I wrote a review of this weekend’s Lancaster Symphony Orchestra concerts, which is being published in today’s New Era, but there were a few things I didn’t have room for. One was to note Ian Hobson’s encore, Sergey Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesleid, in a performance that was one of the highlights of the evening. Hobson wears his virtuosity lightly; I found myself doing a sort of mental double-take while listening. “Wow, what did I just hear?” (I’m going with the program spelling of his name, by the way.)
Now we know: conductor Stephen Gunzenhauser often finds program notes incomprehensible, or so he told the audience Friday night. Thus, the Powerpoint presentations, a sort of “visual hearing” of what’s going on in the piece. I’m on the fence about the Powerpoint; it’s often quite interesting, but I seem to read (or at least comprehend) at a different rate than I hear. It ends up being a little distracting.
An odd detail about Ignace Jan Paderewski: during his opening remarks, Gunzenhauser noted that, while Paderewski’s body was taken back to Poland when the country regained its independence in 1992, his heart remains buried at the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Doylestown. (He had been buried at Arlington National Cemetery.) Rachmaninoff, who would have preferred to have been buried at his estate in Switzerland, is buried outside New York City in a town named Valhalla, according to the 1980 New Grove. His life, like so many others, was uprooted by revolution and war; he and his family left Russia for Copenhagen in 1917. The family moved to the U.S. in late 1918, and returned to Europe in the early 1930s, living in Switzerland. In 1937 Rachmaninoff moved to the U.S. for the last time; like so many other expatriate composers, he lived near Los Angeles, in Beverly Hills. Paderewski has a California connection as well; he owned a ranch in northern California, growing grapes and producing wine.
Ravel is the odd man out in this discussion: according to this site, he didn’t stray much beyond the general Paris area.
