Partners in music, partners in life: Meet Athens’ Itamar Zorman and Liza Stepanova

Caption

Itamar Zorman (left) and pianist Liza Stepanova play their respective instruments during a performance.

Credit: Courtesy of Itamar Zorman and Liza Stepanova

They’re an international pair who have become Americans and put down roots in Georgia. Pianist Liza Stepanova moved from Belarus to Berlin and then to the States. Violinist Itamar Zorman studied in Israel and Germany before landing in New York, where the two met in school. He won top prize at the 2011 International Tchaikovsky Competition; she is in her tenth year teaching at the University of Georgia. In addition to their individual careers and their juggling act as parents, they perform together as two-thirds of the Lysander Piano Trio.

This month on Front Row Georgia, GPB is sampling some of Zorman’s and Stepanova’s commercially released albums: his (Portrait, Evocation, Violin Odyssey), hers (Tones & Colors, E Pluribus Unum) and theirs (After a Dream, Mirrors). 

The two artists recently spoke with host Sarah Zaslaw from their home in Athens about their lives with music and each other.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

Edited for length and clarity.

Liza Stepanova on which came first, the relationship or the trio

The relationship. We were graduate students at Juilliard when both the relationship and the trio started. I was in a few very nice but fickle chamber groups that didn’t seem to have any longevity. And then at some point it made sense: "Well, I have a partner in life and maybe he’ll stick around." So we started playing together.  

Itamar Zorman on the challenges of overlapping work and personal lives

The logistics of touring musician don’t quite work well with the needs of a young family. And also, musicmaking is so personal. It’s very hard to detach from whatever is going on in our personal lives, and our personal lives are intertwined, and then when we make music together, it spills over there. So it makes it interesting. But it’s also wonderful.  

Liza on the Lysander Piano Trio’s album Mirrors

Right around COVID, we realized that we had finally commissioned and premiered enough pieces to make a whole album of works that are associated with us since their inception. So this is a collection of those works. The title track is Black Mirror [see video] by a graduate school friend of ours, Jakub Ciupinski. It’s a really moody, beautiful, slow-burn piece that is about a photography technique of photographing something through a darkened lens.    

Liza on teaching at UGA

The vast majority of my work is teaching private piano students. I occasionally teach a graduate piano-literature class. I also coach quite a bit of chamber music and I was also one of the founding administrators of Chamber Music Athens.

At UGA, I have very hardworking students. All my students have always brought a very good attitude to their lessons. What that means is that if I tell them something and it’s not working, it’s my fault. So you learn through trial and error: “Okay. I told you to do this. You practiced. That didn’t really work. I’ve got to do something differently.” Now, in my 10th year of teaching, I think I have a few tricks up my sleeve.  

I taught one elective called Programming with a Purpose. It’s basically how to use repertoire and choices of what to play, or how do you inspire the creation of new music, that aligns with whatever your values are and connects your big concerns with your art making. I also talk about this a lot in my personal mentoring of my students. We talk about how art can reflect the world and people and so many things and how they can incorporate that into their careers.

Itamar on teaching

I was fortunate one semester to teach at Indiana University for one of my mentors, Mauricio Fuks. He was on a medical leave and so I was teaching his studio, but he was still around. Whenever I came to teach, afterwards I would come to his house and over a meal we would go over the work with the students, and it was very interesting for me to hear someone who is now in his 80s, who has taught for so many decades and has experience with different levels — and also how he looks at the student also as a person, so, why a certain approach might work better with a student of a certain personality or a certain background.

On their 6-year-old daughter’s piano lessons

Itamar: Sometimes I sit in her lessons and I learn a lot. It’s funny how in kids you see the same things that you see in adults, maybe in a more extrovert way, but I find that some of the tricks that work on a 6-year-old might work on a college student, too.  

Liza: She studies with my colleague Grace Huang. It’s very interesting, this multifaceted approach and just how early she starts working on everything—foundation of technique, foundation of artistry also. It’s not just, “Okay, the first five years, we’re just going to learn notes and then the difficult concepts come in.” And our kid’s thriving. She’s very, very musical. She sings and she composes. She’s always kept the music pouring out of her. So we thought piano would be a good instrument, because it could support her musical pursuits even if she doesn’t become a pianist.

On their 3-year-old son’s musical interests

Liza: Percussion at the moment.

Itamar: Yes, although he also likes to approach the piano and, you know, “play” the theme from Star Wars and things like that. Very approximately.  

Itamar on choosing violin himself

I loved the sound of violin, since I can remember. The family story says that I wanted to play something that neither my dad and my mom play. The idea was that they wouldn’t be able to tell me what to do, which actually turned out to be a wise decision. It allowed me some independence while still being able to rely on their experience and life in music. For years I dreamt of being a basketball player, and I was actually on a team for a few years. Back then, I was one of the always one of the shortest in class; that all changed a little too late. I think when I was 14, that’s when I started to practice violin on my own accord and pleasure.

Itamar on his Tchaikovsky Competition experience

I definitely did not expect to win. I would not listen to any of the other competitors. I didn’t find it helpful in any way, and behind closed doors everyone sounds great. So I was just focusing on my own playing. It was very long. It was five live rounds. I just remember being very, very tired at the end. I fell asleep in the airport on the way back.  

