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Piano premieres were a long time coming

By JOHN FLEMING
Published April 12, 2007

Two piano concertos are being performed in the Tampa Bay area for the first time ever this weekend - and one of them is actually 200 years old.

Benjamin Lees' Piano Concerto No. 3, being premiered by the Florida Orchestra with soloist Ian Hobson, was just recently composed.

But the other premiere is Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. That, of course, is a standard work, except the version to be played by soloist Teresa Brandt and the Chamber Orchestra of Florida is not the standard score. Instead of being for piano and orchestra, it is an arrangement for piano and string quintet possibly done in Beethoven's time but never officially premiered until a German scholar put together the edition that is being used this weekend.

Brandt, a dermatologist, learned of the score on the Internet. More on all that later.

Productive badgering

First, let's consider the Lees premiere, which comes 40 years after the composer's Piano Concerto No. 2. His Piano Concerto No. 1 was premiered in 1955, and No. 2 in 1966. Why wait such a long time for the third?

"Well, you only write a piano concerto when there's a cogent reason to do so," Lees said last week, on the phone from his home in Palm Springs, Calif.

And the reason was Hobson, who has championed Lees' piano music in two recordings on the Albany label. "The third piano concerto was a result of Ian badgering me over the years. I finally got to it," Lees said.

Lees, 83, is best known for his symphonies. There are four listed on his Web site www.benjaminlees.com. "At heart, I'm a symphonist," he said. "I like to take an idea and develop it."

He has composed a dozen concertos and other works for solo instrument and orchestra. His Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (1964) has been widely performed. The new piano concerto is constructed traditionally in three movements with a running time of about 23 minutes.

"This piano concerto, in a way, is simpler than the others," he said. "The orchestration is more lean so that the focus is mostly on the piano. It's not the kind of muscular orchestration that I used before. Piano Concerto No. 2 begins like a sledgehammer. Here, it's different, more spare."

Lees planned to attend rehearsals and performances of his concerto this week. Long ago he made his peace with the often ambivalent, if not hostile, reaction of audiences to new music.

"Any audience is basically 25 years behind what the composer wrote," he said, referring to countless works with disastrous premieres that went on to be regarded as masterpieces.

"I always hope the audience will walk away saying, 'I would like to hear that again.' What you don't want is to have an audience yawn. Even an audience that says they hated it is all right because at least that's a reaction."

Associate conductor Susan Haig will be on the podium for the Lees concerto, leading her final masterworks program before leaving the orchestra after this season. The program also includes Debussy's La Mer and L'isle joyeuse and the Lalo overture Le roi d'Ys.

Familiar, yet different

Soloist Brandt is responsible for the other premiere this weekend, the chamber version of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. "I was looking around for something for strings and piano, and I came across this on the Internet," she said.

The familiar Beethoven concerto for piano and orchestra was first played in 1807. The chamber version incorporates an arrangement for two violins, two violas and cello made by a contemporary of Beethoven's named Possinger. "This was probably requested by Prince Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven's patrons, who may have wanted to perform the piece in a smaller venue," Brandt said.

The string parts had been preserved in an archive in Bonn, Germany, but the solo piano part did not survive. To the rescue came Beethoven scholar Hans-Werner Kuethen, who combined the string quintet and a piano part derived from the first copyist's score of the original concerto. The solo part is the same length as the original but has embellishments in more than 100 bars.

"Kuethen . . . made a pretty good case that Beethoven intended them to go together," Brandt wrote in an e-mail. "There is controversy about this among music scholars, but whether or not Kuethen is right, it's still interesting."

The biggest change from the standard concerto is the lack of winds, brass and timpani. "You can miss all those rich woodwinds," Brandt said in a phone interview. "But if you just step back and think of it as a chamber piece, then it doesn't feel like it's missing anything."

Robert Levin made a recording of the chamber version for the Archiv Produktion label, and there have been performances in Boston and London, Brandt said. This performance will be the Florida premiere.

Brandt, 52, comes from a musical family (both parents were violinists in the Tampa Philharmonic, which predated the Florida Orchestra). She took music lessons from an early age and studied with pianist Jan Khorsandian as an undergraduate at the University of South Florida while majoring in biology, then going on to medical school there.

"You have to make a living," said Brandt, whose dermatology practice is in Brandon. "I just play piano for the love of it."

Brandt, who tries to practice every day on her Steinway at home, has had the score of the chamber version of the concerto for a year. She previously played the standard version. She has performed Mozart concertos with the chamber orchestra, which includes members of the Florida Orchestra and gives several concerts a year.

Richard Cormier will conduct. There is another soloist on the program, Skye Kinlaw, an 11-year-old violinist who will play the Spring movement from Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Preview

Benjamin Lees

The composer's Piano Concerto No. 3, with soloist Ian Hobson, will be played by the Florida Orchestra in concerts at 8 p.m. Friday at Ferguson Hall of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa; 8 p.m. Saturday at Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg; and 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater. $17-$52. (813) 286-2403 or toll-free 1-800-662-7286; www.floridaorchestra.org.

Beethoven

The chamber version of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, with soloist Teresa Brandt, will be played by the Chamber Orchestra of Florida at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Musicale and Federated Clubs Building, 809 Horatio St., Tampa. $5, $30. (813) 273-0359; www.coof.org.

[Last modified April 12, 2007, 06:31:42]