|
The American pianist and software engineer, Ben Nacar, was homeschooled through high school. He graduated from Brown University in May 2012 having completed a double concentration in Computer Science and Classics.
As of January 2015, Ben Nacar works full-time on the Brown Computer Science technical staff, doing sysadmin-y tasks and writing back-end code that hopefully makes things run more smoothly. When not doing his day job, he is usually either performing, composing, or practicing. I give regular solo recitals at the RISD Museum and at Brown's Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and have also made solo appearances at the William Hall Library in Cranston and at the Laurelmead Cooperative retirement community in Providence. All of his concerts have featured his favorite works from the standard classical repertoire ("from Bach to Rach"), and occasionally his own compositions and arrangements as well. His first public solo performance occurred at the RISD Museum in the fall of 2009, when he played J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) and the opening movement of the Beethoven-Liszt Pastoral Symphony transcription. His senior recital he performed at the Cogut Center (now the Cogut Institute), the program consisting of Franz Liszt's B minor Sonata and the complete Beethoven-Liszt Fifth Symphony. Transcriptions of non-piano works are a personal specialty, and in addition to F. Liszt's and his own arrangements of orchestral works, his repertoire includes some of Ferruccio Busoni's piano renditions of J.S. Bach's organ pieces and a couple of Vladimir Horowitz's best-known transcriptions.
Ben Nacar has also done extensive collaborative work. In the fall of 2009 he accompanied singers Kathryne Jennings and Fred Scheff in a joint voice recital in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. During the summer of 2011 he worked with Kathryne Jennings and conductor Paul Phillips as rehearsal pianist for Opera Providence's production of W.A. Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte. Between 2012 and 2016 he collaborated with Community MusicWorks players Jesse Holstein, EmmaLee Holmes-Hicks, Ealain McMullin, Minna Choi, Lauren Latessa. In the fall of 2012 cellist Daniel Harp and he performed a recital of sonatas by L.v. Beethoven, Debussy, and Samuel Barber, throwing in for good measure a cello-and-piano sonata of my own that he had composed during the previous summer. He has played with several string and voice students in Brown's Applied Music Program, usually working with them over the course of a semester or two before our actual performances. As an undergraduate he also did extensive rehearsal and accompanying work with student groups Brown University Gilbert and Sullivan and Brown Opera Productions.
Ben Nacar's original compositions include works for solo piano, chamber ensembles, concert band, and full orchestra. In March 2014 and March 2015 he presented programs consisting exclusively of his compositions, featuring local professional, student, and community instrumentalists. The spring of 2015 also saw the premiere of (the concert band version of) his Bruin Overture, written in celebration of Brown University's 250th anniversary and performed by the Brown Wind Symphony under the direction of Matthew McGarrell. Besides writing concert music, he has dabbled in film and musical theater. In the spring of 2013 he composed the soundtrack to Jeremiah Robs A Bank, a half-hour film directed by Michael Rose, and in the fall of that year he wrote the music to Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horsemen, a twenty-minute musical for children with libretto by Phoebe Nir. More recently, he composed the music for the seven-minute animated short film Toymaker (2017).
Aside from music and computers, his interests and hobbies include history, railroads (full-size and miniature), cartooning, and roleplaying games. He also plays chess. |