It definitely did change my life. That competition was particularly public. It was one of the first ones to have been broadcast very widely. People were following from around the world, and they brought rather renowned jury members, performers. So, lots of contacts. And in the music world, contacts is really key. I met lots of people, lots of people heard me in the competition and then got in touch with me.

Liza on her early years

I was born in Minsk. Part of my family’s Russian, from a deep part of Russia, from small villages. I grew up with my grandma about four hours from Moscow while my parents were studying for their Ph.D., and then we went back to Minsk. 

Caption

Liza Stepanova’s grandmother's piano dates back to the 19th century.

Credit: Courtesy of Liza Stepanova

I started piano in my grandmother’s house because — this is a story I like telling — she had found in the flea market a piano that was probably 150 years old or so. It was an upright piano with candleholders sticking out from the piano — because it was back when there was no electricity — and carvings of composers. It was really a piece of art. I loved it and there was never any question that I would play piano. My grandmother also had a dream of playing the piano. She played a little bit, but she couldn’t really pursue it because of the war back when she was little. So that made just the most sense to me. She was a role model to me always. 

In the former Soviet Union, there was a sprawling system of pre-college training in the arts, because the arts were treated somewhat like sports: it was something competitive that people were proud of and that needed to be supported. I first started at the regular music school. Then at 9, I transferred to a special music school attached to the university for especially promising children, and I had a very, very tough teacher there. When I was 10 or 11 she had a studio recital off campus, not at that school. It was very, very stressful for me and for my family. I still remember what I played, the Bach English Suite in A minor, and she gave me hell over it for months. That was my first memory performing.  

We left for Germany when I was 13. At that point the borders were becoming a little bit more open because the Iron Curtain had fallen down. My parents are both scientists and they were starting to get invitations to work abroad, and they took them. So we left.  

Liza on her album E Pluribus Unum

It started with a situation that arose with a student of mine at the University of Georgia, Badie Khaleghian, who was a Baha’i refugee from Iran. He was a composer and also a very serious pianist. We had a really good working relationship. And then he had his graduation recital. He’s very creative and that was something that we were very excited about. At that point, that was the year of the so-called Muslim ban. Politics aside — and his family’s not even Muslim, but that’s beside the point — in any case, his parents were not able to attend, all of a sudden.

It really touched our work and I felt very badly about it. So I asked him if he would write a piece for me, just for something good to happen right at that moment. And he wrote me this amazing 15-minute piece about a Baha’i female hero in Iran. She was the first person to take the veil off. I guess he wanted to write a piece for me that was about a strong woman, and I took it as a compliment.

Then I was asked to do a concert of all-new music in San Francisco. And I thought, “What else could I surround it with? There’s this student who is an immigrant and there’s his story. Who else do I know and admire right now in the U.S. who is an immigrant?” That’s how this program was born. And then a couple of years later, I recorded it.

Among other highlights is a haunting piece by our friend Reinaldo Moya, who is a Venezuelan composer: “Rain Outside the Church” from The Way North, about a sanctuary church. There’s a music video made by a wonderful Syrian video artist, Kevork Mourad. 

Itamar on his album Violin Odyssey

During the pandemic, people were putting up so many live concerts online, and I was looking for something that would still be helpful for people later on, after that phase. I wanted to present works by lesser-known composers that I feel strongly about and also give them some context. So I would play them and interview an expert. During COVID, it was very easy to get these people from Mexico, China, New Zealand to talk about this repertoire. My collaborators were somewhat local, because we didn’t fly. I collaborated with pianists Ieva Jokubaviciute, who teaches at Duke, and Kwan Yi, who teaches at East Carolina University. Eventually it ended up being a sort of large body of work. And I figured, I need to record it.

The most fun piece is "Afromood" by Ali Osman, the Sudanese Egyptian composer. There’s a tambourine part, and when I play it in recital, I use a foot tambourine to play it. For the recording, I wasn’t brave enough. The “Slavic” or “Slavonic” Sonata by Dora Pejačević is a great addition to the repertoire. She was a Croatian composer at the beginning of the 20th century. It’s as if Dvorak had lived for another 10 years. And I think the Second Sonata by Erwin Schulhoff is a masterpiece of 20th-century violin.

Itamar on composer Paul Ben-Haim, featured in his album Evocation

He was born in Germany, 1897, had a great career in Germany until he was 37 years old. He was a music director at an opera house near Munich. But then the Nazis came to power. He came from a Jewish family, and he lost his work. His pieces could not be performed anymore. He checked his options, then he decided to immigrate to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, later on became Israel. He changed his name from Paul Frankenburger to Ben-Haim and changed his style completely. If you hear pieces by Paul Frankenburger, they would sound like Strauss. It’s wonderful music but very much German, nothing Mediterranean about it. He came to the Middle East and he started incorporating music of the region, religious and nonreligious, with a great, great ear.

Liza on the value of public radio

I’ve had some really nice conversations with radio hosts around the country with the Lysander Trio. Radio is doing some of the most important work in telling the stories of Western classical music. It’s just wonderful that this avenue exists. Every time we’re on Performance Today, somebody calls or texts from across the country and says, you know, “I heard your Debussy trio yesterday morning; that was so great.” I think there’s very much a big and important place for radio.