THE BASICS: JoAnn Falletta and the BPO continue their Rachmaninoff festival, this time with Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 and Piano Concerto No. 2, replacing the originally scheduled Fabio Bidini with returning pianist Natasha Paremski (whose previous performance with the BPO back in 2017 featured Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3). The concert repeats this Sunday afternoon, November 12, at 2:30 with a pre-concert talk an hour before the concert. Kleinhans Music Hall is at “3 Symphony Circle” Buffalo, 14201 where Porter Avenue, Richmond Avenue, North Street and Wadsworth meet at a traffic circle. Visit www.bpo.org or call 716-885-5000. Tickets ($12 to $93) are available. Full-service bar in the lobby or across the lobby in the Mary Seaton Room. Masks are optional.
Runtime: Two hours ten minutes with one intermission
THE CONCERT: In a recent listener poll by Buffalo’s WNED Classical radio station to find the “Top 20 Composers.”
Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943) came in at #11, which might sound rather middling, but when you look at who “beat” him, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, etc. you realize that the actual rank doesn’t matter as much as the fact that Buffalo’s classical music community put him in the pantheon of classical music’s gods. And yet, unbelievably, Rachmaninoff the composer suffered from crippling self-doubt for years. The story goes that it stemmed from a terrible reception to his under-rehearsed first symphony conducted by Alexander Glazunov who was reported to have been drunk on the podium at the premiere. Ouch!
JoAnn Falletta on the other hand never seems to need performance enhancements to be in a great mood and she seemed especially thrilled with the enthusiasm of the audience. That, and also the fact that before the concert started, BPO President and Executive Director Dan Hart announced that The 2024 Grammy Nominations were just published by the NY Times and the BPO, with JoAnn Falletta conducting, has been nominated for another Grammy, this time for “Scriabin: Symphony No. 2; The Poem of Ecstasy.” They’re keeping some pretty prestigious company in the category of “Best Orchestral Performance” including Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducting The Philadelphia Orchestra, and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Congratulations!
Then, out came this weekend’s soloist, another Russian ex-pat as we had last weekend, this time 36-year-old pianist Natasha Paremski, born in Moscow who moved to the United States at the age of eight, becoming a U.S. citizen shortly thereafter, who is now based in New York City. She played one of the most loved piano concertos, Rachmaninoff’s second, in A minor. Often Falletta seems like a mother hen with her soloists but here her body language seemed to say “You’ve got this, kid. Go get ‘em.” And Paremski did. If you’ve ever stood on the platform near one of those enormous locomotives as it slowly pulls out from the station, that, to me, is how this piano concerto starts, with a solo piano, playing those giant Rachmaninoff chords, with seven repetitions of low F, four ledger lines below the bass clef, chug… chug… chug… and then the strings (only) come in with that sweeping sound that Rachmainoff revels in. Winds and brass will be along later, but first it’s all smooth strings. And then the piano fireworks begin.
Big applause and both Falletta and Paremski reveled in the wash of emotion from a hyper-enthusiastic crowd.l For an encore Paremski played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G-sharp minor.
After intermission it was time for Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor which, like the second piano concerto, also has an interesting opening, also very low in the bass clef, featuring the double basses with a very deep, menacing minor mood. It sounded like Wagner’s music when Siegfried approaches the cave of Fafner the dragon. As I thought of Wagner (1813 – 1883) who I think, had he been born later, would have composed excellent movie music, I became aware of how cinematic Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 is. Once leading a tour of school children to the WNED Classical radio station, the director of education told the kids “Classical music is like movie music, only you get to make up the movie yourself in your own mind.” That’s how I felt at Kleinhans. What kind of movie did I imagine? With Rachmaninoff you get it all – noir, romantic, action, nostalgic, heroic, fantasy, horror. It’s all there, right in the score.
If some of the melodies seemed very familiar it might be because mid-70s pop star Eric Carmen used melodies taken from both of this weekend’s works. He did pay royalties to the Rachmaninoff estate for borrowing from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto for his 1975 song “All By Myself” All By Myself – YouTube and then borrowed from the symphony’s third movement for his 1976 song, “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again.”
If the name Natasha Paremski sounds familiar, besides the fact that she came here in 2017, Natasha is a regular recital partner of Buffalo favorite, the Grammy-winning cellist Zuill Bailey, with whom she has recorded several CDs. Speaking of chamber music, several BPO musicians “moonlight” with The Buffalo Chamber Players, and if you like chamber music (one player to a part, intimate setting), the Buffalo Chamber players are back performing at the AKG (the Albright Knox Gundlach Art Gallery on Elmwood) this coming Thursday evening November 16 at 7 pm (note the early start time) with a program called “Sweet Sixteen.” Thursday’s concert will feature many of the contemporary works the BCP premiered over their sixteen-year history as well as Mendelssohn’s Octet, composed when he was just sixteen.
There’s also a string quartet recital coming along on Thursday, November 30, an intimate holiday-themed performance by candlelight at the BPO Clement House (786 Delaware Ave.). Space is extremely limited. Proceeds from this event (Tickets are $100 each) will benefit the free BPO summer community concerts.
There are many, many non-classical concerts coming along too.
- Friday, November 17 at 7:30 pm at Kleinhans Stuart Chafetz conducts “ABBA: Arrival from Sweden” described as “the absolute best and most authentic ABBA show there is.”
- Saturday, November 18 at 7:30 pm at Kleinhans Fernanda Lastra conducts the music of Neil Diamond with Las Vegas’s Jay White.
- Saturday, November 25 at 2:30 pm at Kleinhans Ron Spiegelman conducts Disney’s Frozen in Concert as the film is projected on the screen above the orchestra only this time you get the music with live orchestra… the BPO!
Those three concerts, ABBA, Neil Diamond, and Frozen, all featuring the orchestra, are all at Kleinhans Music Hall. Then on Sunday, November 26 at 7:30 pm members of the orchestra take their annual road trip with the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus under the baton of Music Director Dr. Adam Luebke for Handel’s Messiah at OLV Basilica 767 Ridge Road in Lackawanna. Handel’s Messiah repeats the following Sunday, December 3, also at 7:30 pm at St. Mary’s Swormville, 6919 Transit Road, East Amherst. And just like that, we’re into December and many holiday concerts. For details on those visit bpo.org/events.