Two years after beloved pianist Sarah Jamieson’s passing at age 103, seven doctoral students will take the bench of her prized Steinway and reprise her 1951 senior concert.
By Maggie Ginsberg, Division of the Arts
When the opening notes of Bach’s Fantasia in C minor cascade through Music Hall on October 12, one wonders if the historic theater will somehow recognize the tune. Does the ivy-covered Victorian Gothic stone still hold the reverberations of all of its performances? If so, will it remember this particular student recital that first echoed on this stage 74 years ago?
On a cool spring evening in May 1951, Sarah “Sally” Cameron Jamieson performed her senior piano recital in Music Hall. Already a young mother and U.S. Navy veteran, she’d moved to her husband’s hometown of Madison and used her VA benefits to realize her lifelong dream of a graduate degree in music. That night she played all seven pieces solo, with the exception of the final piece, Carl Maria von Weber’s Konzertstück, for which she was assisted by the University Symphony Orchestra. The performance was recorded by campus radio station WHA, and pressed to a ‘78 record.
That record is the only version of the recital Sarah’s son, Robert “Rob” Jamieson, has ever heard — until now. Nearly 75 years later, he’ll be in attendance at Music Hall as seven of Professor of Piano Christopher “Kit” Taylor’s doctoral students reprise the Sarah Jamieson Memorial Recital. Using the original 1951 program as their guide, they’ll perform works by Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin and Weber — the same pieces Sarah played that night, in the same hall in which she played them — on the Steinway that graced her Shorewood Hills home for seven decades.
“A lot of the time it feels like these performances disappear into the ether, but here we are, bringing back a recital from 70-some years ago,” says Taylor of the program he calls solid and ambitious. “This is music that pianists today should and do know, and relate to, and it does span the generations.”
Sarah purchased the Steinway in $25/month installments shortly after graduation, and played it virtually every day of her long life. When she passed away in 2023 — two months shy of her 104th birthday — her sons donated it to the Mead Witter School of Music.
“I consider that piano a member of our family, and the strongest link that I have with my mother,” says Rob Jamieson, an accomplished pianist himself, who earned three degrees from UW–Madison, including his MD. When his brother and fellow alumnus John “Chip” Jamieson suggested they donate the Steinway to UW–Madison, where their parents’ connections ran as deep as their own — (dad was John Jamieson, UW men’s golf coach from 1952-70) — it just felt right.
“It had to go where it would be appreciated, and used, and it had to be with the University of Wisconsin, because of mother,” Rob Jamieson says. “That’s where it belongs.”
Still, the brothers never expected the School of Music would reprise a recital — just as Taylor’s doctoral students didn’t realize the connections they were about to make, either.
Every time a classical pianist sits down at the bench, they’re summoning centuries of musicians. These seven students won’t just be honoring Sarah Jamieson as they take on her senior recital pieces, they’ll be in conversation with generations past.
Up first will be second-year Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) Matthew Driver, who is taking on Bach’s dramatic, sophisticated Fantasia in C minor. When he spotted it on the program, he knew it was meant to be: It’s the exact piece that Driver performed to open his junior year recital in Spring 2019, back when he was an undergraduate at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“Everyone knows there are thousands of pieces in the piano literature, and that piece is a little treasure of mine,” says Driver, who chose UW–Madison to pursue his doctorate because Taylor and the School of Music’s reputation preceded it. (Two Madison alumni were primary influences while Driver was an undergraduate at VCU and a graduate student at University of North Carolina School of the Arts.) In returning to the piece with six more years of formal study under his belt, Driver is moved by the unexpected ways he’s improved on a song he thought he knew well.
“I never met Sarah Jamieson, but that’s a unique connection — what are the odds that we opened our recitals with the same piece?” he says. “I really want to do this justice. Give it all I’ve got to make this piece come to life again.”
Next, Megan Angriawan and Dominik Cambeis will each play two movements of Beethoven’s playful Sonata Opus 31, No. 3. “We are recreating something that Sarah Jamieson played, and it’s not quite the same, but it’s the same spirit coming back,” says Cambeis, a second year DMA who came to Madison to study with Taylor because he was instantly magnetized by his approach to the piano. Personal connections like this are crucial in the piano world, which is defined by lineage; pupils studying under the masters until they become masters themselves. Sarah herself was a student of legendary composer Gunnar Johansen, who served UW–Madison from 1939 to 1976 as the nation’s first musical artist-in-residence at a university. The two later became close, life-long friends. (Johansen, who died in 1991, premiered his Third Piano Concerto with the Madison Symphony Orchestra in 1981. Taylor performed Johansen’s concerto with the University Symphony Orchestra in 2022.)
“I think when people realize the generational connections that art can foster, that’s something worth remembering, nurturing and pursuing,” Cambeis says. “Keeping the flame alive.”
