Pulsing Sound 2026 Series 1 - Permutations: A Piano Extravaganza

Lucas Amory and Max Hammond team up with the technologies of Steinway Spirio in 20th and 21st century piano music. Pianists Lucas Amory and Max Hammond tackle four-hands and two-piano music across the last century, with the added help of Steinway Spirio's player piano capabilities. The program will include classics from Maurice Ravel, Conlon Nancarrow, and John Adams, as well as newer pieces, premieres, and arrangements from Sofia Ouyang, Miles Walter, and Lucas Amory.

Lucas Amory is a versatile soloist and chamber musician. He holds a Master’s degree from the Juilliard School in Piano Performance and a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in Music and German, where he was also awarded the Robert D. Levin and David McCord Prizes for his musical achievements. He counts Julian Martin, Hae-Sun Paik, and Shai Wosner among his most important mentors. Lucas is the first prize winner of the PianoArts 2024 North American Competition in Milwaukee and 2022 James Yannatos Harvard Concerto Competition. In 2026 he was featured as a resident artist at L’Atelier Musical in New Baltimore, NY , where he recorded and performed the complete Debussy Etudes in collaboration with Grammy-winning producer Patrick Lo Re. Other engagements in this timeframe include the Dame Myra Hess Recital series in Chicago, the Prelude Recital to the PianoArts 2026 Competition, as well as chamber music residencies at Marlboro, Yellowbarn, and Lehigh Valley Chamber Music. Among other chamber music festivals, he has attended the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, Prussia Cove, Norfolk, Four Seasons, and Taos, and is the pianist in the Marlboro Festival Ross Garon Trio Çava and 2024-5 Juilliard Honors ensemble Trio PUMA. He is one half of the Rehmus Duo with his violinist sister Leah, and together they’ve toured and performed in Milwaukee, New York, and Philadelphia. As a performer of contemporary music, he has collaborated with many esteemed artists and composers including Matt Aucoin and the American Modern Opera Company, Bruce Adolphe, Nico Muhly, and Claire Chase, and collaborated with clarinetist Anoush Takuhi Pogossian on the interdisciplinary Armenian music project Komitas and Friends involving five commissions and premieres from student composers at Juilliard, which is set for a new installment in 2026-2027.As a conductor he is the current Music Director of the CHROMAS Ensemble in New York. He is a former Music Director of Harvard’s Bach Society Orchestra, and has involved himself in countless opera and musical theater productions both in directorial and répétiteur roles. When not playing piano or conducting, Lucas looks to further himself in all things music; he was employed as a Ferris Fellow baritone in the Harvard University Choir, enjoys private teaching, improvises, and explores historical performance practice on the classical fortepiano. In his down time, he enjoys long-distance runs and following Boston sports.

California-born pianist Max Hammond’s passion lies in putting canonical works in conversation with new voices. As an artist who plays with the “the finesse, the grace, and the ebullience of a Mozart” (Harry Rolnick, The Concerto Net), Max aspires to use his music to spark a dialogue through which we may consider questions of belonging, historicity, queerness, and temporality. An avid performer of contemporary music, Max has had the honor to premiere works by composers Jennifer Higdon, Martin Bresnick, Georg Frederich Haas, Joan Tower, Carlos Simon, Meredith Monk, and Harold Meltzer. He is the recipient of the Robert Turnbull Piano Foundation Grant, which he is using to support the commission of a solo work by Viet Cuong, premiering in 2027. As the winner of Juilliard’s concerto competition, Max made his Lincoln Center debut in Alice Tully Hall performing Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, Op. 42 with the Juilliard Orchestra under David Robertson. As a concerto soloist, Max has performed a diverse range of works, from Prokofiev’s Third Concerto to Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety with ensembles like the Yale Symphony Orchestra, the Bellflower Symphony, and the Pasadena Orchestra. This year, Max made his Carnegie Hall debut in a concert exploring the work of Meredith Monk alongside the composer herself. Other notable recent engagements include performances with Fred Sherry at the Guggenheim’s Peter B. Lewis Theatre, the North America premiere of G. F. Haas’ monumental “11,000 Strings” for fifty microtonally tuned pianos and chamber orchestra alongside Klangforum Wein at the Park Avenue Armory, concerts in the basin of the world’s largest refracting telescope housed at Yerkes Observatory in Williams’ Bay, Wisconsin, and recent collaborations with Steinway Spirio, Hennessy Cognac, and Lugano Diamonds. Max graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna cum Laude from Yale College with a BA in mathematics, where he studied at the Yale School of Music with Wei-Yi Yang. Max graduated from the Juilliard School under Julian Martin and Soyeon Kate Lee with a Master’s Degree in May of 2026; he was awarded the Arthur Rubinstein Prize upon graduation, the highest honor given yearly to a graduating pianist. In the fall, he will continue his work at Juilliard in the doctoral program. He lives in New York City, where he loves the cold (an interest inherited from its lack in his Los Angeles upbringing, no doubt).

NEW YORK — September 2026 — THE BLANC announces the 2026–27 season of Pulsing Sound, its cross-disciplinary concert series curated by Sofia Ouyang.

Launching this October and unfolding through Spring 2027, the new season brings together six projects ranging from piano and technology to string trios, new-music ensembles, world premieres, and interdisciplinary performance. This season includes pianists Lucas Amory and Max Hammond working with the Steinway Spirio; a collaboration with Forest Hills Chamber Music Series; the return of Telos Consort; an evening of new works with Belgian ensemble Ensemble Fractales and Columbia composers; the distinctive instrumentation of Kintsugi Quintet; and a new interdisciplinary project developed for THE BLANC.

Pulsing Sound begins with a simple idea: listening as encounter.

Between musicians and audiences. Between instruments and technologies. Between a composition and the space in which it is heard. Between music and the wider field of movement, image, architecture, and embodied experience

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