Alan Feinberg doesn’t like to be labeled. But for a while now, he’s been gaining wide recognition as an avid and brilliant interpreter of American piano literature.
It doesn’t help, of course, that Feinberg’s debut solo CD (on Argo), which won a Grammy nomination two years ago, is titled “The American Romantic.” On the album, he plays with skill and poetry neglected pieces by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69), Amy Beach (1867-1944) and contemporary composer Robert Helps. The kudos it received helped launch Feinberg’s recital career. He has since recorded two companion discs, furthering his championship of noteworthy American originals.
These days, in addition to a hectic schedule performing with orchestras here and abroad, the 42-year-old New Yorker is touring the country in “Discover America!” a recital series surveying two centuries of American keyboard music.
On Sunday, he will make his first Orchestra Hall appearance, in a bountiful program featuring works of Gottschalk, Beach, Edward MacDowell and Shulamit Ran, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence.
“I don’t want to be pidgeonholed,” Feinberg insists with regard to his “Discover America!” tour. “Before this phase, I was known as Mr. New Music, even though Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin have been part of my repertoire all along.”
For most of the ’70s and ’80s, Feinberg toiled prominently in the ghetto of contemporary compositions. Among more than 200 premieres he gave were key statements by the likes of Milton Babbitt, John Adams, Steve Reich and Charles Wourinen.
“I didn’t mind that much, of course,” he says. “I got to know a lot of composers personally, how they try to come up with interesting ways of expression. I learned to communicate with the audience. With a new piece, you have to find your own voice in it and make it speak. When I play a piece, I don’t feel like putting people through school.”
A refreshingly unorthodox and intelligent musician, Feinberg has pursued his piano career almost haphazardly. He attended the Juilliard School of Music in the early ’70s, where many of his classmates were prodigies bent on becoming stars.
“I was awed by them,” he recalls. “I certainly didn’t have the drive. I was just interested in music.” He entered no competitions and shied away from big-name mentors. Composer Helps, who was teaching at the Juilliard then, steered him to piano and contemporary music.
After graduating, Feinberg chose the more arduous and uncertain route of free-lancing. “I wasn’t ready for the recital circuit,” he says. “So I played in all kinds of venues: cabarets, movie theaters for silent films, operas-you name it.
“At the same time, I offered to premiere new works considered `weird’ by my classmates. After a couple of years, I got a reputation.”
Fairly soon, critics, too, began taking notice, one reviewer placing Feinberg in the distinguished company of Alfred Brendel and Maurizio Pollini. “That’s when I realized I need an agent, a manager and the whole shebang.”
Feinberg credits his unconventional background and outlook with his success in reaching an audience. “The recital market has been going down because listeners would rather stay home listening to CDs. Most performers today don’t really care if the audience has a good time.
“They interpret the same old pieces in the same old tiresome way. The artistic authority is missing. That’s why our musical culture is freeze-dried, impersonal. Music should be discussed.
“When people look at a program such as `The American Romantic,’ they may say the pieces don’t go together. But there’s a structure. It’s my job to convince them of that and to provide roller-coaster ride.”
Feinberg’s latest CD bears the title “The American Virtuoso.” The selections are mostly by composers from the turn of the century, the era of great, flamboyant pianists such as Busoni and Rachmaninoff.
“All of them were in the business of making a living, so they had to please an audience,” Feinberg says. “Their taste was astonishingly broad. They played operatic paraphrases or variations, dance music, folk songs. The simple pieces were put over so movingly that for a moment the audience felt it had touched what the artist was all about. That’s what I hope to achieve.”
