s significant piano music. The first CD brought a Grammy nomination in 2002; two additional discs to be issued later this year will complete the set.

Sunday’s concert will begin with four of Bach’s organ chorale preludes transcribed for piano by Ferruccio Busoni, an Italian pianist who was almost the exact contemporary of Glazunov.

Like Glazunov, Busoni was strongly influenced by the showy virtuoso brilliance of Franz Liszt.

“But Busoni’s transcriptions of these Bach organ chorale preludes are very different from Liszt,” Hulbert says. “He stays almost exactly with what Bach wrote for organ, adding only a few doublings that make the piano sound more like the organ.

“I grew up a Lutheran,” the pianist adds, “so I had the sound of those hymns Bach used in my ears from the time I was a kid. Maybe that’s why this music means so much to me.”

Despite Hulbert’s shift from his early fascination with musical comedy to the piano, he maintains a connection with the theater. His wife, playwright and director Judith Carlson, directs Tacoma’s North End Children’s Theater.

The couple live in Tacoma with their two middle school-aged boys, and with visits home by a daughter in college.

The Spokane String Quartet had originally scheduled an afternoon of string quartets for Sunday’s concert, and Hulbert’s performance for later in the season. But scheduling conflicts arose for one of the quartet’s members, and Hulbert agreed to change his date with the ensemble to Sunday.

“We want to remind season ticket holders that their tickets with the date Feb. 20 are the ones to bring,” says Roberta Bottelli, the quartet’s executive director.