Even given Parlando’s high bar for the eclectic, with the program “Sidewalk Tango” Ian Niederhoffer raised it a notch or two above.

The thematic red thread running through Parlando’s Sunday afternoon concert at Merkin Hall was the symbiotic relationship between energy and change. For Niederhoffer, that phenomenon manifests itself in the world’s ever-evolving great cities, such as Berlin, Seoul, and Buenos Aires, all of which were represented musically by the afternoon’s three chosen composers.

The music of the night was the theme of the first concert of the new season from the chamber orchestra Parlando. But as conductor Ian Niederhoffer pointed out in his introduction, “night” has many flavors, and many emotional connotations. Composers have evoked them in countless ways over the centuries. This “Night Music” program drew on Mozart, Fauré, Bartók, and Tōru Takemitsu to prove the point.

Fauré’s “Nocturne” from his Shylock Suite, incidental music to a late-19th-century French production of The Merchant of Venice, is only a couple of minutes long. But here it functioned as more than an introduction or appetizer. The string orchestra produced a cool, glowing sound that evoked the romantic spirit of the night while establishing Mr. Niederhoffer’s tasteful sense of balance and tone.

The enduring theme of night music — the nocturne — was explored in the latest Merkin Hall performance by Parlando. Conductor Ian Niederhoffer, who founded this promising chamber orchestra in 2019, conceived and led a packed house through an insightful and captivating rumination on the musical night-scape.

Niederhoffer ingeniously emphasized — in generous spoken introductions to the pieces — the heightened emotions experienced after sun down. And the evening’s repertoire captured some of the various ways composers have been inspired by night to harness those intense feelings.

WESTERLY — Parlando, the New York City-based chamber orchestra known for "bringing intimate and accessible orchestral experiences to wider audiences," returns to Westerly this weekend for its second performance at the United.

"We had so much fun, how could we not return," said Parlando founder and director Ian Niederhoffer on the telephone Tuesday morning.

"It was an absolute no-brainer," he added with a laugh, noting that laughter is actually the focus of this year's program and the chamber orchestra plans to "turn up the humor" for an unforgettable evening of laughs, wittiness and harmony."

Parlando, the chamber orchestra founded in 2019 by Ian Niederhoffer, offered an evening of music about music: the subject was Mozart, and works by Reynaldo Hahn, Alfred Schnittke, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov were performed. 

‘Every concert tells a story’ is the motto of Parlando, a New York-based chamber orchestra founded in 2019 by Ian Niederhoffer, whose aim is to engage audiences in a shared sense of discovery through creative programming. Their most recent concert – the third in a season of four programs they regularly present at Merkin Hall – told several stories.

Not the least of these involves the remarkably effective formula Niederhoffer and his ensemble have been refining to build a welcoming, quasi-familiar bond with their listeners. Parlando’s bond is its brand. Each program’s works are chosen to illustrate aspects of a given theme. That is hardly an unusual practice, but the connections Niederhoffer posits are typically subtle and thought-provoking. Most importantly, the unifying themes connect topics we face in our lives in general as human beings with inherently musical concepts or processes.

Sunday afternoon’s theme was ‘Transient Voices’, referring to music’s capacity to ‘capture the ephemera’ – which Niederhoffer discussed in his introductory comments. That too is part of the brand: unfussy, easy-to-follow chats that are smart, articulate and packed with suggestions for tangents that might be helpful to audience members at any level of familiarity with classical tradition.

Niederhoffer described the ephemeral nature of music itself as a characteristic that equips this art with a special ability to help us cope with the impermanence we experience – not just to be more mindful of that condition, but to appreciate how what seems transient can endure – just as music, a transient phenomenon par excellence that dissolves into silence at the end of each performance, can reawaken dormant memories.

Without contrivance, Niederhoffer toggles between the abstract and the most concrete musical detail. Part of his uniquely compelling talent is an ability to bring these ideas to life without seeming reductive or oversimplified. This is an alternative to the predictable patterns of program music thinking, in which a one-to-one correspondence might be emphasized between, say, a dissonant climax and a stabbing in the associated story. What interests Niederhoffer and his Parlando musicians – and what they seek to engage the audience in experiencing – is how music tells these stories through specifically and uniquely musical details.

