It’s like going to see an all-star game, or an all-star cast performing an anthology of all your favorite dramatic scenes.
The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Piano Extravaganza returns to the Kiggins Theatre for another revue of beloved keyboard masterworks, as played by a whole platoon of great hands: eight of them, in the end.
Last year, five pianists swarmed the stage of the Kiggins to show off the power of the piano. This year there are four, and they’re all Pacific Northwest stars who live in Vancouver: Cinda Redman, Elena Vozheiko, Dimitri Zhgenti and Michael Liu.
Redman and Vozheiko often perform together as the East Meets West Duo. Liu is the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s resident pianist and one of the founders of its Chamber Series, now launching its fifth year of bringing small ensembles to the Kiggins for a more intimate experience than those big orchestra concerts at Skyview High School.
If You Go
What: Piano Extravaganza.
When:3 p.m. Oct. 16.
Where:Kiggins Theatre, 1011 Main St., Vancouver.
Tickets: $25, $10 for students.
Contact:vancouversymphony.org, 360-735-7278.
This concert will get pretty big, too. It’ll include the four pianists playing solo, and in duos, on two grand pianos. It’ll conclude with an exciting all-hands-on-deck grand finale, as all four pianists deploy all eight hands on all 176 keys.
Expect piano classics by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev — and even French jazz pianist Claude Bolling. Highlights will be piano transcriptions of two orchestral works: “La Valse” by Maurice Ravel, which is infamous for its difficulty as a solo work, and has been transcribed both for piano two-hands and piano four-hands; and “Symphonic Dances” by Sergei Rachmaninoff, which he composed both for orchestra and for piano four-hands.
The eight-hands closer is secret information that will not be revealed beforehand, according to VSO executive director Igor Shakhman. You’ll have to show up to find out.
Chamber Series
Future chamber concerts at the Kiggins will feature similarly creative and offbeat approaches to classical music. They’re all at 3 p.m. on the following Sundays:
• Nov. 20, Igor Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” (Soldier’s Tale), with a seven-piece ensemble and Portland actor Kirk Mouse, in a Russian folk tale about a soldier who trades his fiddle to the devil.
• March 19, film score arranger Rodney Sauer returns, with a VSO ensemble, to provide the musical soundtrack to three vintage silent films: Buster Keaton’s “The Scarecrow,” Charley Chase’s “What Price Goofy?,” and one of the earliest animated films ever made, “Gertie the Dinosaur.”
• May 21, Seattle composer John Paul and his original 2009 score for another silent film, “City Girl,” which was shot in Oregon in 1929.
• June 18, one of the world’s premiere cellists, Ko Iwasaki, closes the series. Michael Liu and other VSO musicians will join him.
