Artist Residency Event
The Art of Bach
The Art of Fugue
The Art of Democracy
Starting at 4pm | The Big Barn, Putney VT | Free admission
With pianists Albert Cano Smit and Mikael Darmanie
On Election Day 2024, Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue becomes a musical affirmation of democracy. Bach's contrapuntal masterpiece will be performed in its entirety by Albert Cano Smit, with responses and anticipations improvised by Mikael Darmanie.
4pm—Pre-concert introduction
4:30-7:30pm—Performance in 50-minute intervals to allow audience members to arrive and depart as desired
The evening will conclude with an informal discussion with Albert and Mikael hosted by Artistic Director Seth Knopp.
Presented by Yellow Barn in partnership with the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation
About the Artists
Notable engagements include appearances with the San Diego, Seattle, Barcelona, Albany, and Montreal Symphonies, and Las Vegas and Rochester Philharmonics. He has given recital and chamber performances across the United States at the Kennedy Center, Merkin Concert Hall, Steinway Society–The Bay Area, Bravo! Vail Festival; in France at the Wissembourg Festival and Fondation Louis Vuitton; at Germany’s Rheingau Music Festival; in Xiamen, China; and throughout Spain.
Born in Geneva, the son of a Dutch mother and Spanish father who settled in Catalonia, he left home at 9 to join the Escolania de Montserrat choir school. His serious piano studies took him to the Colburn School and to Juilliard, where he finished his artist diploma in May 2022, under the tutelage of Robert McDonald. He was awarded Juilliard’s prestigious Arthur Rubinstein Piano Prize in 2020 and is currently Iva Dee Hiatt Visiting Artist in Piano and Lecturer in Music at Smith College.
Mikael Darmanie has performed throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Russia, and the Caribbean in appearances at The Weill Institute at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Rachmaninov Hall at The Moscow Conservatory, The Bang on a Can Marathon, Close Encounters With Music in the Berkshires, The Cape Cod Symphony, Portland Bach Virtuosi, Mainly Mozart Festival, The Rising Star Piano Series in Southampton, Royal Northern College of Music, and The Emerald City Music Festival.
Mikael is the keyboardist and DJ, and a composer and arranger for the band Warp Trio. The Trio has performed throughout the world in genres ranging from jazz to hip-hop, rock, contemporary classical, bluegrass, fusion, and electronic dance music, most recently in Spain at the International Experimental Music Meeting, and at the Marché des Arts du Spectacle d'Abidjan in the Ivory Coast.
He is currently finishing his Doctorate at Stony Brook University under the mentorship of Gilbert Kalish. Other primary teachers have included Awadagin Pratt, Ray Anderson in Jazz, Arthur Haas on the Harpsichord, and Timothy Long in Conducting.