KEY POINTS:
Twenty-four years ago pianist Read Gainsford carried off Television New Zealand's Young Musician of the Year award. After furthering his studies on both sides of the Atlantic, he opted to make the United States his home and is now on the faculty of Florida State University in Tallahassee, in a music school that boasts 1200 music students, with a third of these in the graduate school.
For all the years spent stateside, Gainsford still finds New Zealanders more outward-looking than the insular Americans. "Perhaps it's that we are always wondering what the real world is like, being so far away from everyone else. We feel more of an inner compulsion to get involved with everything we see around us."
Gainsford has been more involved with the Auckland scene this year, delivering a tremendous John Psathas Piano Concerto with the Auckland Chamber Orchestra last month and returning this week for two concerts: a solo recital titled Music from Four Centuries and an ensemble outing, Music from 4 Corners.
Liszt's rarely-heard Second Ballade stands out on tomorrow night's recital programme. "It's in the same key as Liszt's well-known Sonata," says Gainsford, "and has some terrific heaven-storming rhetoric and a wonderful romantic sense of narrative."
Based on the legend of Hero and Leander, it reaches its dramatic high when Hero is drowned while swimming across the Hellespont to be with his lover. "But being a mythological tale, Hero's immediately transformed into a constellation."
One way or another, heavenly issues are high priorities for this man. Zen texts are prominent on his desert island reading list and Gainsford admits that eastern religion deeply informs his attitude to life.
"Zen is about being in the moment. One of the things that causes the most performance anxiety for musicians is not being present in the moment. You find you are worried about what someone has said in the past or what might be said in the future."
He can relate these theories to the Bach Partita that opens the concert. "Bach almost goes beyond time in the stylised dances of this Partita," Gainsford explains. "It's almost a religious thing, whether you see it within a theological framework or just treat it as free spirituality."
When it comes to finding contemporary material, Gainsford feels that "with so many composers available, you go either for the big names or for people you know".
Composer Mark Wingate, a colleague at FSU, places Gainsford behind a piano and a laptop tomorrow night.
"The laptop takes care of itself," explains Gainsford, "because it is there to keep me co-ordinated with the sounds being electronically transformed from the piano."
Completing the evening is the fourth book of Albeniz's Iberia. "It's Spanish music anyone can identify with - technicolour passion from a culture where everything is a matter of life and death."
Four nights later, Gainsford returns to the University Music Theatre with flautist Luca Manghi and bassoonist Ben Hoadley, with a collection of music from Beethoven to Villa-Lobos to a new commission from Eve de Castro-Robinson.
With Manghi and Gainsford tackling an extremely listener-friendly Sonata by Lowell Lieberman, I ask the pianist how he feels about the American impulse to write music that positively strives to make a connection with its audience.
"I think it's a good thing. It has a heart-on-the-sleeve quality we need when our lives are so complicated and we are so busy worrying about retirement and exchange rates. The need to experience full-on emotion is more relevant than it has been for some time. We need to communicate rather than set up little Da Vinci Code problems to solve."
IN CONCERT
What: Music from Four Centuries.
Where and when: Auckland University Music Theatre, 6 Symonds St, tomorrow at 5pm.
What: Music from 4 Corners.
Where and when: Auckland University Music Theatre, Wednesday Oct 22 at 8pm.