An affinity for underrepresented works or lesser-known pieces of the repertoire is likewise part of Parlando’s identity. Niederhoffer opened with Umbra, a short piece for string orchestra by Aida Shirazi from 2017. Born in Tehran in 1987, Shirazi cofounded the Iranian Female Composers Association as a platform to support creative work by young artists across the Iranian diaspora. The topic of transience in this case, according to Niederhoffer, is related to memories of a distant home. Shirazi went abroad to the West to study music, earning her doctorate at the University of California, Davis.

She channels a sense of being out of place, disconnected with her home culture, into the unsettling, shadowy, in-the-margins textures of Umbra – a moment of eclipse that totally blocks the light source. Niederhoffer shaped ultra-sensitive nuances of volume and textural weight to enhance the music’s compelling internal drama of filtered memories, with brief pizzicatos recalling haunting impressions of the santur, the ancient Iranian hammered dulcimer (a guidepost the conductor, in his prefatory remarks, pointed out).

Parlando’s concerts are designed to be efficient and compact – no intermission, but a chance to unwind in the lobby afterward and perhaps gather to chat further about the music. The performances are ideally calibrated to the intimacy and warm acoustic of Merkin Hall, which looked to be close to capacity (449 seats) with a fully attentive audience.

The main course was Shostakovich’s Symphony No.14, music that directly confronts the ultimate fact of human transience: the death that ends each story. The composer sketched the score at white heat during a hospital stay in 1969, when he was gripped by thoughts of imminent death. Niederhoffer is only in his twenties, but he showed an uncanny sympathy for this late work of an artist obsessed not just with death’s ineluctability but with its omnipresence. That, in a nutshell, is the ‘story’ of the Fourteenth, a work unusually structured as a sequence of eleven movements, each setting a poem dealing with the topic of death – most often a violent, cruel and tragic death that arrives prematurely. The scoring is similarly unconventional: string orchestra with two percussionists and two vocal soloists (soprano and bass).

Niederhoffer presided over a tautly dramatic interpretation, playing up Shostakovich’s radical contrasts of the lower depths of cellos and double bass with frantically screaming violins in highest register. Principal cellist Diana Golden contributed especially memorable lines of mournful cantabile, while the ensemble’s unison figurations and accents emanated a stark beauty.

For his poetic stories of death, Shostakovich chose four sources, using Russian translations (paraphrases and even rewritings would be a more accurate description) of non-Russian poets: Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbeker (in the pivotal ninth movement about a hero killed by the tyrannical state) and, in the epilogue-like final two movements, Rainer Maria Rilke. English translations were projected as surtitles.

Niederhoffer offered a fluent introduction to the background of Shostakovich’s tormented career, referring to a depiction of prison-camp life in one of the songs as another example of the composer ‘giving a musical middle finger to Stalin’. He also addressed the great paradox of the Symphony No.14: that music of such unrelenting, indeed exhausting, bleakness can impart a restorative feeling that even approaches joy. As Shostakovich himself put it: ‘I want listeners to this symphony to realize that “life” is truly beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never committing a base act’.

Soprano Irina Rindzuner and bass Mikhail Svetlov gave impassioned accounts of their parts, investing them with genuinely operatic intensity and effective touches of characterization to give each vignette or setting a recognizable atmosphere. They were also well-matched, joining voices in the final movement for the first time to devastatingly powerful effect in the poetry of Rilke.

Parlando’s next and final program of the season, ‘The Other Mozart Effect’, will take place on 1 May.

Ian Niederhoffer may need to tweak his patented chili-pepper ranking system for gauging the listener difficulty of musical works. 

For “Transient Voices,”Parlando’s latest program, Aida Shirazi’s Umbra earned a difficulty rating of three and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 a two on a scale of five. Reasonable minds may disagree with him and may have wanted to kick both up a notch or two.

But without question Sunday’s performance by the chamber orchestra at Merkin Hall was off the scale for its integrity and emotional impact. Apart from his abundant talents as a conductor, Niederhoffer’s appeal rests in his musical curiosity and ability to discern commonalities in extremely disparate works. In his preconcert remarks, the conductor explained that composers have the unique ability to capture the ephemeral and preserve it in music. For Niederhoffer, that was the thread which linked Shirazi’s brief work and the Shostakovich symphony.

Born and raised in Tehran, Shirazi is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. Umbra (Clouds) is a departure of sorts for the California-based composer as it is not based on a literary source. 

