Reviews

In 1987, a young French pianist named Philippe Bianconi won the silver medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He's never been the same.

"The Cliburn completely changed my life and really jump-started my career," Bianconi says. "For two and a half years, I toured the United States extensively."

Bianconi returns to the Sunset Center stage this weekend, marking his fourth local visit. He first appeared here in 2004. His most recent visit was back in 2013.
This time around, Symphony conductor Max Bragado-Darman suggested Bianconi perform Andalusian composer Manuel de Falla's 1916 score Noches en los Jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain). Bragado-Darman, who recently announced he will vacate his post after the 2020 season, felt he needed a special pianist to do it.

"It's a really wonderful piece," Bianconi says. "It's poetic and evocative, with gorgeous harmonies, terrific rhythmic vitality and lush orchestration. Actually, it is really an orchestral piece with principal piano."

This show, the sixth and final outing of the orchestra's 2017-2018 Concert Grand series, will also feature Bianconi reading rhapsodic Hungarian composer Franz Liszt's second piano concerto, a piece the composer shelved for over a decade before finishing it in 1861.

"That decade marked a very busy time in Liszt's life," Bianconi says. "The originality of his second concerto probably needed time to mature."

Liszt displays a well-honed degree of thematic transformation here, exhibiting devices Bianconi enjoys.

"The thematic transformation is wonderful indeed," he says. "It is fascinating to see how Liszt works on the original material of the beginning of the piece to build the whole architecture, and how he develops and changes it rhythmically and in character in order to create the various sections of the concerto."

The two works for piano will be sandwiched between Sergei Prokofiev's Haydn-esque Symphony No. 1, which will open the program, and Tchaikovsky's beloved 1812 Overture which will serve as a finale to the current season.