Chopin piano concerto a highlight of Concertante's return to Rackham
photo by Michael Aheam
It was in 2005, the weekend before Thanksgiving, that the six virtuoso string players of Concertante debuted at Rackham Auditorium, under University Musical Society auspices. Maybe it was the timing, maybe it was the lack of name recognition, maybe it was the presence of a big contemporary work — John Adams’ “Shaker Loops,” a stunning piece, actually — that kept people away.
To paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, If people don’t want to come to a concert, you can’t stop them.
But it’s cause for real thanksgiving that Concertante’s stellar musicians — who play with the sort of cohesiveness and sympathy that comes from long association — return to Rackham Sunday afternoon. And if Adams couldn’t drag people out into the cold, maybe the Chopin Piano Concerto — with 2005 International Chopin Competition winner Rafal Blechacz, who will have played a solo recital Friday at Hill Auditorium — will be the needed lure. Two added attractions are Elgar’s “Serenade for Strings in e minor, Op. 20, and Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht,” Op. 4.
PREVIEW
Concertante, with Rafal Blechacz, piano
- Who: Virtuoso chamber group, with acclaimed young pianist.
- What: Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1; Elgar “Serenade;” Schoenberg “Verklärte Nacht.”
- Where: Rackham Auditorium, 925 E. Washington St.
- When: Sunday, Feb. 13, 4 p.m.
- How much: $20-$42, UMS Ticket Office in the Michigan League, 734-764-2538, and online at ums.org.
All three of these 19th century pieces have become part of the standard concert literature, and yet, as they are presented Sunday, they are unusual.
The Elgar was written for string orchestra, but will be played Sunday in a string sextet arrangement. The Schoenberg, of course, was written for string sextet, but it is most frequently performed in Schoenberg’s orchestral version. And the Chopin, conceived for piano and orchestra, receives a chamber reading: piano and string quartet.
Concertante violinist Xiao-Dong Wang says the Chopin is new for the group this season.
“It’s exciting to play this piece,” he said by phone recently. “If you play chamber music, there is not a whole lot of Chopin to play. You don’t get to enjoy that kind of musical language. It’s refreshing.”
Wang said Chopin’s “lean writing” for the orchestral strings in the concerto lends itself well to the intimacy of the piano quintet format. “You don’t need a huge symphony orchestra for this,” he said. “I think it works very well.”
Several similar transcriptions exist, including one that Chopin himself played, Wang said.
Flexibility is a hallmark of Concertante, so in addition to sextets with the core players, the group is used to shrinking its numbers for quintets, duos and trios and recruiting additional players for octets and nonets.
For the Schoenberg, though, it’s all the group’s six players — in addition to Wang, Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello; Ara Gregorian, violin and viola; Zvi Plesser, cello; Ittai Shapira, violin; and Rachel Shapiro, viola — who will be on stage. And for Wang, as good as the orchestral version of the piece is — “there’s a gain in the bass and in the sonority of the voices,” he said — the sextet preserves an essential quality: the work’s romantic intimacy.
“That’s true particularly for the first violin part,” he said. “A lot of that has a very personal imprint.”
The Elgar arrangement, Wang said, is “fairly literal” and “honest to what Elgar wrote.” He admits the missing bass part is a loss. But, he added, “This piece in its nature is not orchestral, and that works well for us. The Tchaikovsky Serenade works better with string orchestra. That’s the reason we chose this piece.”
And, he pointed out, any time you take a known piece and reconfigure it for another instrument or combination of instruments, “you hear things you don’t normally hear.” That’s good, he said, for waking us up musically, on the stage and in the hall.