The vital role of PPI’s artistic curator
Dear friends of PPI,
Do you like poetry? I have to confess that a “no” to this question (despite the fact that I dearly love a significant number of poetry apathists) baffles me, and that I’ve never been quite as thrilled by a Big Media initiative as when the New York Times, in April 2025, launched their annual “Poetry Challenge”. Whether it’s the lyrics to Beatles songs, the pithy philosophy of Robert Frost, or indelible snippets of childhood verse that pop into one’s memory willy-nilly – I want to believe that we are all touched by various types of poetry, and agree that there’s a vast difference between a clear, concise and completely dull everyday observation (“This morning, I saw a crowd on the train”) and a poetic enrichment of that same experience (Ezra Pound’s “In a station of the metro” – read and listen here). The first presents a fact. The second produces a feeling. (Don’t we all yearn for fewer facts and more feelings?)
The exact same applies to the solo piano experience and constitutes the backbone of what we at PPI believe to be the primary task of our guest Artistic Curator: finding the poetry. Technically excellent pianists are not exactly in short supply. The “Lang Lang Effect” has been reverberating through the piano world for well over a decade – and although a precise global census doesn’t exist, there are currently between 60,000 and 100,000 advanced pianists studying at the tertiary level worldwide. Historians, musicologists and performers generally agree that the average technical baseline of modern conservatory graduates easily rivals – and often exceeds – the technique of elite performers from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Finding “good” pianists to perform technically flawless solo piano recitals is definitely not the challenge. But finding ones that make our flesh tingle, our hearts race and our souls expand? That’s where PPI is lucky beyond words to have the wisdom, expertise and phenomenally discerning ear of Boris Giltburg!
Although the semantic difference between the titles “artistic director” and “artistic curator” is slight, the shift in nuance, to us, is vital. A good director can identify and set a trajectory, but it takes a skilled curator (like Boris!) to populate that path with very particular talents. (Or, to use the poetry metaphor: A director writes the prose paragraph, but a curator turns it into memorable and meaningful verse.)
What does this mean for PPI’s upcoming season? What, you may still wonder, makes our pianists particularly “poetic”? They certainly don’t all sound alike, nor do they all play exclusively lyrical or romantic repertory. Their tones are not necessarily soft and dreamy. What they all share, though, is a sense of imagination and inspiration, distinct personality, unique emotive power and that impossible-to-define charm that elevates their music-making from the brilliant but prosaic to the inexplicably but breathtakingly poetic.
You can hear Boris talk about his role (and his love for Oregon) in this exclusive clip on PPI’s YouTube channel.
Do you love poetry? You certainly don’t have to – but I still bet you’ll love feeling the poetry of the piano PPI is bringing to you this season!