Cesar Franck's Piano Quintet is a gorgeous piece of chamber music. It's among the titans of the repertoire, alongside the Piano Quintet by Johannes Brahms, which happens to be in the same key -- f minor.
But it's not as frequently played. And for good reason: Aside from the sheer technical demands it makes on the players, it has an extremely complex tonal palette, an incredible dynamic range and an even more incredible number of key modulations, and it's a beast to balance.
Lucky for the audience at the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's 2016-17 River Rhapsodies Chamber season opener at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, it got an absolutely nonpareil performance of the quintet Tuesday night from guest pianist Elisso Bolkvadze and the Arkansas Symphony's Rockefeller String Quartet -- Trisha McGovern Freeney and Katherine Williamson, violins; Katherine Reynolds, viola; and Ethan Young, cello.
The musicians ably -- no, superbly -- dealt with all of the piece's challenges, playing, as the writing requires, with almost elfin delicacy in some spots and dig-in bull-doggedness (almost to the point where one would expect broken bow strings and a complaining keyboard) in its most intense moments. The balance was first-rate and the hall's acoustics kept overtones from building up, allowing for a clean sound one does not always get in this work.
Bolkvadze, a UNESCO Artist for Peace, was wrapping up a week-long residency as the Arkansas Symphony's 2016-17 Richard Sheppard Arnold Artist of Distinction, which included a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 with the full orchestra over the weekend.
That gave her exclusive control over the first half of the program, during which she gave lovely performances of three familiar Impromptus by Franz Schubert -- she brought out the left hand in No. 2 in E-flat major in a way few pianists do, and emphasized Schubert's song-like melody very well in No. 3 in G-flat major -- and a knock-everybody-flat performance of the less familiar Piano Sonata No. 2 by Sergei Prokofiev.
Metro on 10/05/2016