Alexander Paley & Peiwen Chen, piano 4-hands
Alexander Paley, piano
Daisuke Yamamoto, violin
Neal Cary, cello
Jan. 10, St. Luke Lutheran Church
Arrangements of orchestral works for piano solo or piano 4-hands proliferated in the 19th century, to provide wider access to the music when orchestral concerts were few and far between, and to give composers a steadier source of income.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” one of the most lusciously string-centric works ever written, might seem an unlikely, even preposterous, candidate for a keyboard arrangement; but the composer produced one for piano 4-hands, and it’s surprisingly convincing.
Alexander Paley and Peiwen Chen, his spouse and 4-hands/duo partner, sprang Rimsky’s surprise in the 2003 edition of Paley’s Richmond music festival, and they reprised it in the opening concert of the festival’s 28th season.
The melodic flow of “Scheherazade,” and much of its atmosphere, come across more successfully than might be expected in the arrangement, especially at the moderate tempos that Paley and Chen adopted in this performance. The dances of “The legend of the Kalendar prince” and “Festival at Baghdad” are more overtly rhythmic in the piano reduction; but some of the more layered patches of orchestration and more turbulent effects – in the finale’s shipwreck, for example – translate more awkwardly to the keyboard.
The arrangement is, in its way, as much a tour de force as the orchestration. Paley and Chen played it, appropriately, to the hilt.
Paley was joined by violinist Daisuke Yamamoto, concertmaster of the Richmond Symphony, and Neal Cary, the orchestra’s principal cellist, in Rachmaninoff’s “Trio élégiaque” No. 2 in D minor, Op. 9.
This work was composed in 1893 as an elegy to Tchaikovsky and was given the same subtitle, “In Memory of a Great Artist,” as Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor, written 12 years earlier as an elegy to his mentor, the pianist-conductor Nikolai Rubinstein. Like the Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff’s trio is lengthy (its first movement runs about 20 minutes and feels longer) and darkly lyrical except for a few flashes of light in a central set of variations. It can be quite a slog in the wrong hands.
Paley, Yamamoto and Cary proved to be the right hands. Paley thrives on Rachmaninoff’s strain of high-romantic rhetoric and virtuosic keyboard writing, and Cary is a past master at dark lyricism. Yamamoto, not usually inclined toward heart-on-sleeve romanticism, tuned nicely to his colleagues’ interpretive wavelength. The Rogeri violin that the symphony acquired for him last year, a rather dark-toned instrument, suited this music perfectly.
The Alexander Paley Music Festival continues with a program of Franck, Shostakovich and Bizet at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 11, and music of Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt at 3 p.m. Jan. 12, at St. Luke Lutheran Church, 7757 Chippenham Parkway. Suggested donation: $20. Details: (804) 272-0486; http://paleymusicfestival.org