For the visiting conductor and visiting guest artist, the upcoming Texarkana Symphony Orchestra concert provides an opportunity for something new.
Guest conductor Lawrence Loh and pianist Natasha Paremski will join forces with TSO players for Johannes Brahms' "Concerto No. 2, Op. 83 in B-flat Major" on Saturday, Feb. 2, at 7:30 p.m. The Perot Theatre concert also includes another late Romantic composer, Sergei Rahmaninoff, with his "Symphonic Dances, Op. 45."
For Paremski, it's a chance to perform a Brahms work she wants to perform. And for Loh, he gets to make connections here, where he knows there's a strong orchestra awaiting him.
Loh said the Brahms and Rachmaninoff works aren't particularly connected thematically, but he simply loves both of them.
Of Brahms' "Concerto No. 2," Loh said this concerto is regarded as one of the greats in the repertoire. "It's massive. There are four movements," he said. To him, they provide "a perfect arc from beginning to end." The piece rises and falls but feels connected throughout, he said.
And of Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances," it's not only a very mature work composed at the end of a great composer's life, but also more.
"I think that he was able to break out of the form of the symphony and just write something that really spoke to him at this time in his life," Loh said. "It allowed him to be a little more experimental. It allowed him to focus on dance, but it's not like one big dance. It's a series of many different dances: noon, dusk and midnight they are all so contrasting, so beautiful."
If there is a connection between these selections, it's that the concert features a
pianist known for playing Rachmaninoff who'll instead play Brahms in this concert, he said.
This will be Loh's second time to work with Paremski. When he interviewed her on stage the first time, he asked if there was a concerto she really wanted to play that she'd never been asked to perform. "She said Brahms' second," he recalled.
Known for playing all sorts of composers (Gershwin, Chopin), he said, she never had the chance to play this Brahms piece.
Loh vowed they'd do it, and then Clark contacted him about guest conducting. Hence, the opportunity landed in their hands. It all happened within a week.
"She is amazing. She is very, very completely committed musically," Loh said, praising Paremski's focus on creating an exciting performance.
Andrew Clark, the TSO's executive director, says both compositions are also new for the orchestra. "The Rachmaninoff is a very challenging piece and will certainly stretch our orchestra, which we're excited about," he said.
Loh was tapped for the guest conductor role because of the good things Clark heard of him. Loh's experience includes formerly serving as associate conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and he's also conducted major orchestras across the country, the director said.
"Currently, the director of music of the West Virginia Orchestra," Clark said. He also conducts Christmas programs at the DSO. "If anybody has ever been over to the DSO for one of their many Christmas concerts that they do over the entire month of December, they may have actually seen Larry conduct."
Although he's primarily known for pops conducting, said Clark, Loh really wanted to do a masterworks concert with the TSO.
"Natasha is, of course, a Russia-born pianist who came to the United States at the age of 8 and makes her home in New York, as well, and has a lot of international fame now, played with all the major orchestras in the United States," Clark said
It will be a real treat to hear her perform this Brahms piece here, he said. "We'll have a nine-foot concert grand Steinway from Steinway Hall in Dallas here in the Perot."
Clark describes Brahms as a composer who took an absolute music path. "The idea of wanting to maintain all the classical masters but with a new harmonic language," he said.
Atypically for concertos, "Concerto No. 2" has four movements total, including the third, an andante with an extended cello solo. It's a chance for the TSO's principal cellist, Brett Andrews, to shine.
"It's just great music, full of a lot of life," Clark said.
About Rachmaninoff, the director said, "Many consider it, and it truly is, somewhat autobiographical in that it kind of sums up all his compositional history and his compositional abilities in this one piece." The piece was written in New York, the composer overlooking Long Island as he wrote it, he said.
Finished as World War II broke out, Clark said, "Symphonic Dances" references Rachmaninoff's homeland. "It's introspective in that he wanted it to reflect his native Russia and the Russia that he had once known, not the Russia at the time that he was writing the piece so there are a lot of folk elements to it."
Ancient chants are incorporated, too. Among the unique qualities of the piece is the inclusion of an alto sax.
Loh's concert preview starts at 6:40 p.m.
(Tickets: $58, $42, $30. Student tickets available with ID; group discounts available. Buy tickets at the Perot Theatre Box Office: 903-792-4992 or PerotTheatre.com.)