Cambeis opted to play Beethoven because the composer is a personal favorite, tied only with Mozart. Cambeis is especially fascinated by Beethoven’s later work, and the fact that he created his most joyful work of all — Symphony No. 9, best known for Ode to Joy — while he was tragically going deaf.
“If I was living through those physical health challenges, it would not be joyful for me,” Cambeis says. “But once these feelings and pains are put into music, then it becomes so. Music is in that way a spiritual remedy. With Beethoven’s last movement of his 9th symphony, joy comes to connect us all. Joy makes us brothers and sisters.”
Payam Pahlevanian will take the bench next to perform both Debussy’s atmospheric Danseuses de Delphes, and his lively Baroque Passepied. Next, Hyeyeon Seok will take on Chopin’s haunting Ballade in A flat. Finally, Weber’s romantic dazzler, Konzertstuck, will mark the one deviation from the 1951 program: instead of an orchestra, Taylor found an arrangement for one piano, four hands. That piece will be performed by third-year DMA Minha Jeon and second-year DMA Eunsu Kim, who both hail from South Korea by way of Indiana University. Kim studied there for five years under pioneering virtuoso André Watts, then came to Madison in search of a new teacher after he died in 2023.
“I went to my professor’s memorial concert, André Watts, who passed away the same year as Sarah. I dedicated one piece to him in my recital,” Kim says, adding Watts taught her as much about life as he did about piano, and that she’s found a similar kinship with Taylor. “But this is the first time I’ve actually played in someone’s memorial concert, and I really feel gratitude and very honored. It feels very special.”
“I think music is a global language,” adds Jeon. “When I play the piano, they understand me here. Music is just language for all ages and countries and times, and that connection is very amazing for me.”
Rob Jamieson would agree that music is a true universal language. In the last days of his mother’s life, after she lost her vision and therefore her ability to play, and after she could no longer even speak, he’d put on her favorite Bach CDs, or their favorite opera — Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier — and she’d squeeze his hand.
“As long as I can remember, and I suspect even while she was carrying me as she was preparing for that recital, I have been steeped in music because of her,” he says.
His earliest memories of the elegant piano are of its pedals. The mysterious way his mother’s foot pumped to produce magical sounds as he huddled beneath the piano on the 1950s-era carpet of their Shorewood Hills living room. He’d crawl up onto the bench to scribble notes on the sheet music the way she did, a habit for which she never scolded him. He grew up playing the magnificent instrument, and sitting rapt as various neighbors and friends came over to do the same. She was always inviting everyone into her home, whether you were a fellow musician or the server from the restaurant or the person repairing her roof. It’s especially meaningful that the memorial recital will take place on his mother’s Steinway — she would have loved to listen to a new generation putting it to use.
“She wanted to know everybody,” he says. “And there wasn’t anyone in Madison that didn’t adore her. She outlived every one of them, dying just short of 104, but she developed new friends, too.”
“Piano music filled the air on a daily basis,” agrees Chip Jamieson. In addition to his brother’s and his mother’s endless practicing, she regularly invited friends from the School of Music or members of the Madison Symphony Orchestra over for coffee and to form a casual quartet. “Literally there was music every day. Piano provided the soundtrack of my youth!”
Her children — which also include daughter Ginny — called her mother, but most everyone else called her Sally. Or wife, or Grandma, or Great-Grandma, or even the “Queen of Shorewood,” where she was the neighborhood’s oldest resident. She held numerous civic leadership roles, including serving as a founding member and president of the Madison Symphony Orchestra League, a Madison Symphony Orchestra board member, a member of the Madison Opera Guild and the Schubert Music Club. If you attended a concert of note over the last six or seven decades, she was likely sitting mere rows from you, soaking it all in.
“Every great artist that came through Madison, mother and I, and later Chip, saw together,” Rob Jamieson says. They saw hundreds of concerts, recitals and symphonies over the years. But the last performance the three ever attended together was special in a way that at least one of these doctoral students — Cambeis — will appreciate.
It was Madison Symphony Orchestra’s September 2022 production of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. A show the organizers called, aptly, “Infinite Joy.”
The Jamieson brothers donated the piano, but they still have their mother’s favorite music bound in dark blue and gold books, her detailed notes scribbled in the margins: Emphasize softness here, No sustaining pedal there. Unfortunately, the original ‘78 record was lost, and the only piece Rob Jamieson truly remembers her practicing is the Bach — but he anticipates it will all come flooding back when the October 12 concert begins.
“I’m going to envision my mother up there performing. I’m going to see her at that piano, and remember just how beautifully she played,” Rob says. “And so, through these wonderful students doing this for us, I will hear my mother again.”
Find more information about the Sarah Cameron Jamieson Memorial Recital here.