Daniela Liebman was 11, maybe 12, when it began to make sense. She had moved to Texas, where she was studying piano with Tamás Ungár. She was practicing the opening of a Mendelssohn piece on a little upright piano, trying to understand what a festival teacher was explaining, when suddenly she did.
Describing that moment now, she sounds awed. “I’d had this idea that when you play a note, there’s nothing else you can do–that you can’t manipulate it any longer. But the note’s still growing and decaying. It almost becomes a creature of its own, independent of you. If I really tuned into it, I could pick up a note, as it was decaying, with a second note. It would sound like part of the same breath. No wonder people liked this!”
She was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, daughter to a Mexican mother and American father. At a very young age, she began to study the rudiments of ballet, piano, and chess. She began to play chess competitively, but discovered she didn’t enjoy it. “Piano was probably what I had the most natural talent at,” she said. “Not that I was very good at that, either. It was like 2% more than the other two.”
She debuted with the Aguascalientes Symphony at age 8, before she knew enough–or cared enough–to be nervous. “I remember not being nervous at all. It felt like it was time to go to the playground. Which is crazy looking back! But there wasn’t an ounce of nervousness.” Having musicians in the family
helped; her grandmother’s a pianist and her father plays violin.
Nerves would come later, after her epiphany at age 11 or 12. “I learned about color in music, and form, and sound, and how you can manipulate sound to create peaks…it just blew my mind. All of a sudden, this third plane of existence came into view.” Now there was a reason to be nervous, she realized. Now, there were stakes. Sometimes, she’d become physically ill before a show. But that didn’t stop her from playing.
She continued to study. “I’m constantly listening to music,” she said. A huge part of life as a musician is hearing others play, something she’s grown to enjoy more and more in recent years, and something she views as anything but passive. “It takes a certain level of concentration to be present for someone. It’s a heavy thing.”
At 21, she has played with more than 30 orchestras, and on four continents. She’s released an acclaimed album of music by Schubert, Chopin, and Ponce. She’s been profiled on Amy Poehler’s “Smart Girls” organization and has been featured in Vanity Fair and GC Mexico. Forbes Mexico named her one of the country’s 100 most creative and powerful women. On Sunday, May 11th, she will play Kalamazoo’s Wellspring Theater as part of the Gilmore’s 2024-2025 season. The Gilmore has named her one of this season’s Rising Stars.
The program will include music by Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Berg, and others.The Rachmaninoff piece (“Lilacs” from 12 Romances, Op. 21, No. 5) is particularly personal. “I grew up with a very traditional diet of Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart.” She didn’t have as much opportunity to explore Rachmaninoff as she wanted. “The first thing I did when I had the freedom to choose was to program him.”
She’ll also be playing Carassco’s “Mazurkas,” Nos. 4 and 7. Similar in length to the Rachmaninoff, they have sonic similarities, as well. “Something about Mexico and Russia connects really well.” Berg’s Sonata Op. 1 she describes as a “wild ride.” “It feels deeply familiar and deeply unfamiliar at the same time. I’ve fallen so in love with it!”
When describing Beethoven’s Sonata in G Major Op. 31, No. 1, another piece she’ll be playing, she uses a term not often associated with classical music: funny. “It’s so funny! It’s unapologetically funny. It’s youthful, too.”
Schubert’s Allegretto in C Minor, D.915 is a tightrope. Simple and short–it’s about five minutes long–it opens the program. “It’s kind of dangerous. It’s so simple that if you don’t find the beauty in it and feel it during the moment, it comes across as extremely basic. There’s 1% of difference where if you cross this delicate, subtle line, it gets under your skin.”
After the program, Liebman will attend the afterparty, which she sees as an opportunity to further the connection with audience members she made onstage. “To play for a couple hundred strangers and just leave…that goes fundamentally against everything I’m trying to do with my music. Any musician at their core is trying to communicate.” To her, the social aspect is an extension: a further opportunity to share what she loves.
Asked what it is that makes the piano such a perfect instrument for solo music, she said that, at heart, the piano is an orchestra. “We can use so many different voices and textures. But it’s beyond that, too. There’s this moment sometimes when you see a pianist play, where they understand the instrument so well, and the music so well, that it doesn’t feel like they’re actually playing the piano. It’s not just a pattern of eighth notes or quarter notes. It comes out as gestures, or laughter, or a voice. Nothing else is missing. Everything is there.”
Daniela Liebman
The Gilmore
Wellspring Theater
May 11, 4 p.m.
thegilmore.org