The Iranian composer’s objective in creating Umbra was to depict a very personal and introspective journey through music. Scored for strings, Umbra evolves though almost imperceptible changes, which Shirazi compares to a floating three-dimensional object rotating at a very slow pace. Shiraz interjects slabs of luminous, transparent sound with fascinating musical outbursts. These included exquisite dissonances, pizzicati, and unusual bowing techniques. Niederhoffer placed each one perfectly, giving the music an inherent vitality despite its static nature.

Shirazi also enhanced the sense of motion by silence. The glacial movement of the music was frequently stopped by a pause, which conductor and orchestra imbedded with mystery and a sense of apprehension. 

As its title implies, at its core Umbra is about ephemera. The work ended with the music simply evaporating into a calming nothingness, held  by audience members for an extended period.

Niederhoffer cannot be challenged on stating that Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 is one of the darkest works in the repertoire. Suffering from various debilitating ailments in the final years of his life, Shostakovich’s fixation on death found its ultimate expression in his penultimate symphony, which he might easily have cast as a song cycle or oratorio.

Composed in 1969, it is a setting of eleven poems by Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire. Wilhelm Küchelbecker and Rainer Maria Rilke for two voices and a chamber orchestra of strings and percussion. The poets, of whom only Küchelbecker was Russian, all died young and tragically.

Shostakovich addressed death without a trace of sentimentality and certainly no hope for redemption. The brutality of life under Stalin had robbed him of such illusions. Nonetheless, the symphony’s emotional power and the strange beauty of the orchestral score makes the Fourteenth Symphony not only one of the composer’s most personal works, but also among his greatest.

Niederhoffer was born to conduct this music. The work clearly engages him intellectually and spiritually, as well as musically. He brought the weight of history to this performance, by making the dark sentiments of the poets’s texts resonate with the world in which we live. It is also music which requires the finest precision and passion, are two of Niederhoffer’s greatest strengths as a conductor.

His choice of soloists, soprano Irina Rinzuner and bass-baritone Mikhail Svetlov, brought grandeur and gravitas to the performance. The Russian-born Svetlov possesses a cavernous voice capable of expressing the most profound of emotions. Rinzuner, an American soprano, has an instrument of considerable size and thrust, but also of great beauty. Her classic elegance summoned the spirit of the great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, who sang in the first performances of the work in Moscow.

The third song, a setting of Apollinaire’s “Lorelei,” displayed both singers at their dramatic best in an intensely dramatic reading of the tale. Rinzuner’s spot-on pitch and vocal placement combined with the tolling of bells for a spine-tingling effect. She was equally effective in the setting of Apollinaire’s “The Suicide,” singing of a tormented man whose body lies in a grave marked by three lilies, but no cross.

The emotional core of the symphony rests in the setting for bass of another Apollinaire poem, “At the Santé Prison.” It is the lament of a prisoner stripped naked lying alone in a cell, whose identity has been reduced to a number. Svetlov sang with restrained intensity, poignantly depicting the man’s despair and fleeting memories of his youth in a remarkable range of vocal color and dynamics ranging from pale and haunting to full-blooded howls of terror.

The sounds which Niederhoffer drew from his players matched the intensity and dramatic impact of the two soloists. Especially potent was the playing of the lower strings which conjured the gloom that often pervades the work. There are also moments of luminescent, almost eerie beauty in the score which the violins captured perfectly, as did the percussionists (on bells, castanets, tom-toms, slapstick, vibraphone, wood block, xylophone, and celesta).

The soloists only sing together in the final song, a setting of Rilke’s “Conclusion.” Niederhoffer suggested that there was a glimmer of hope in this final expression of the greatness and inevitability of death, but there was none in this performance . It was, however, as Shostakovich intended, a sublime musical depiction of an utterly bleak finale that was honest and true to life.

What's the link between the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in June, and the early-20th-century titans Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Darius Milhaud? A mutual flair for the theatrical, which is reflected in the title of Parlando's concert on Sunday:

"Melodrama."

While all three artists wrote operas, this chamber orchestra will focus on some smaller yet substantial works: Milhaud's "Le Bœuf sur le toit," Saariaho's "Graal théâtre" (featuring the violinist Geneva Lewis), and Korngold's "Much Ado About Nothing" Suite.

