Here is a special posting, a review written by frequent guest critic and writer for this blog, John W. Barker.Barker (below) is an emeritus professor of Medieval history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also is a well-known classical music critic who writes for Isthmus and the American Record Guide, and who hosts an early music show once a month on Sunday morning on WORT-FM 89.9 FM. For years, he served on the Board of Advisors for the MadisonEarly Music Festival and frequently gives pre-concert lectures in Madison. He also provided the performance photos.
By John W. Barker
The Salon Piano Series offered by Farley’s House of Pianos on Madison’s far west side continues to be a project of imagination and inspiration, with concerts offering a range of visiting performers and unusual repertoire.
It was quality and quantity in the program offered on Friday night, which was then repeated the following evening. A team of four—count ‘em, four— highly accomplished pianists, who are used to performing together as a team, gave a remarkable concert of multi-piano splendor.
The four (below, from left) are: Spaniard Daniel del Pino, Canadian Lucille Chung, Israeli Alon Goldstein and Italian Roberto Plano. Their collaborative facility is linked to utter enthusiasm in their work.
For this program, Farley’s assembled four superlative instruments. Three are vintage Mason & Hamlin pianos, one made in 1907, the other two dating from 1914; plus a Steinway grand made in 1940. The array of these instruments—all four in the center of the salon, with circles of chairs all around for the audience—was itself an inspiration, and a fine success.
The opening piece was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Sonata in D Major, K. 381, for piano four hands, a kind of “miniature” introduction, and beautifully played by Chung and Goldstein at the Steinway.
“All hands,” as it were, then turned out for the remainder of the program.
A four-piano arrangement of the Dance Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns was knowingly made in 1874 by Ernest Giraud, a contemporary and colleague of the composer.
This was followed by a more recent effort, a Fantasy on Themes from Bizet’s “Carmen” (1994) contrived by the distinguished Mormon musician Mack Wilbert. Both of those works built up spectacular effects of sound and color, in music certainly familiar in their original forms.
Also familiar, of course, is Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, played in this program in a four-piano arrangement by Jacques Drillon (1992). Here, I felt that such an arrangement was a bit forced. All those hands made the repeated rhythmic foundation that much more pounding and more relentless than in the orchestral original, while the colors available from the pianos could not quite match the wonderful varieties that Ravel could draw from his wider range of orchestral instruments.
Particularly disappointing, I found, was a four-piano expansion (1886) by Richard Kleinmichel of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. While the single-piano original is dense, its division among four players was mainly a matter of doubling up the players on the same parts: more analytic than the original, this treatment does not really improve anything.
As an encore, the four delivered a Horowitzian transcription of John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. (You can hear Vladimir Horowitz perform it in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Responding to endless audience enthusiasm, the four then sat down together at the Steinway to play a Galopp by one Albert Lavignac, written for one piano, eight hands. The four players had a ball climbing all over each other to do this novelty piece as intended.
One interesting feature of the program was the opportunity to hear and compare these four fine pianos against each other. And the four performers added to the experience by constantly rotating who played which instrument.
To my ears, the Mason & Hamlin instruments could deliver a marvelous richness and power. But the Steinway could combine those qualities with an added brilliance and coloristic range.
But, then, that was to my ears.
Whatever, a dazzling keyboard evening was had by all.
ALERT: This week’s FREE Friday Noon Musicale, held from 12:15 to 1 p.m. at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, 900 University Bay Drive, features violinist Kangwon Kim (below) and pianist Junghwa Moon Auer in music by Antonin Dvorak, Johann Sebastian Bach, Fritz Kreisler, Frederic Chopin, Claude Debussy and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
By Jacob Stockinger
The Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras (WYSO) will present its first concerts of the new season, the Evelyn Steenbock Fall Concerts, on this Saturday afternoon, Nov. 15, and then on Saturday afternoon, Dec. 13.
More than 350 young musicians will display their great talents to the community during the three concerts, which are dedicated to private and school music teachers.
These young musicians, who get into WYSO through competitive auditions, are really good.
They also play to some of the liveliest and most responsive and enthusiastic audiences in the city.
THIS SATURDAY
WYSO’s string orchestra, Sinfonietta (below), will kick off the concert series at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon with “Highland Cathedral” by Korb and Roever; the “Danse Infernal” by Del Borgo; Eureka! by Sharp; “Fantasia on Theme from Thailand” by Meyer; the “Haunted Carousel” by Newbold; and “Tuxedo Junction” by Hawkins, Feyne, Johnson and Dash.
The Concert Orchestra (below) will then take over with Washburn’s “St. Lawrence” Overture, Del Borgo’s “Meditation,” “A Pirate’s Legend” by Newbold and Slavonic Dances by Antonin Dvorak.
At 4 p.m. on Saturday, the popular Percussion Ensemble will perform “Spanish Point” by Ben Wahlund and the “Danse Bacchanale” from the opera “Samson and Delilah” by Camille Saint-Saens.
The Philharmonia Orchestra will then end the concert with Ernest Bloch’s Concerto Grosso No. 1, the Danse Macabre, Op. 40, by Camille Saint-Saens; the “Pavane pour une infante defunte” by Maurice Ravel, featuring Logan Willis on piano; the fourth movement, “March to the Scaffold,” from the “Symphonie Fantastique” by Hector Berlioz; and the Hoedown from Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo,” featuring Moqiu Cheng on piano.
DECEMBER 13
At 1 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, Dec. 13, the Harp Ensemble (below top) will perform before the Youth Orchestra (below bottom) closes out the concert series with “The Roman Carnival” Overture by Hector Berlioz; Excerpts from “Die Meistersinger” by Richard Wagner; and movements 1, 3 and 4 from the Symphony No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 13, by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
TICKETS AND OTHER INFORMATION
The Evelyn Steenbock Fall Concerts will be held in Mills Concert Hall in the UW-Madison George Mosse Humanities Building, 455 North Park Street in Madison on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
WYSO concerts are generally about an hour and a half in length, providing a great orchestral concert opportunity for families.
Tickets for each concert are available at the door, $10 for adults and $5 for youth 18 and under.
This project is supported by Dane Arts with additional funding from the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation and the Endres Mfg. Company Foundation. This project is also supported by the Alliant Energy Foundation and by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.