Pianist Michelle Cann is a teacher. Instead of standing in front of a whiteboard, however, she sits at a piano, her program injecting a bit of education into each recital she plays.
Cann views her programs as a chance to point audiences toward lesser-known composers, drawing out parallels between new works and chestnuts through concerts that span a wide range of repertoire.
She’ll bring that spirit to Spivey Hall on Nov. 10, playing a solo recital of Chopin, Ginastera and Liszt alongside “My Dungeon Shook: Three American Preludes,” a 2020 work by Atlanta-bred composer Joel Thompson, and Florence Price’s E minor sonata.
Cann has become somewhat of a go-to Price interpreter, recording three albums of the composer’s work. Her most recent is a debut solo recording, “Revival,” that pairs the music of Price with composer Margaret Bonds. In 2022, Cann played on recordings of Price’s “Quintet in A Minor for Piano and Strings” with the Catalyst Quartet and the composer’s “Piano Concerto in One Movement” with the New York Youth Symphony.
“I’m really trying to take you on a journey from old to more or less brand new,” Cann said of her Spivey Hall debut. She is no stranger to Atlanta, though; Cann played Price’s one-movement concerto with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2022, and she brought Rachmaninoff to Symphony Hall in 2023. (Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price herself was briefly an Atlantan, serving as head of the music department at the precursor to Clark Atlanta University in 1910.)
Photo by Steven Mareazi Willis
Photo by Steven Mareazi Willis
“I definitely still enjoy bringing great, traditional piano music to my recitals,” Cann added, “but you’ll hardly ever see a program that does not then include composers of today or something I’m educating you on.”
Cann is very deliberate about her recital programming, making sure the order of compositions takes listeners on a journey while relaying the energy inherent in the music. All the compositions planned for her Spivey Hall performance are, to different degrees, grand and big, she said, except for the more reflective “My Dungeon Shook,” which has a presence all its own.
She strives to approach more well-known pieces on her programs from a fresh perspective. After her concerts, listeners occasionally will tell her, “I’ve never heard it this way before.”
“That means I did something right,”the pianist said. “That’s the whole point of live music … interpreting it in a fresh way. It feels new even though it’s not new.”
Cann’s philosophy echoes what Katherine Lehman, Spivey Hall’s executive and artistic director, is working to establish at the Clayton State University venue. To some extent, this means Lehman must work outside a communal musical comfort zone, choosing artists and repertoire that might challenge audiences — or at least show them something new.
“I think it’s very important that we always feel that bit of unsettledness that makes us think, ‘What should we be doing next?’ not ‘How can we bask in what we already do?’” Lehman said.
When planning a Spivey Hall season, Lehman strives to balance what has worked well in the past with programming that honors and reflects “where we are at this particular moment.” That includes incorporating a wider range of composers along with artists who might look at music from a different perspective. Lehman said Cann is an important part of this approach because she is playing works that mix “things that we do know and things that we should know and things that we don’t know at all.”
Lehman is particularly excited about hearing Cann’s interpretation of Thompson’s “My Dungeon Shook.” The Spivey leader said the piece “challenges us to think differently, both about classical music and about some of our most sacred ideas.” The Spivey Hall audience will get a chance to compare the work with a world-premiere Thompson composition when mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton visits the venue in January.
For Cann, the Price piece on the Spivey program stands out because it’s a relatively recent musical discovery in sonata form — the same structure utilized by composers such as Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.
But she also knows audiences want most of all to be entertained.
“As a listener, I really enjoy having something that is familiar and that I look forward to,” she said. “And for me, there’s an excitement of being like, I already know this piece, now I’m really excited to see what you do with it.”
CONCERT PREVIEW
Michelle Cann, solo piano
3 p.m. Nov. 10 at Spivey Hall. $35-$65. 2000 Clayton State Blvd., Morrow. 678-466-4200, spiveyhall.org
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