News & Reviews
Sara Davis Buechner, Transgender Pianist, Shunned In U.S., Gets Canada Encore
- Huffington Post Canada
Classical pianist Sara Davis Buechner played with some of the most prestigious orchestras in the United States, winning praise from presidents and capturing awards that pointed to a promising career as one of the best in the world.
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Pianist Sara Davis Buechner at the National Gallery
- The Washington Post
As if to prove that her music-making wasn’t all fireworks and technical wizardry, pianist Sara Davis Buechner opened her program at the National Gallery on Sunday with Mozart’s brief and youthful E-Flat Major Sonata, K 282 in a reading that opened almost languidly, proceeded with beautifully calculated ornamentation and rhythmic elasticity and concluded with cheerful simplicity.
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An Evolving Country Begins to Accept Sara, Once David
- The New York Times
As David Buechner, born in the northwest suburbs of Baltimore in 1959, I became an internationally known concert pianist. But from the time I was a child, I understood that I was meant to be Sara. In those days, there was no information nor discussion of anything outside the heterosexual template. Nor were there role models for transgender children.
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Finesse and Fury from the Canton Symphony
- ARTWACH
It is always something of a letdown when Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann doesn’t preface a program selection at a Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) concert with his special brand of wit, sardonic or otherwise. Ever the engaging raconteur, he didn’t disappoint on the occasion of the December 2 performance at Umstattd Hall.
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Florida Orchestra, soloist Buechner bring authenticity to ‘Anxiety’
- Tampa Bay Times
No, you don’t have to read W.H. Auden’s long, impenetrable, Pulitzer Prize-winning poem The Age of Anxiety to understand what inspired Leonard Bernstein to compose a piece for solo piano and orchestra with the same title for his second symphony. Sara Davis Buechner has already done the work for the audience. “I certainly read the poem, more in terms of getting the general atmosphere of it,” says Buechner, the piano soloist with the Florida Orchestra this weekend. “I think Bernstein saw his life in New York in the poem.”
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Oakland East Bay Symphony features renowned pianist Sara Davis Buechner
- Oakland North
Buechner began by playing “The Age of Anxiety,” a highly energetic piece from Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, just one of a number of pieces the symphony had chosen for their New World A-Comin’ concert, which took place on November 4. The show featured an array of music by American composers like Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, as well as by the Argentinian Alberto Ginastera.
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Review: Oakland East Bay Symphony triumphs with Bernstein’s moody ‘Age of Anxiety’
- The Mercury News
In 1947, W.H. Auden wrote his poem “The Age of Anxiety,” which is about the search for faith in a world filled with such terrible events that meaning seems hard if not impossible to find. Leonard Bernstein — in his late 20s, thinking about spiritual truths — became obsessed with the poem, which provoked him to compose his Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra, “The Age of Anxiety,” a work of tough beauty.
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Review: Pianist Sara Davis Buechner helped kick off San Jose Chamber Orchestra season
- The Mercury News
“A Night in a Spanish Garden” was the title of the San Jose Chamber Orchestra’s season-opening concert Sunday at Le Petit Trianon. Pianist Sara Davis Buechner was the soloist, an enchanter at the keyboard — and as a speaker, setting the audience at ease in every way. For this listener, it was like walking into a college seminar with a genius lecturer who takes you on a journey to secret places — without leaving the room.
MoreInterview with Sara Davis Buechner
- US Asians
I love creativity in all its forms and my role models are hardly limited to fellow musicians. As a pianist I always wished to follow in the profoundly important tracks of Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Dinu Lipatti, Clara Haskil, and my own teacher at Juilliard, the late Rudolf Firkusny. But my own approach to the piano and its sounds has been deeply influenced by flamenco and kabuki dance, the motion pictures of Kurasawa, Naruse and Charlie Chaplin, the paintings of Vermeer and Renoir, the writing of J.D. Salinger. Willa Cather and Shusaku Endo, grand American architecture of the Art Deco era, the baseball artistry of Jim Palmer, Don Mattingly, Kei Igawa and Ichiro Suzuki, and even witnessing the varied religious services of the Buddhist, Jewish, Catholic and 7th Day Adventist faith
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