William Wolfram

William Wolfram is an American pianist who appears with orchestras across the US, taking on large-scale romantic and twentieth-century concertos. He returns to Buffalo to perform Liszt's First Piano Concerto, a piece built for a soloist with power and flair.

Wolfram is coming to Buffalo with Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1, a compact, three-movement showpiece that opens with a famous unison blast from the orchestra answered by cascading piano octaves. Listeners can expect big, declamatory statements from the soloist alternating with lighter, almost improvisatory passages, including a triangle-accompanied scherzo section that Liszt himself had to defend against critics who found it frivolous. The piece rewards a pianist who can pivot quickly between thunder and delicacy, and who treats the orchestra as a sparring partner rather than a backdrop. The same concerts pair the concerto with Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony and a world premiere marking WNED's 50th anniversary, so the evening moves from a nineteenth-century virtuoso showpiece into harder-edged twentieth-century orchestral writing.