Awadagin Pratt loves how the ‘groove comes back’ in Montgomery’s ‘Rounds’

At 58, pianist Awadagin Pratt is not exactly enjoying a resurgence — he has always had a high-level career since he won the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1992 — but what might better be called a surge. 

Fueling this new or renewed interest in him is Jessie Montgomery’s concerto Rounds, for Piano and String Orchestra, which is included on his 2023 New Amsterdam Records disc that won a Grammy Award for best contemporary classical composition last February. Pratt has performed the work 80-90 times with nearly 50 ensembles since its world premiere in March 2022 — numbers that just keep going up.

One of the next performances will come Feb. 25 when he makes his debut as a soloist with the Sphinx Virtuosi during a concert staged by Symphony Center Presents, an arm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association.

Pratt was sure that Rounds would get a boost from being co-commissioned by nine orchestras and from Montgomery’s fast-rising profile, including her 2021-24 tenure as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. But its cascading success has surprised even him.

“I knew it was a beautiful and effective piece when I first got it,” he said. “I was expecting some interest, but I did not expect it would be like this.”

In addition to the work’s leading to his first performance with the Sphinx Virtuosi, his association with the concerto played a key role in his debuts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in September 2022 and the CSO in January 2023.

“I think it doesn’t hurt that it is a round, that the material comes back,” Pratt said of the concerto. “It’s kind of addictive and intoxicating. People get into a groove with the material as it comes back, and you‘ve got this really beautiful middle section and an improvised cadenza, which provides a different kind of excitement, and then the groove comes back. There is something about that that people like.”

The pianist’s first interaction with the Sphinx Organization, a Detroit-based non-profit that fosters people of color in classical music, came in 2023. The Nina Simone Piano Competition for African-American Artists, which operates under Pratt’s Art of the Piano Foundation, won a start-up grant through the Sphinx Venture Fund. The grand-prize winner of the inaugural Simone Competition that first year was Clayton Stephenson, who received $50,000 and performance opportunities. 

The 20-year-old Sphinx Virtuosi is a self-conducted, 18-piece orchestra that consists of top Black and Latino artists from across the United States. Its programs have a similarily diverse cast, with works by past composers such as Alberto Ginastera, Florence Price and George Walker, as well as today’s leading voices.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pratt spent most of his childhood in Normal, Illinois, where both his parents held teaching positions at Illinois State University. He began piano lessons there at age 6 and added violin three years later. His first chance to hear the CSO live came when he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which has the first-class Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, where the CSO appears regularly and other major groups routinely visit.

After becoming the first Black artist to win the Naumburg Competition and gaining a prestigious 1994 Avery Fisher Career Grant, he launched his still-flourishing international career. Early on, he was known for performing with his own custom-designed wood bench with short legs that allowed him to sit at an unusually low level at the keyboard. At first, he disassembled the bench and transported it in his luggage, but the screws and Allen wrench needed to put it back together at each stop were banned following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

So he began shipping his bench to each upcoming venue, but around 2003, there was a snafu, and it did not arrive on time for a concert. Workers elevated the piano on blocks, but that fix didn’t work, because it made the pedals too high. So Pratt made do with a conventional piano bench. “It went well enough that I was like, OK, let me reconsider my address to the piano,” he said. “I experimented with seat heights over that summer, and I just decided to sit higher.” He has used a regular piano bench ever since.

After nearly two decades of teaching at the well-respected Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, he joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2023. He has not yet moved his residence to California, but is planning to make the shift next summer. The chair of the piano department in San Francisco is a longtime friend, and the two had long talked about working together at some point. At the same time, Pratt was taken with the conservatory’s efforts to immerse students in all aspects of the music business, including arts management and recording. “They just seem to be at the forefront of getting musicians ready for this century and not last century,” he said. “Other places are trying, but it just seemed like a really great place to go.”

Pratt remains the only person so far to earn performance certificates in three areas at the top-level Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore: violin, piano and conducting. While he has always devoted some time to conducting, he has increased his attention to it in recent years.

He is in his second season as principal conductor of the Miami Valley Symphony, a community orchestra in Dayton, Ohio, and he has recently led the Pittsburgh Chamber Orchestra and Vancouver (Washington) Symphony Orchestra. “The plan is to ramp that up more aggressively,” he said. “It’s something that has been important to me for a long time. I love conducting, and that’s sort of an itch that needs to be scratched.”