For music Professor Walter Ponce, a piano recital is a lot like
a party. And like any exclusive party, the guest list is short and
limited to a few old friends: Crumb, Mussorgsky and Beethoven.
Ponce, the head of the Piano Area at UCLA, will be playing
select pieces by each of these well-known composers at his solo
recital on May 3.
“I’ve played all these works before,” said
Ponce. “Sometimes I play lot of new things, but in this case,
all these things are revisiting old friends.”
Ponce stays in touch with his “friends”; his copy of
Mussorgsky’s “Pictures At An Exhibition” is so
well-worn that he had to acquire a new score for the 30-minute
piece.
In the solo piano tradition, Ponce will be performing all the
pieces from memory. This will be Ponce’s first solo recital
at UCLA in several years, so his students’ expectations will
be riding high.
“Sometimes there’s a little bit of pressure because
your students are going to listen, and you spend so much time
telling them what to do and then you don’t want to be the
example of what not to do,” said Ponce.
But the professor is a dedicated performer. Having arrived at
UCLA in 1996 at a time when there were no chamber music
performances to be seen, he organized the music department’s
faculty to play chamber music several times a year. When asked
about his work on the Chamber Music at UCLA series, Ponce humbly
deferred the credit to his fellow professors.
“(There) was a common consensus that we should have that
because we have so many outstanding artists,” Ponce said.
Ponce brings a long career of teaching to UCLA as well.
Throughout his life, even as far back as his own time as a student
at the Mannes College of Music and the famed Juilliard School of
Music, he has been both teacher and performer.
He spent 24 years teaching at the State University of New York
at Binghamton before he was lured to California.
“A lot of the creativity is now stronger, (there’s)
more energy on the West Coast,” Ponce said.
Much of this energy springs from UCLA’s world-class
faculty, but it also streams from the eager students who show no
signs of decreasing in number. In spite of a lesser interest in
classical music in today’s world, there are as many music
students as ever clamoring for a place under the tutelage of
someone like Ponce, who works one-on-one with both undergraduate
and graduate piano students. For those who want to pursue music, he
has one piece of advice.
“People ask me, when did I decide to become a
pianist?” Ponce said. “I never made that decision. The
best decision is when you don’t have to make a decision
““ when it’s just “˜of course!’ The only way
to be a professional musician is when you have a choice, I’ll
be a professional musician, or I’ll be a professional
musician. There is no other thought.”