Earle to perform at Carnegie Hall

The concert will be hosted by Mark Cabaniss, one of Earle’s former KWC colleagues and president and CEO of Jubilate Music Group in Nashville.

Others in attendance alongside Earle and Cabaniss will include singer-songwriter Ken Medema, arranger and composer Mark Blankenship and arranger and composer Camp Kirkland with special guest Stan Pethel, arranger, composer and professor of music emeritus at Berry College.

A 250-voice chorus and orchestra will also be performing in the program, with 15 to 20 members coming from Owensboro.

The event is to include “The Weaver” by Medema and Buryl Red and the world premiere of “Triumph of Faith: The Musical Story of Esther” — a cantata about Esther from the Old Testament of the Bible — by Blankenship and Cabaniss and conducted by Kirkland.

Earle will perform about 15 to 20 minutes worth of solo pieces — a Franz Liszt Concert Étude and Frédéric Chopin’s “Grande polonaise brillante.”

Earle said it’s vital to communicate the music effectively.

“You start thinking, ‘What is the composer trying to communicate?’ ” she said. “ ‘If I were in the audience, what do I want to feel during this experience?’ For me, it’s all about the passion, the emotion of the music, the communication.”

Earle was due to perform at the venue sooner but was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, which Earle said the artistic world has been “such a rollercoaster the last couple years.”

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, Earle already announced that she would retire in May from KWC after 36 years but the virus derailed her other plans.

“I had cruises, Carnegie Hall, and some other tours all lined up, and within a few days I was going through my datebook and (crossing out concerts),” she said. “Pretty soon, I said, ‘I don’t need a datebook.’ …All of the sudden, I went from extremely busy to nothing.”

During that time, Earle focused on her health by walking about five miles a day, cooking more routinely at home while increasing her practicing.

“I wanted to keep my chops up,” Earle said. “I kept practicing and started to learn new pieces.”

And with the small break due to COVID-19, Earle feels to have more of an appreciation of what she’s able to do for a living.

“I don’t take it for granted that concert halls and concerts are going to happen,” she said. “I feel like I’m in a great place in my life as I knock-on-wood — I feel more comfortable with who I am.”

While Earle has performed at the known venue several times before from piano pieces, chamber music, collaborative piano works and world premieres, it continues to be a place that she’s fond of since making her debut at Carnegie Hall in 2005.

“My feelings today are the same as they were when I first got the call (back then),” she said. “Whenever you get the chance to play at Carnegie Hall — it’s just surreal because it’s the best.”

Earle described that she was “in shock” and “never saw it coming” when her composer friend John Steffa reached out to her for the 2005 concert after seeing her play for Steffa’s music theory class at Murray State University.

“He really liked what I played … and he realized that I did a lot of modern techniques that some pianists don’t do — like play with your elbows and you’re playing inside the piano on the strings and that kind of stuff,” she said.

Despite being able to play around the world at a number of different concert halls, Carnegie Hall still remains Earle’s pinnacle place to perform at.

“The prestige, the history and it’s so incredibly gorgeous to play there,” she said. “They have the best pianos, the best acoustics; it seems like every few years they’re renovating it to get the state-of-the-art sound. The sound is so phenomenal that you can play as soft as you want and know that it will carry to the back row.

“You can just really be artistic and get lost in the music and love it.”