Fifth generation Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez has been performing since she was 6 years old. “One of my earliest memories is playing with Barbies backstage at age 6 while waiting to go on stage to perform with the orchestra.” She last graced the TSO stage with Beethoven’s Emperor in 2013. This time she’ll bring her virtuosic touch to Chopin’s romantic Piano Concerto No. 2.
I’m so excited to return to Tucson and this time with Chopin’s second Piano Concerto, one of the most wonderful masterpieces written for the instrument. Chopin’s music is such a special world of sound, and this concerto is super special. It’s number two because it was published second but Chopin actually wrote this concerto first which I find interesting. It’s truly a world of poetry and expressiveness and he also beautifully explores the keyboard in a technical way. The concerto has three movements, and the first movement starts off with this dramatic urgency in the main theme and then the second theme embellishes everything in such a perfect way. The second movement is a nocturne that has this ideal radiantly expressive sound that is also full of tenderness. The middle section has a bit of stormy uncertainty and then we go back to the beautiful nocturne theme and then it moves without pause into the third movement which is full of infectious good spirits. All the embellishments are so charming and beautiful. It’s a piece that is a lot of fun to perform. The way Chopin writes for the piano is quite comfortable and you can tell he was an exceptional pianist because everything that he writes makes sense in the hand technically. Combined with the poetic qualities of his music, it’s really so much fun to be able to perform.
Selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet ballet follow the concerto. Initially proclaimed “impossible to dance to” by the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, Prokofiev frustrated by the critique created two orchestral suites from the ballet’s music in late 1936. Two years later the full ballet received its world premiere in Brno, Czechoslovakia and in 1940, after further revisions, the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad, the bitter rival of the Bolshoi, performed the Russian premiere. It proved to be one of the greatest triumphs of Prokofiev’s career. The music, even without the ballerinas, conjures vivid images of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy and contains some of Prokofiev’s most memorable and beautiful melodies.
The program opens with Grammy-nominated composer Missy Mazzoli’s These Worlds in Us, winner of the 2007 ASCAP Young Composers Award and the Woods Chandler Prize for best orchestral composition for the Yale Philharmonia. Mazzoli dedicated the piece to her father, a Vietnam War veteran. In her program note Mazzoli said of her father, “in talking to him it occurred to me that, as we grow older, we accumulate worlds of intense memory within us, and that grief is often not far from joy. I like the idea that music can reflect painful and blissful sentiments in a single note or gesture and sought to create a sound palette that I hope is at once completely new and strangely familiar to the listener.”
While Martinez is an avid performer of the classical concerto repertoire, she is also passionate about new music. “I’m a huge fan of new music, especially new music written by women. I’ve been programming a lot of music by so many wonderful composers writing music today. I love having the opportunity to collaborate with them and to be able to understand their thinking behind the music, to kind of immerse myself in the different worlds. I play a lot of music by Missy Mazzoli, Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snyder, Jessica Meyer. I love Missy’s music and I’m so excited to hear this piece. I play one of her pieces called Heartbreaker quite a bit in recital. I’m currently working on a piano concerto commission by a dear friend and composer Allison Loggins-Hull. I love bringing new works to audiences because there’s a lot of really wonderful new music out there and I like pairing them with Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and other standard repertoire to highlight how they complement each other. “
Tickets for Chopin and Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet on March 14 and 16 start at $14.
