NATCHITOCHES – Pianist Corey Hamm will perform at Northwestern State University on Oct. 28-29 at 7:30 p.m. in Magale Recital Hall. The concert is part of the Louisiana Piano Series International. Tickets are $15. Students are admitted free. Dr. Francis Yang and Dr. Christine Burczyk Allen are the organizers of the Louisiana Piano Series International.

The Oct. 28 concert will feature “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” by Frederic Rzewski, which consists of 36 variations of a Chilean revolutionary song. His CD of the hour-long work by Redshift Records won Spotify’s Best Classical Recording in 2014 and Best Classical Recording at the 2014 Western Canadian Music Awards. He has performed the work over 80 times all over the world.

On Oct. 29, Hamm will play Prokofiev’s “Sonata No. 8,” “Piano Sonate” by Henri Dutilleux and Nikolai Kapustin’s “Piano Sonata No. 2.”

Hamm is establishing a unique musical profile performing widely in North America and in Asia as both soloist and chamber musician. His extensive work in the 1990s with the Dutilleux will come to fruition in his plan to record Dutilleux’s complete works for solo piano and chamber with piano in the near future.

Hamm has commissioned, premiered and recorded over 300 works by composers from all over the world.  These commissions have been for solo piano, various chamber music formations as well as concerts.

His most extensive collection of commissioned works includes over 70 pieces for PEP (Piano and Erhu Project) with whom he has toured China.  To date the composers for the project come from China, Canada, UK, and the United States, and include Michael Finnissy, GAO Ping and Brian Cherney. The result is a new and flourishing catalogue of works for piano and erhu composed in the musical languages of the 21st century.  This combination of instruments bringing together two of the world’s great musical traditions now has a unique collection of works for Nicole Ge Li and Corey Hamm to draw from for audiences of the 21st century.

They have released some of these works on their PEP CDs, Vols. 1 and 2 (Redshift TK437 and 440). Volume 2 was nominated for Best Classical Recording at the 2015 Western Canadian Music Awards. Volumes 3, 4 & 5 are in preparation for release in 2019 and 2020.

He has also commissioned more than 50 works for The Nu:BC  Collective and for Hammerhead Consort (two piano and two percussion).  As pianist for The Nu:BC Collective  he has released the critically acclaimed CD Beyond Shadows (Redshift TK432). As a founding member of Hammerhead Consort, he received the 1993 Sir Ernest Macmillan Memorial Foundation Chamber Music Award and was winner of the 1992 National Chamber Music Competition.

Hamm is professor of piano at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he was awarded the prestigious Killam Teaching Award and the Dorothy Somerset Award for Excellence in Performance. He is on the piano faculty of both the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at NEC in Boston, and MusicFest Perugia, in Italy.