- Pianist Paul Roberts appears this week
at Portland International Piano Festival.
British pianist, author, and teacher Paul Roberts is back in Portland this week for the 14th annual Portland International Piano Festival, where he’s giving a lecture, “Debussy, Ravel and Literature,” on Friday morning. Roberts is also celebrating the recent publication of Reflections: The Piano Music of Maurice Ravel, the companion volume to Images, his singular book on the cultural background of Claude Debussy’s piano music.
A frequent visitor to Portland, and a festival favorite, Roberts is brilliantly engaging and entertaining as a speaker and performer. In February, just before his most recent Portland recital, Portland writer David Abel spoke with Roberts for Oregon ArtsWatch. In this two-part podcast, Roberts discusses his Portland connections (including music legends Gilbert Seeley and Harold Gray), his interdisciplinary interests and background (including literature and theater), and his approach — as a pianist and a teacher — to the challenges of interpretation in performance.
We’ve also included several tracks from Roberts’s acclaimed recording of Debussy’s Preludes.
General Lavine – Excentric (Original English Title)
La Puerta Del Vino (The Gate Of Wine)
David Abel is a poet, editor, bookseller, and curator. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series and the artists’ collective 13 Hats, he has organized and performed in interdisciplinary projects in Portland for the past dozen years.
David Abel & Paul Roberts