Andrew Tyson

Durham-born pianist Andrew Tyson’s rise in the classical world has been rapid. Since 2011, the thirty-three-year-old pianist has won numerous major national and international competitions, released three albums, and performed all over the world. His concert kicks off Duke Performances’ piano-recital series this year (which somehow only includes male pianists) and will be Tyson’s first in town since 2016. The program is a study of variations which leans heavily on French music: Jean-Philippe Rameau, Cécile Chaminade (somehow the only female composer in the entire piano-recital series), and Maurice Ravel, with an appearance at the end by Robert Schumann. Chaminade’s two pieces serve as the musical bridge between Rameau’s formal Gavotte variée and Ravel’s idiosyncratic Miroirs, an impressionistic attempt to illustrate the world on the other side of the looking glass. And Schumann’s Symphonic Études are really a massive variation set hidden within a wickedly hard series of nominally pedagogical pieces. —