Pianist Carter Johnson said that last summer’s Gina Bachauer International Artists Competition was one of the most fun he has had in his experiences in the world of piano competitions. While he took the silver medal in the event, the real reason for having so much in Salt Lake City was different.
”My wife and two kids were able to come to SLC for this one and stay with me at the home of my host family,” Johnson said in an interview with The Utah Review. Traveling to international piano competitions often can be expensive and one feels alone either spending most of their time alone in a hotel room or practicing.
Meanwhile. Bachauer competitors are hosted by families in the Salt Lake City metro area and in a stroke of luck, Johnson learned from his hosts — Linda and Rob Etherington — that the other competitor they had been slated to stay at their home had dropped out of the competition. “I had been spending so much time away from my family that I tentatively asked them if they would not mind my wife and kids being able to come along,” he said. “I certainly did not want to be presumptuous but they were more than happy to have them and everyone had a wonderful time with their kids and grandkids.” This week, Johnson is returning to SLC for his recital and he again is staying with the Etheringtons, who had asked him if his wife, Hannah, and the boys, Preston and Ambrose, would be joining him (they are staying home in Connecticut, this time).
Johnson will be the guest artist for the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation‘s Nov. 15 concert (7:30 p.m., Jeanné Wagner Theatre in the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts), where he will perform works by the Four B’s: Brahms, Bartók, Beethoven and Grażyna Bacewicz, a 20th century Polish composer and violinist, who died in 1969 and whose work is enjoying a nice resurgence.
As silver medalist, Johnson received $25,000, a commemorative silver medal, concerto engagement with the Utah Symphony and other items. He also won a $1,500 cash prize for the best performance of the commissioned work for the competition, Two Andean Portraits by Gabriela Lena Frank, which each of the 12 semi-finalists performed.
The small bonus prize surprised Johnson. A month before the Bachauer competition, Johnson, who is Canadian, competed in Montreal where he performed for the semifinal round that competition’s commissioned work, Barbara Assiginaak’s Mzizaakok Miiniwaa Mzizaakoonsak (Horseflies and Deerflies). “I admit that I did not put my best effort in the commissioned piece for Montreal,” he explained, adding that his school schedule at the the time was so packed that he did not have time to memorize the piece. Prior to coming to Salt Lake City for the competition, he made good on his pledge to memorize Frank’s piece. “It was not hard to memorize but doing so forced me to reckon with the music in a more personal way,” Johnson explained.
For the concerto round for the three finalists, who were accompanied by the Utah Symphony, Johnson performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat Major, K. 482 on the first evening. which, according to The Utah Review, “was like the perfect weather for the summer evening here in Salt Lake City. His cadenzas for the first and third movements were well crafted. His passage work was clean with lovely lilts and lifts throughout.“
In the final round, Johnson rolled a daunting challenge, performing Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, for the first time in public. It was a stressful choice and Johnson had a memory lapse earlier that day in the symphony rehearsal, adding it was “something that has never happened before.” This particular Prokofiev concerto is considered on par in technical difficulty with Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. Nevertheless, not to be undone by Youl Sun’s magnificent performance of another Prokofiev concerto (No. 3) which earned the Korean pianist the gold medal, Johnson made the grade for the silver with a solid performance in the Second Piano Concerto, particularly in the work’s inner two movements: the Scherzo and Intermezzo.
For this week’s program, Johnson said he selected music that he is working on and did not want to reprise anything that he performed during the competition last summer. The idea of the four B’s was happenstance and it was Bachauer staff that tagged the proposed program as such. Quick to clarify that he intended no disrespect to Bach, normally an obvious choice to be part of the great B’s, he wanted selections to be as fresh as possible, especially in highlighting piano works that are lesser known to audiences.
In tandem with winning first prize in the 2021 International Competition of Polish Music, Johnson has become an artistic ambassador for works by lesser-known Polish composers of the past and present. One of them is Grażyna Bacewicz, a composer and violinist who died in 1969. In fact, this is the second time in a month that a Salt Lake City audience will hear a piece from the composer, whose body of work is enjoying a renaissance (in October, NOVA Chamber Music Series presented her first piano quintet).
Johnson will perform Bacewicz’s Sonata No. 2 (1953), which fits nicely with the remaining composers represented on his program. This sonata offers a neo-romantic nod to Brahms and Beethoven and another to the visceral sonic oomph of Bartók‘s music. The first movement evokes the clearest references to Beethoven but also nearly as many to Prokofiev, a contemporary of hers. The second movement of the sonata, in fact, starts similarly as the slow movement in her first piano quintet, which she had completed a year earlier. The third movement, a rondo labeled as a Toccata, moves into sonic territory evoking comparisons to Bartók‘s harmonic language and aesthetics.
Johnson will open with Brahms’ 8 Klavierstücke, op. 76, a work from the composer that is not played as extensively as the later piano works (Op. 116-119). Johnson said this will be his first concert performance of this piece, having played it previously in January for a recital to fulfill his degree requirements at Yale University, where he is a doctor of musical arts degree candidate and is studying with Wei-Yi Yang. In the same vein, Johnson will also play Beethoven’s Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, op. 27, no. 1, a piece not seen as frequently on recital programs as the composer’s later opuses for keyboard.
He will play Bartók’s only sonata for piano (Sz. 80), in which Andrew Rangell, a pianist, has described the opening movement as “dominated by machine-like energy, percussive, propulsive, filled with irregular phrases and brutal punctuations,” along with a second movement that opens “with a frozen, grief-stricken theme.” The final movement’s theme and variations opens with, according to Rangell, “an unequivocal burst of folk dance,” and “capricious shifts of tempo.”
Johnson said he is eyeing the Bartok piece for future competition material. “It can be a scramble because it is so treacherous but I also am inspired by Bartók’s beauty in highlighting raw folk music without needing to make it sound too pretty or elegant,” he added. Incidentally, Johnson‘s competition record has been excellent. In addition to Bachauer’s silver medal, he also won first prizes in the 2023 Concours Hauts-de-France, the 2021 International Competition of Polish Music, the 2020 Valsesia International Competition and the 2023 Weatherford College International Competition.
For tickets and more information, see the Bachauer website.