THUNDER BAY - What an apropos title for the Thunder Bay Symphony’s first concert of the 2017-2018 season.
It is a Masterworks program: of Mozart, Prokofiev, and Dvorak; and features a young guest pianist whose virtuoso career on world stages is just beginning. As said, new beginnings in his new world.
Charles Richard-Hamelin, age 28, was born and raised in a beautiful region of hills, lakes and farmland in Quebec known as Lanaudière; similar to northwestern Ontario, I’d think.
His first music degree was McGill; then a Master’s at Yale. But what vaulted Richard-Hamelin into the stratosphere of concert performance, just two years ago, was his decision to enter the 17th Frederic Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. Thinking he perhaps wasn’t quite ready, knowing he would be “aged out” for the next competition of 2020, he jumped in with both hands, so to speak. From a global pool of 450 applicants, a final group of 10 play before a panel of 17 judges. Richard-Hamelin claimed the Chopin silver medal; he also won the competition’s Krystian Zimerman prize for best sonata performance.
“The Chopin competition, it’s like the Olympics for piano,” he explained. “It never occurred to me I’d win.” From a musical family, with his father an amateur pianist-composer introducing him to a keyboard at age four, Richard-Hamelin knew he had some talent but “just wanted to have the freedom of a kid, too.”
Just two years after his international Chopin win, Charles Richard-Hamelin is on a Thunder Bay stage with TBSO to perform Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.3 in C major.
Sergei Prokofiev. For his 62 years here, he must have lived in interesting and I’d guess sometimes beleaguered times. Born 1891, he is described first in Russian history; later in an altered version in a Soviet Union. He experienced the build-up to WWI; was sent instead to the conservatory of Moscow at age 13 for “theory and composition”. Parts of his creative life occurred in Europe; then he visited America; chose to return to Russia.
Notes say he started this composition as “sketches” in 1913 (age 22); finished the concerto in 1921. The first movement, the Andante Allegro, holds a listener spellbound.
Welcome new Music Director, Maestro Paul Haas, to a symphony stage. Welcome the music of these new beginnings, in this new world. TBSO’s first Masterworks: Friday, Oct. 20. 7:30 sharp.
By Linda Maehans.
