Ruth Laredo - Concerts

Concerts

Ruth Laredo appeared on stage as a little girl in the Music Club of Metropolitan Detroit. When she was 11, she gave both her first recital in the Detroit Institute of Arts (among the pieces the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2, where her teacher Edward Bredshall played the orchestral part), and, under Karl Krueger, her first concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, with whom she played the second and third movements of the concerto.

She spent much of the first decade of her career as accompanist to her husband Jaime Laredo. At the same time she tried to establish herself as a soloist and in 1962 she made her orchestral debut in Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Unfortunately the debut attracted little attention, and it was some time before she became recognized as a solo performer.

She was a founding member of the Music from Marlboro Concerts and in 1965 participated in their first tour, which included a visit to Israel where she played Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto for three pianos in D minor with Rudolf and Peter Serkin. She appeared in the very first Music from Marlboro Concert, “Isaac Stern and Friends”, in Carnegie Hall in New York City.

Her solo career had a major boost in 1974, when she gave her debut in Avery Fisher Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center. Her performance of Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Pierre Boulez, was met with enthusiastic critical acclaim. In 1976 Young Concert Artists presented her solo recital debut in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center with pieces of Beethoven, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Ravel, whose “La Valse” would become her signature piece. Her encore in this concert was Gershwin's Second Piano Prelude. In 1981 she made her solo recital debut in Carnegie Hall with a program entitled “Homage to Rachmaninoff” which included works by Chopin, Beethoven and Scriabin.

In 1988 Laredo participated at the celebration of the 135th anniversary of the first Steinway piano, and the 500,000th piano manufactured by that company. The concert, hosted by Van Cliburn, featured 27 famed pianists including Alfred Brendel, Shura Cherkassky, Murray Perahia, Rudolf Serkin and Alexis Weissenberg. Laredo played Rachmaninoff's Prelude Op. 32, No. 5 and Coquette from Robert Schumann's Carnaval, Op. 9.

Besides New York City and Detroit, Laredo performed in Washington, D.C. (Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, 1966 in the White House together with her then-husband Jaime Laredo for President Lyndon B. Johnson), in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Indianapolis, Maryland, Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Toronto, at numerous festivals, among them the Amadeus Festival/Midsummer Nights Festival in New Jersey, the Aspen Music Festival and School in Aspen, Colorado, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival in Bridgehampton, New York, the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah, New York, the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Maverick Concerts Festival in Hurley, New York, the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in Detroit, the Music Mountain Summer Chamber Music Festival in Falls Village, Connecticut and the Casals Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She made tours in the season 1976/1977 to Europe (Netherlands, Germany) and Japan, and 1979 to Japan and Hong Kong. Particularly remarkable was her tour in 1989 to Russia (then RSFSR, Moscow, St. Petersburg ) and the Ukraine (then USSR, Odessa). For an American to come to Russia to play the music of Russian composers – in the same room of the Moscow Conservatory where Rachmaninoff had played – was an extraordinary undertaking. But Laredo enjoyed a very warm welcome by the audience and her concerts were sold-out. In the Glinka Museum in Moscow she had the opportunity to see Rachmaninoff's original manuscripts.

In addition to the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit and the American Symphony Orchestra, Ruth Laredo played among others with the Philadelphia, the Cleveland and the American Composers Orchestra, the Baltimore, Beaumont, Boston, Greenwich, Houston, Indianapolis, Jupiter, Madison, National, New Jersey, St. Louis and Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra, the Buffalo and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Kazimierz Kord, with whom in 1993 she performed in Warsaw in a United Nations Day Concert, which was broadcast by TV stations all around Europe, and then toured with the orchestra through the USA culminating in a concert in Carnegie Hall with Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1.

In the 1988/1989 season she began her series “Concerts with Commentary” (first called “Speaking of Music”) in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. The series ran for 17 seasons until the last concert on May 6, 2005, shortly before her death. The programs became very popular and therefore she performed them in other cities of the USA.

The series included works from Brahms, Chopin, Dvořák, Fauré, Franck, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Clara and Robert Schumann, Scriabin and Tchaikovsky, which she discussed before the performances with great engagement. The final concert was the third of a series entitled “The Russian Spirit” with music from Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Shostakovich.

On September 13, 2001, only two days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, Ruth Laredo celebrated the 25th anniversary of her debut in the Alice Tully Hall with a recital as the opening concert of Lincoln Center's 2001 season. Before the concert, she explained to the audience why she had not cancelled the event: “It was important for me to play. Great music gives us spiritual sustenance and gives us hope. It is in that spirit that I play tonight.” The program was similar to that of her debut in 1976 and included works by Robert Schumann, Beethoven, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Ravel, with Chopin's Waltz Op. 69, No. 1 as the encore.

In September 2004 Laredo was invited by the Russian ministry of culture to participate in the International Festival of the Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory. At this event, dedicated to the 200th birthday of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, she played chamber music as well as solo recitals and gave a master class for Russian students.

She was noted for her strong commitment to chamber music and said that soloists particularly need this experience as a preparation for concerts with big orchestras. “The lack of it is evident when a soloist performs as if the orchestra were a mere accompaniment,” Laredo said. She collaborated frequently with the Shanghai Quartet (regularly at the Music Mountain Festival), and among others with the American, Budapest, Emerson, Manhattan, Muir, St. Lawrence, St. Petersburg, Veronika and the Vermeer Quartet, with the Chappaqua, Manhattan Chamber, Orpheus Chamber and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, with the Philharmonia Virtuosi, the Sea Cliff Chamber Players and the Orchestra of St. Luke's. She appeared with the Guarneri Quartet and the Tokyo String Quartet in the Lincoln Center series Great Performers. She helped the Tokyo String Quartet several times when a member of the Quartet was indisposed transforming the group temporarily into a piano quartet. Since their first association in 1980 in Alice Tully Hall, she toured each season with the flutist Paula Robison as the “Paula and Ruth” duo.

Ruth Laredo also played contemporary music, mainly in the beginning of her career in Marlboro. This was something Pablo Casals – who did not like music beyond the era of Brahms – disapproved of. He would stay home when Leon Kirchner would come to Marlboro for a performance. In the 1983/1984 season she played the world premiere of Peter Martin's work called Waltzes with the New York City Ballet. In 1989 she played Wallingford Riegger's twelve-tone Variations for Piano and Orchestra at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra under Paul Lustig Dunkel. Her repertoire included also works by Franz Liszt, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Anton Webern and Alban Berg.

In 1994 Laredo played with jazz pianist Marian McPartland and from 1996 with her and Dick Hyman in programs entitled Three Piano Crossover.

In the last years of her life her career as a soloist with orchestras waned, but she was comfortable with a mix of recitals and chamber concerts.

Laredo criticized the rising trend in the US of recording live concerts for broadcast as “troublesome”. She preferred the European method of recording the music in radio studios for subsequent broadcast.