Poised, passionate launch of American Piano Awards with Avery Gagliano

Avery Gagliano got the Premiere Series of the 2025 American Piano Awards off to a robust start Sunday afternoon at the Indiana History Center.

Avery Gagliano now studies with Schiff.

She is the first of five finalists to be presented here in solo recitals plus a concerto performance, one each month through February. That will be followed by adjudicated chamber-music performances, then a finale featuring the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in April after which the top prize will be awarded.

After her Curtis Institute of Music training, the 23-year-old pianist from Washington, D.C., has just started studying with Sir Andras Schiff in Kronberg, Germany. Immediately with her program opener Sunday — J.S. Bach's  French Suite No. 4 in E-flat — some suggestions of Schiff's Bach style, the Bach-on-piano standard for me in recordings to counter the powerful Glenn Gould approach,  were apparent.

There was the suave legato displayed in the Allemande, then the vivid definition of the left-hand lines in the Gavotte and Air. Along the way, the Sarabande stood out for its mutually supporting establishment of mood and pace. Through the Suite's seven-movement course, I found only  the Courante a little cluttered in its final measures. She imparted brilliance to the concluding Gigue, with its "hunting-horn" figures. Clarity and tone were the hallmarks of her introduction to the Indianapolis audience.

There followed a display of lyricism for contrast, Chopin's Nocturne,  op. 55, no. 2, to carry forward a reminder of her highest professional distinction so far: first prize in the 2020 National Chopin Piano Competition. 

A piece she commissioned from a friend, Alistair Coleman's "Music in Timelapse," opened with short, assertive figures that were developed and varied in tempo and texture. The link to timelapse photography's "gradual processes unfolding rapidly" (her phrase) was freshly represented in the unique medium of sound that is the grand piano's. 

Fans of this competition probably felt they were on familiar ground with the work that  crowned the unaccompanied first half of the program: Nikolai Medtner's Sonata in A minor, op. 30. When I first got to know the artistry of Kenny Broberg, the 2021 competition winner, that was the piece he played here in June three-and-a-half years ago. Other Medtner works in the laureate's Indianapolis performances extended that acquaintance, the most recent just last January.

Gagliano hailed Medtner's claim to immortality by admitting that she finds the Russian composer's mastery of counterpoint comparable to J.S. Bach's. Medtner's op. 30 has that characteristically layered, linear design, somewhat compromised by the romantic textures and a bit of wool-gathering he shares with his countryman and near-contemporary, Sergei Rachmaninoff. 

But it's a compact survey of his individuality as a composer for piano. Impressive, stirring counterpoint, thoroughly engaged, comes through for me more definitively in the finale of Medtner's Sonata-Ballade, op. 27, but that is not the piece under review here. I bring that in mainly to acknowledge some justice in Gagliano's assertion about Medtner's contrapuntal knack.

Marjorie Hanna, ICO principal cellist

After intermission, following the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra's spirited account of Schubert's Overture in the Italian Style, it was a pleasure to become acquainted with Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 7, a little-known piece that glowed under Gagliano's advocacy.

Crisply conducted by Matthew Kraemer, the ICO shone in the demanding accompaniment, displaying the teen-age composer's precociousness. That quality later had to be subsumed under her performing skills, which were widely admired throughout her youth and long widowhood. 

Gagliano's advocacy was instructive and displayed full commitment to this composer's  underappreciated genius. Special mention must be made of the haunting second-movement partnership in this performance between Gagliano and ICO principal cellist Marjorie Hanna.

For encores, Gagliano offered idiomatic, vivid accounts of a Robert Schumann "Romance"and a Chopin mazurka.