Reviews
2016-2017: Shakespeare in Music
Monterey County Weekly – Michael Noble does stunning sequence with Monterey Symphony at Sunset
Michael Noble delivered his first recital at the age of 6, and has gone on to perform across Asia, Europe, North American and South America.
Winning the Carmel Music Society's 2013 Piano Competition was a surprise to Southern California-bred Michael Noble.
"You never know what is going to happen," he says. "I knew I played well, but I was surprised I played well enough to win."
Monterey Symphony Artistic Director Maestro Max Bragado-Darman was a judge for the event. Afterward, he suggested that Noble return to perform with the symphony for a reading of Antonín Dvorák's Piano Concerto in G Minor.
Noble didn't take long to say yes.
"I love the Sunset Center," he says, "and I'm grateful to be able to come back. I can't wait to be back there."
Noble immediately set to learning the technically demanding piece for this concert. The concerto is a large work, running some 40 minutes, and Bragado-Darman has chosen an atypical arrangement of the piece by Czech pianist and pedagogue Vilém Kurz, who sought to solve some of the original score's irksome elements. Some observers have called it a work that sounds as if it was written for two right hands.
"Dvorák was a great composer, but it turns out he wasn't a very good pianist," Noble says. "The original score shows that. There are a number of passages that are just plain awkward technically, but there's still lots and lots of great music in there."
For this season-finale program, the Dvorák will be sandwiched between Otto Nicolai's comedic opera The Merry Wives of Windsor, a nod to this season's Shakespeare in Music theme, and 19th-century Belgian composer César Franck's Symphony in D Minor, which – although rarely performed – is widely regarded by critics as a remarkable, even radical, work for its time.
The orchestra's 72nd season will debut in October, featuring six different concert grand piano soloists offering iconic works by Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein, Prokofiev, Saint-Saens, Mozart, de Falla, Liszt, Dvorak, Beethoven, Schumann and Mendelssohn. As this season wraps, it's also a farwell to the tradition of Friday night shows at Sherwood Hall.
MONTEREY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA WITH MICHAEL NOBLE, PIANO 7:30pm Friday, May 19 at Sherwood Hall, 460 North Main St., Salinas; $25/general admission; $10/students and active military. 8pm Saturday and 3pm Sunday, May 20 and 21 at Sunset Center, San Carlos at Ninth, Carmel; $28-$77. 646-8511, montereysymphony.org.