About the artist

Pianist and composer Robert Fleitz performs, commissions, and writes music to curate evocative, surprising, and often multi-disciplinary experiences for audiences. To this end, he has personally commissioned 120 solo, chamber, and performance art pieces, and has given the world premiere to hundreds more, notably including composers Tan Dun, Paola Prestini, and Liisa Hirsch. Robert is the winner of the 2021 Pro Musicis International Prize as well as the André Boucourechliev Prize in the 2020 International Piano Competition of Orléans. Active in performing both classical and new music, his career includes appearances in 24 US states and 13 countries across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Praised for “mesmerizing” and “commanding” playing (The New York Times), and for musicality with “a delightful ease and lightness” (I Care If You Listen) and “groovy tendencies”.

As a composer, Robert’s oeuvre has been recently performed or commissioned by a diverse array of artists, including the Metropolis Ensemble (NYC), Jumblies Theatre Company (Toronto), Orkest de Ereprijs (Netherlands), the Druskomanija Festival (Lithuania), Festival Osmose (Belgium), and Hilary Easton Dance Company (NYC). He is the founder of the Swan City Piano Festival in Lakeland, Florida, his hometown. He completed BM and MM degrees at The Juilliard School and is in New York City, where he lives with his husband, the composer Krists Auznieks.

About the program

In May 2021, Robert Fleitz performed a 2-hour work by Dylan Mattingly entitled “Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field,” as part of the Hear | Together festival in Berkeley. This Piano Break features excerpts from Mattingly’s work, inspired by his scholarship of ancient Greek music and poetry.

The composer writes:
“For hundreds of years, bards would travel the Aegean and sing from memory the 15,693 lines of the Iliad. Each time the story might change a little bit depending on the bard’s surroundings and memory. With thousands of years between us and then, uncountable waves on the shore, a speckling across the universe of momentary loves and victories and breakfasts and hands running through hair, I wonder what the Iliad in which I find myself might look like — evolved in some cases like fish on land and in others torn asunder like the endless reconfiguration of the continents, or perhaps transformed like the green Sahara only 10,000 years ago. These are the days I’ve grown up in — from the divine intervention in a walk-off home run to the river gods in the Hudson to the soft breathing of someone sleeping beneath the window.”