Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto and Chopin’s Piano Cto. No. 1 figured into Adam Golka’s winter season, with performances with the Riverside County Phil. in CA and the Knoxville Symphony, respectively: “Golka’s playing was light and full of the energy of the youthful Chopin, who was 20 and in love when he wrote it. Golka’s lovely playing of the second movement “Romance. Larghetto,” captured Chopin’s expressions of his devotion to the young soprano Konstancja Gladkowske.” – Harold Duckett, Knozville New Sentinel, April 21, 2017
A highlight of spring was a return to the International Musicians Seminar Prussia Cove (overseen by Artistic Director Steven Isserlis) where he played and coached solo works and chamber music with an array of eminent colleagues and teachers. Returning home to New York in late April, he was presented by the MEF in a recital at Alice Tully Hall where the theme of “Franz Liszt, Holy and Infernal Genius” included Adam’s performance of Legend No. 1 and Mephisto Waltz No. 1, plus “Reminiscences of Don Juan” for two pianos with Orion Weiss, and Three Petrarch Sonnets with mezzo-soprano Lauren Eberwein.
June 3 sees Adam reprise his “Van Cliburn: American Hero” program of Beethoven and Chopin, this time as a featured presentation of the 2017 Cliburn International Piano Competition. He returns to Fort Worth and Bass Hall at the end of August for a performance of Mozart’s Cto. No. 27, K. 595 in the Fort Worth Symphony’s Classical Masters Festival with frequent collaborator Miguel Harth-Bedoya. In between, he returns to the Krzyzowa Festival in Poland – a bastion of extraordinary chamber music playing and cross-cultural exchange of ideas — and heads West for a summer adventure at the new Tippett Rise Art Center in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana, where he performs a recital ofSchubert, Liszt, and Brahms followed by an evening of chamber music with the Ariel String Quartet.