When American pianist Bryan Wallick performs next weekend in the Stevens Center, the occasion will mark the second time that he has soloed with the Winston-Salem Symphony. He is not taking this and other re-engagements lightly, calling them "very important in a career."
"These days, with all the competitions that are out there, often the winner gets some concert opportunities, but the career really starts when he begins to get re-engaged," he wrote in an e-mail from South Africa, where he is living with his wife, who is from South Africa, and their two young children. "I'm thrilled that Winston has decided to have me back."
In 2006, Wallick teamed up with conductor Robert Moody and the symphony in Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This time around, he'll perform Gershwin's Concerto in F, a work that Moody has paired with Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 in E Minor.
The program, titled "Shostakovich and All That Jazz," will be presented next Sunday and on Feb. 9, as part of the symphony's "Classics" series. An abridged, "Kicked-Back Classics" version of "Shostakovich" will be presented on Saturday. There will be commentary and projected images, and the audience will hear the concerto in its entirety as well as movements two and four of Symphony No. 10.
Press materials say that "Shostakovich and All That Jazz" aims to illuminate "what links the two composers: their original approaches to rather traditional musical forms."
"George Gershwin wrote his Piano Concerto in the heady days of roaring twenties, a freewheeling decade when American influence soared," the materials say. "Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Tenth Symphony in the late forties and early fifties during the repressionist regime of Joseph Stalin, one of the darkest periods of modern Russian history. Where Gershwin's work is free, easy and essentially American, Shostakovich's is, by turns, pensive, dark, violent and, finally, optimistic."
Wallick, 31, said that "Shostakovich" is "certainly a contrasting program." While he didn't know the Shostakovich symphony well enough to comment on it, he described as "original" and "amazing" Gershwin's approach to the piano concerto.
The pianist has had to overcome several challenges in preparing the concerto.
One challenge: "Gershwin can be a tricky composer to interpret because he splits the classical/jazz divide so uniquely that one always wonders if certain phrases should be more classically defined or jazzed up. Then one has to filter these musical decisions through the conductor, who must guide the orchestra's sound around the soloist."
Another challenge: "This piece can be a frustrating work to practice by itself, as so much of the music is in the interplay between the orchestra and the piano. I have played it for the last five years, so I do feel I know it pretty well and hope I have some interesting things to say with the music."
Wallick will also proceed on a much different foundation than the one he knew when he first played here. In 2006, he had just finished up a two-year fellowship at London's Royal Academy of Music. (His studies there augmented those he completed at New York's Juilliard School, which awarded him a master's degree in 2001, four years after he won the gold medal at the 1997 Vladimir Horowitz International Piano Competition in Kiev.)
"I hope I have matured as an artist," he said. "(It) takes some time after all the schooling, lessons and master classes to sift through all the ideas and to start to make your own artistic decisions. It's a wonderful-yet-difficult process to go through.… One has to learn to trust in (his) own musical instincts."
kkeuffel@wsjournal.com
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