(Michelle Cann, piano)
By Montague Gammon III
When Michelle Cann sits down at a Steinway in very early November to play Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, she’s reuniting with a difficult but thrilling college friend who has changed, while fulfilling a long delayed childhood dream.
The college friend is Liszt’s Concerto, now in its fully orchestrated version. The dream is playing under the baton of VSO Principal Guest Conductor Thomas Wilkins.
Wilkins is also conducting Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, which opens the Nov. 1-3 concerts, and the performance closing Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2, in a program rich with human interest stories.
Ravel used the French tombeau to mean “a piece written as a memorial,” when he composed, in 1914-17, a six movement piano suite. Each movement memorialized a friend or friends killed in World War I.
In 1919 he turned four of those movements into the orchestrated work that’s on the VSO program.
Human interest story 1: Ravel dedicated the fourth movement of the piano suite, the final movement of the orchestral version, to Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, brothers whom one artillery shell killed simultaneously on their first day at the front.
Human interest story 2: The widowed pianist Marguerite Long premiered the piano suite in 1919. Its final movement, which is not in the orchestral arrangement, was dedicated to her husband.
Musical essayist and reference librarian Roger Hecht wrote about Le Tombeau in allmusic.com: “Ravel employed the full battery of instruments, but placed every note, chord, and instrument like a jeweler working with clear pristine colors.”
Cann described the Liszt in a telephone interview as “a virtuosic show piece…it really shows all the acrobatics that a pianist can do.” The word “difficult” cropped up more than once in our conversation. When Cann first learned this Concerto as an undergrad, she “definitely found it to be daunting.”
She also called it “one that’s fun to come back to.” In college, she’d played a version that Liszt arranged for a piano soloist plus, in lieu of the orchestra. a second piano.
“Only only in the last few seasons,” she said, has she played the Concerto professionally. ”What has been very exciting is, this is only the third [concert where] I’ve played it with an orchestra, ever!”
“It’s really a delightful piece,” she said. “It’s so lyrical and so songful, as Liszt can do so well.”
It’s also so athletic that Cann likens the splendidly virtuosic ending to “running a marathon…adrenaline kicks in and just carries me right to the end.”
Her realized childhood dream is playing under Wilkins’ baton. “We go way way way back” she said.
The “small Florida town” where she grew up wasn’t near classical orchestras.
“When I was around 10-12 he was the Assistant Conductor at the Florida Orchestra in Tampa and St. Pete. That was the closest major orchestra for my family to attend, so we just loved Thomas Wilkins, just so dynamic and such a great conductor and especially for me at nine, ten, eleven, I was so enamored with him…what a role model!”
“The only Black conductor I knew was my own father, [the music teacher at a K-12 Christian school] and it wasn’t an orchestra thing…So for me to see this other conductor at such a high level and such a great conductor! I was just so inspired by him and I always loved watching him when I was a young kid.”
Cann’s elder sister won a young musician’s contest that allowed her to solo with Wilkins’ orchestra. “So I’m like ‘I want that to be me someday,’ and I also won when it was my chance but unfortunately he was no longer there; he’d moved on.”
Some two decades-plus later, she’s realized her dream, and that’s human interest story 3.
“I got to reconnect with him this last season. We worked together in South Carolina…the last time I’d seen him and the last time he’d seen me I might have been 12 or 13…I think it was one of the most special experiences ever orchestrally.” Their Hampton Roads concert follows by one week her debut, under Wilkins, with the San Francisco Symphony.
“For me to have wanted this pairing, to work under him when I was 12 and it just didn’t work out and then to do it…I felt like I was that kid again and [felt] that excitement of working with this great conductor.”
Sergei Rachmaninoff, born with immense talent into a world of wealth in the Russia of 1873, son of two accomplished amateur pianists and grandson of another, saw his privileged world collapse the first time when he was only nine, his spendthrift father’s debts forcing the auction of the last of his family’s six estates. (The live-in piano teacher the family let go did get him a scholarship to the St. Petersburg College of Music.)
In 1917, the 44 year old world-famous pianist, composer and conductor saw his own estate confiscated by the Soviets. Taking only a few belongings and a little money, Rachmaninoff, his wife, and his daughters, aged 5 and 14, decamped by train and open sleigh in the Russian winter to Sweden, thence to the US by way of Denmark, never to return.
Esplanade.com calls Rachmaninoff “the composer who wrote straight from the heart,” quoting him as saying that he wrote his music “to make it say simply and directly that which is in my heart… these moods become part of my music…”
Often seen as the last of the Romantic composers, Rachmaninoff stuck to his musical guns into the 20th Century’s avant-garde explorations. He not only survived, but perhaps prevailed, remaining popular among classical listeners and serving as a source of movie tunes (e.g. Marilyn’s Seven Year Itch, Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day) and popular songs, such as Eric Carmen’s 1976 Top-40 ballad “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” which excepted Movement 3 of Symphony No. 2. (Carmen got a “12% of the royalties, thank you!” lesson in what “not in the public domain” meant.)
Especially in that 3rd movement, Rachmaninoff’s 2nd is almost the definition of the term “lush,“ which word often crops up in descriptions of his works. After a rather foreboding opening it seems to immerse the listener in a sound world where forces pull toward opposite poles, then offers up excitement, sweetness, and a concluding fourth movement that could make folks applauding it say, “That’s what I’m talking about! That’s a symphony!”
WANT TO GO?
Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony
Thomas Wilkins, conductor
Michelle Cann, piano
Maurice Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin
Franz Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2
7:30 pm, Fri., Nov. 1, Chrysler Hall, Norfolk
7:30 pm, Sat., Nov. 2, Ferguson Center for the Arts, Newport News
2:30 pm, Sun., Nov 3, Sander Center for the Performing Arts, Virginia Beach
Box office: 757-892-6366