By giving short spoken introductions to each piece from the stage, the orchestra's conductor and founder, Ian Niederhoffer, makes good on its motto: "Every concert tells a story." But smart, unusual programming on this level fosters a gripping narrative of its own, too.

The New York City-based chamber orchestra Parlando aims to bridge the gap between audience and performer.

That may sound a bit self-evident — doesn’t every artist and ensemble want to connect with listeners?

But for Parlando and its founder and music director Ian Niederhoffer, “bridging the gap” means something special: truly direct communication, and engagement in creative and fun ways.

Niederhoffer engages with the audience before each concert, explicating the theme of the program. The selections vary widely, but each concert’s theme connects standard works with new or underrepresented music. The upcoming “Odysseys” concert, October 4 at Merkin Hall, brings together two contemporary pieces, Jimmy Lopez’s Guardian of the Horizon and Joey Roukens’s Visions at Sea, with Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence.

Just as he does with audiences, Niederhoffer was happy to speak with us about Parlando and how he pursues the orchestra’s goal “to make all classical music feel familiar to the audience, no matter the composer, era, or style.”

WESTERLY — Ian Niederhoffer, a young conductor widely praised for "his elegance and dynamism on the podium," was on the telephone Tuesday morning explaining how a 1929 silent film, a famous Russian composer and a contemporary chamber orchestra will all merge Saturday for an unusual program called "Silent Film with Live Orchestra: Parlando" at the United Theatre.

The event, which will include a screening of the 1929 Soviet film, "The New Babylon," will be accompanied by a live performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s "The New Babylon," by Parlando, a New York City-based chamber orchestra founded by Niederhoffer.

"The real star is Shostakovich and his brilliant, vibrant, vivacious score," said Niederhoffer, a 2019 Yale graduate who has been spending summers in Watch Hill and Weekapaug with his family since he was a 5-year-old.

Niederhoffer said he got the idea for Saturday's program soon after a conversation he had last summer with Carly Callahan, the United's executive director.

The conductor and music director of Parlando, known for bringing intimate and accessible orchestral experiences to wider audiences, Niederhoffer said his philosophy — and that of Parlando — is that "every concert tells a story."

"When Carly told me the history of the United," Niederhoffer said, and how it began as a Vaudeville place then became a movie house, ideas for the program — which ties together the United's past with its future plans as a "a multimedia communal space" with live music and film — began to take shape.

"I thought what better way [to tell a story] than with the movie-music combination of 'The New Babylon,' and Shostakovich’s vibrant score," Niederhoffer said.

Niederhoffer said he plans to talk briefly before the program begins, just to explain what the film and the Paris Commune are all about.

"It's really a love story," he said, "a love story about a revolutionary shopkeeper and a soldier," two lovers caught in the throes of political upheaval in 19th century Paris.

The shopkeeper ends up being the brave character while the soldier "chickens out," he said with a chuckle.

"It actually holds up pretty well for a Russian propaganda film," he added. "It's very contemporary as far as gender roles."

"The story is a little opaque, and a little self-serious," said the conductor with a laugh. "The score brings it all to life. It brings a sparkle."

Niederhoffer, who won three prizes at the 2021 Khachaturian International Conducting Competition, will be returning to conduct the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra during the upcoming season as winner of the Audience Prize. Recent engagements include appearances with Onsite Opera, Music Talks, Gramercy Opera, and cover conducting for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

In 2019, Niederhoffer made his European operatic debut conducting two world premiere chamber operas at the Wiener Kammeroper with the Vienna Summer Music Festival. In 2017, he made his U.S. professional debut with the Vermont Mozart Festival and was invited back as conductor of their 2018 season, leading the Festival Orchestra in several concerts across northern Vermont. Later that year, he appeared as guest conductor with the Salomé Chamber Orchestra at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.

A participant in both the 2019 and 2022 Järvi Conducting Academies, where he conducted in master classes with Paavo Järvi, Neeme Järvi, Kristjan Järvi, and Leonid Grin, Niederhoffer began his conducting studies at the age of 15. In 2021, he was named Artist of Promise at the Conducting Academy of the Verbier Festival where he assistant conducted for Lahav Shani, Daniel Harding, Antonio Pappano, and Gábor Takacs-Nágy.

