Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Beloved Maine pianist Diane Walsh makes a long-awaited return to the PSO with Beethoven’s most serene piano concerto, the 4^th, in G Major, Opus 58. Pre-pandemic, she performed Clara Schumann’s youthful piano concerto with conductor Ruth Reinhardt in March 2019, and Chopin’s second concerto with Robert Moody in January 2017.

Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz has written, “I fell in love with music once I understood that sounds have souls, and it is through them that one may speak of oneself.” Her Kauyumari, first heard in 2021, has become a popular concert opener for orchestras. Ortiz wrote it for the Los Angeles Philharmonic to celebrate their return to live concerts after the worst of the pandemic had passed. The title refers to a blue deer long used as a spirit guide by the Huichol people of Mexico. The deer  helps them establish contact with their ancestors, healing their souls and the wounds of the world. Ortiz again: “Although life is filled with interruptions, Kauyumari is a comprehension and celebration of the fact that each of these rifts is also a new beginning.” This piece lasts only 8 minutes, but it is full of events and color and builds to a thrilling conclusion.

Also sprach Zarathustra, the great tone poem by Richard Strauss, first heard in 1896, is a more unruly beast. After its immediately recognizable opening, made famous in Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, various themes appear to guide us through chapters of the philosophical novel by Nietzsche. These themes appear in various guises as the hero is transformed during his journey, always searching and questing. Strauss the brilliant orchestrator is always in evidence, finding colors no one else had yet thought of. Strauss the idealistic young man is here, too, asking his own questions of life until, at the conclusion of the work, he finds no satisfactory answer, saying farewell to the listener with hesitant, inconclusive chords.

– Martin Webster