Events Calendar

Guest Artist Recital and Talk: Fredrik Ullén, piano

“A man with many muses: Science, art, and Ligeti’s etudes for the piano”

Fredrik Ullén will give a short talk interspersed with piano demonstrations, followed by a recital of Books I and II of György Ligeti’s piano études.

This concert is free and open to the public.

View the program here: https://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/islandora/object/ui%3A30235

Fredrik Ullén (born 1968) is a preeminent Swedish avant garde pianist who has performed as a soloist in leading festivals and concert venues in most European countries, Canada, and the U.S. He is represented on 25 CD records, many of which have received outstanding critics and accolades from the international press, including Diapason d’or, CHOC (Le Monde de la Musique), CHOICE (International Piano), Stern des Monat (FonoForum) and many others. His repertoire includes many of the most complex works written for the piano, by composers such as Ligeti, Sorabji, Kurtág, Ferneyhough, Xenakis and Messiaen, but he also has a strong interest in the traditional piano literature. His recordings include a collection of Chopin transcriptions and György Ligeti's complete works for piano. In 1996, he became the first person to record the second book of Ligeti's Études. Fredrik's latest musical project is the first complete recording of Sorabji's 100 Transcendental Studies.

Ullén is a fellow of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music (2007) and Academia Europaea (2017).

In addition to his career as a performer, he is a neuroscientist involved in scientific research focusing on expertise and creativity, using music as a model domain. Since 2010, he has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. In 2021 he became Director of the Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Dr. Ullén will also present a free public seminar for the Iowa Neurosciences Institute on 9/5/2023. Details