Dedicated to the audience experience, Niederhoffer "seeks to make classical music engaging while preserving the integrity of the music."

He has become known as a charismatic, engaging pre-concert speaker, with an anecdotal style that puts the audience at ease. Inventor of the “chili pepper system,” where each note represents a level of listening difficulty, like chili peppers at a Thai restaurant, Niederhoffer is committed to making the concert experience engaging and comprehensible for all audiences.

While studying at Yale College, he founded and served as music director for the Yale Undergraduate Chamber Orchestra, commissioning six world premieres over his three-year tenure. He also served as assistant conductor of the Yale Symphony Orchestra and music director of the Opera Theater of Yale College.

Niederhoffer graduated with distinction with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music and was awarded both the Wrexham Prize and the Joseph Lentilhon Selden Memorial Award by Yale University for his “verve, idealism, and constructive interest in music.”

The New Babylon

August 26, 2023 7:30 PM

United Theatre -- Westerly, RI

Dmitri Shostakovich – The New Babylon

On August 26th, 2023 at 7:30 PM the United Theatre in Westerly, RI, Parlando will present a live-music screening of The New Babylon. Parlando’s presentation of The New Babylon ties together the history of the United Theatre, from its birthplace as a movie palace to its future as a multimedia communal space. Harkening back to early cinema’s tradition of live music accompanying silent films, this event would also highlight the importance and history of film being a communal experience.

The event consists of a screening with live orchestral music of the 1929 Soviet film, The New Babylon. The score, written by Dmitri Shostakovich is witty, satirical, and compelling, highlighting the pioneering cinematography and acting techniques of this early work depicting the days of the Paris Commune. Shostakovich’s first job was serving as a live piano accompanist to silent movies, and he was a great admirer of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton -- The New Babylon is his only full-length accompaniment to a silent film.

Before the screening, conductor Ian Niederhoffer will speak briefly about the story and history behind the movie and the Paris Commune and give some context as to what makes this work so special.

———

Odysseys

October 4, 2023, 7:30 PM

Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center – New York, NY

 

Joey Roukens -- Visions at Sea

Jimmy López Bellido -- Guardian of the Horizon

Ade Williams, Violin

Gabriel Cabezas, Cello

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky -- Souvenir de Florence

Every journey has obstacles and leaves the traveler changed upon returning. How is this journey and transfiguration expressed through music?

Works include Joey Roukens’s sea-shanty-infused Visions at Sea, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s lush Souvenir de Florence, and Jimmy Lopez’s transcendental Guardian of the Horizon, performed by Adé Williams and Gabriel Cabezas, who premiered the work with the Sphinx Virtuosi in 2017.

——— 

Melodrama

December 3, 2023, 3 PM

Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center – New York, NY

 

Darius Milhaud -- Le Bœuf sur le toit

Kaija Saariaho -- Graal théatre

Geneva Lewis, Violin

Erich Korngold -- Much Ado About Nothing Suite

What is the relationship between music and the theatre? From folk theatre to Shakespeare to the very conventions of the concert hall, come explore what exactly makes a piece of music theatrical. 

Featuring violinist Geneva Lewis performing Graal Théâtre, Kaija Saariaho’s enchanting violin concerto, the concert also includes Darius Milhaud’s Charlie Chaplain-esque Le Bœuf sur le toit, and Erich Korngold’s delightful Much Ado about Nothing Suite.

 ———

Transient Voices

February 25, 2024, 3 PM

Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center – New York, NY

 

Aida Shirazi -- Umbra

Dmitri Shostakovich -- Symphony No. 14

Irina Rindzuner, Soprano

Mikhail Svetlov, Bass

How can music grab on to something as it slips away? Join Parlando as it explores how music captures the ephemeral, from the memory of home, to nature, or to life itself.

Works include Aida Shirazi’s mystical Umbra and Dmitri Shostakovich’s deeply evocative Symphony No. 14, featuring Irina Rindzuner and Mikhail Svetlov.

 ———

The Other Mozart Effect

May 1, 2024, 7:30 PM

Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center – New York, NY

 

Reynaldo Hahn -- Mozart Overture

Alfred Schnittke -- Moz-Art à la Haydn

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov -- Mozart and Salieri

Joseph Parrish, Bass-Baritone

Daniel McGrew, Tenor

Young composers have been hailed as "the next Mozart" for generations, but how did composers interpret Mozart’s legacy? Join Parlando as it explores Mozart’s impact on classical music, culminating in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, the precursor to the Oscar-winning film Amadeus. 

