Dr. Ozzie Johnson Playing Piano Recital on Oct. 4
The music department at Valley City State University is pleased to host faculty member Dr. Ozzie Johnson playing a solo piano recital in the Larry J. Robinson Center for the Arts. The performance is set for 7 p.m., on Friday, Oct. 4, in the Performance Hall of the CFA.
Dr. Johnson is in his third year at VCSU, where he teaches applied piano, class piano, music theory, and coordinates collaborative piano duties. In addition to these duties, Dr. Johnson has a deep interest in composition and music theory. His culminating doctoral project was a multi-movement work for piano entitled Bigger Than Us, which he composed and recorded in Sursa Hall in Muncie, Indiana. Dr. Johnson is highly active within the piano community in North Dakota. He is a member of NDMTA and NDFMC, and he currently serves as the NDMTA State Competition Chair and president of the Valley City MTA chapter. Dr. Johnson received a DA in Piano Performance from Ball State University and holds a MM in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from Ohio University, as well as a BM in Piano Performance from Wheaton College.
Dr. Johnson’s program features music by Schumann, Grieg, Chopin, and Kapustin. He built the program around two major works: Chopin’s first Ballade and Grieg’s Holberg Suite. The first set features a short piece from Schumann’s Morning Songs that works as a perfect prelude before the exciting launch of the Praeludium that starts the Holberg Suite. This wonderful work by Grieg contains five movements, each modeled after a dance style from the Baroque period.
Following this first set are two great piano compositions by Chopin: his Nocturne in C Minor and the aforementioned first Ballade. After the cataclysmic ending of the Ballade, the third set fittingly features three delicate gems that flow seamlessly together. The first piece is from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood, entitled Of Foreign Lands and People, and it is followed by Grieg’s Arietta, which several people in the audience may have played in their own past piano lessons. The final piece of the third set is Schumann’s Arabeske, the ending of which is simple, breathless beauty.
The final set is really just a single piece, Variations on a Theme by Stravinsky by the late Ukrainian jazz pianist and composer Nikolai Kapustin. Being a variation set, it features many popular jazz styles and ends with a bombastic coda that is a fitting end to just about any program.
Dr. Johnson is eager to share this wonderful program with the region and hopes you will consider attending, Friday, Oct. 4, at 7 p.m.