Anyone who is totally pissed off by the persistent cold weather in these parts needs to get to the Flato Markham Theatre Tuesday night for pianist Jon Kimura Parker’s solo take on Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring a few weeks before the iconic work’s 100th birthday.
I see and listen to hundreds of concerts and recordings every season, so it’s only the best and the worst that stick. And Parker’s performance for Music Toronto five years ago remains seared in my memory.
In the Toronto Star later that night, I described it as, “40 minutes of driven drama we received by the sweat of Parker’s brow.”
I also wrote:
“If there was one force capable of pushing the seasons along Tuesday night, it would have been Vancouver pianist Jon Kimura Parker. He single-handedly advanced global warming with a solo-piano rendition of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for Music Toronto at the Jane Mallett Theatre.
“The now-iconic Modernist Russian ballet score caused a riot at its 1913 premiere in Paris. Reduced in size to one instrument, two hands, and one determined pianist, it lost none of its visceral appeal.
“Piano reductions of orchestral scores are notoriously mangy, minimized for practical reasons and not meant for public performance. Parker could have saved himself hours of practice time and fingering grief if he had taken the simple way through. Instead, he gave us a highly complex assemblage of notes and textures that would have challenged two pianos and four hands.
“Parker’s physical powers of lending each finger’s touch a different sound are breathtaking. It was dizzying to watch his hands dance and careen across the keyboard – at times it was as if Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet were there in spirit, as well.
Not content to exhaust himself with one big work, Parker is also performing other Russian treats, including Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which should me a nice break from all that primitive-modernist excitement.
You can check out the full programme here.
And here is a promotional video Parker prepared on his Rite of Spring transcription a couple of years ago:
John Terauds