The program includes Reynaldo Hahn’s charming Mozart Overture and Alfred Schnittke’s witty tribute to the 18th century, Moz-Art à la Haydn, before concluding with Rimsky Korsakov’s one-act opera, Mozart and Salieri, featuring Joseph Parrish as Salieri and Daniel McGrew as Mozart.

The institutionalization of classical music has been a double-edged sword. One side of the blade has carved a space in which the music of the past is preserved through performing venues, ensembles, and the conservatory training of new musicians and composers. The opposite edge has cut away most connections with the larger world of music and listeners, leaving classical music culture to ponder how to get people to come and experience their preservation efforts.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as Ian Niederhoffer’s Parlando chamber ensemble showed, again, Sunday afternoon at Merkin Hall in their season finale. Parlando belongs in the company with Death of Classical, organizations that make the classical world appealing to a broad audience while also honoring the listener’s intelligence and curiosity. 

Parlando does this mainly through Niederhoffer’s programming concepts and his remarks from the stage before each work (the cutesy labeling of each piece in the program with the musical equivalent of the chili pepper symbols seen on Thai restaurant menus is superfluous). Sunday, the program was “Requiem for a Polka,” a thoughtful and entertaining concert of danceable classical music.

Well, not quite danceable. Via Jacques Ibert’s Divertissement, Henryk Górecki’s Kleine Requiem für eine Polka, and the Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra, by Friedrich Gulda there were polkas and other dance flavors. But the larger point Niederhoffer made was that European classical music once was closely connected to popular music. This was true from before the idea of classical music even existed, even before the song “L’ homme armée” became the foundation for much Renaissance liturgical music.

Niederhoffer hinted at how the development of audio recording and reproduction technology cemented the idea of genres and indirectly separated the idea of entertainment from classical music. Parlando’s lively performance put on display the sense of basic fun and pleasure in music, regardless of genre, and how musicians held onto it even if classical music culture didn’t.

Entertainment is the purpose of Ibert’s Divertissement—music literally meant to occupy the time between scenes at the theater, and keep the audience attentive and energized. The music has moments of slow sensuality, but mostly dances and leaps with energy and agility, full of jokes and fun. It’s an ideal mix of Debussy’s colors and Stravinsky’s neo-classicism. The only drawback in the playing is that the ensemble feels like it’s outgrown Merkin, with too much strength for the confines of the hall..

Górecki’s Requiem is a fascinating piece, capturing his ambivalent regret about the dissolution of quasi-universal European culture after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the reemergence of splintered nationalism at the crossroads of Germany, Poland, and the then Czechoslovakia. The vehicle is the polka, abstracted here, a musical lingua franca that cemented countries and also musical styles. This was a concentrated, measured performance, controlled and confident, with the strange obsessive quiet and stillness, alternating with mania, that Górecki picked up from Shostakovich. One was impressed with how Parlando switched with ease between those two feelings, all without sentimentality.

Henry Shapard, principal cellist at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, was the guest soloist for Gulda’s wild concerto. Gulda was a singular and incredible musician, arguably the finest Beethoven and Mozart pianist of the 20th century, and also a terrific jazz and rock musician. He saw no separation between the importance of these genres and did what he wanted in music, following nothing other than his personal imperatives. 

The concerto juxtaposes a Mozartian wind ensemble—given some impressively stylish music—and a jazz-rock group with brass, built around a guitar, bass, and drums. Until the finale of this five-movement work the two groups alternate, one reaching a cadence that the other picks up in a hilariously apposite, and skillful style. It’s all serious fun, extroverted and charismatic while full of real feeling and love for all music.

Shapard clearly had a hell of a lot of fun playing this, and seemed as serious and entertained about the notes as Gulda was. His sound and rhythmic sharpness carried both the rock and classical styles, and his playing of the middle cadenza was terrific, with a real sense of finding his way spontaneously through the music. 

The one minor flaw in the performance had to do with that double-edged sword again—except for percussionist Andrew Beall at the drum kit, the rock group couldn’t play convincing rhythms. But in the end, the point was that for Parlando, it didn’t matter what you called the music, as long as you dug it.