Pianist Freire Will Put New Steinway To The Test

Nelson Freire will be vying with a 9-foot-long black beast for the audience’s attention tonight at the Opera House. The Spokane Symphony purchased a new Steinway concert grand piano and has brought the acclaimed Brazilian pianist to Spokane to inaugurate it.

Freire will play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in a program that will also include Dvorak’s Symphony No. 7. The symphony’s music director, Fabio Mechetti, will conduct.

“We’re going to ‘baptize’ our new instrument with the Rachmaninoff Third,” says Mechetti. “This concerto tests nearly everything a piano can do.”

Freire, Mechetti adds, is the ideal performer to make the test. “He’s the best-kept secret among pianists.”

Tonight’s performance is the first time Freire has performed in Spokane. However, since his official debut in 1959, he has performed in every major city in recitals and with such orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the London Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. Freire records on the Sony, Audiofon, London and Teldec labels.

Freire was born in Boa Esperanza in Brazil in 1944 and he first performed in public at the age of 4. After winning the Rio de Janeiro International Piano competition in 1957, he went to Vienna on a Brazilian national scholarship to study with Bruno Seidlhofer. Freire made his U.S. debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1970. Although his repertoire includes the whole range of the piano repertoire, he is best known, in the words of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, “for the bravura of his interpretation of Romantic compositions.”

Most pianists consider Rachmaninoff’s fearsomely difficult Third Piano Concerto, with its soaring melodies and flashing passage work, a peerless example of Romantic composition.

Rachmaninoff wrote the work for his friend and fellow Russian, Josef Hoffmann, a pianist known for his uncanny technical and musical skills. Hoffmann never played the piece. For years, the concerto was the nearly exclusive property of the composer himself and of a young Russian pianistic wizard named Vladimir Horowitz. Later, Rachmaninoff’s Third became a favorite concerto of Van Cliburn, who played it, along with Tchaikovsky’s First, during his famous victory performance in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

It was Cliburn, in fact, who chose the Steinway piano the Spokane Symphony has been using for the past 25 years. The symphony’s new Steinway, the instrument Freire will play tonight, was chosen by Mechetti and pianist Horacio Gutierrez, who performed with the symphony in 1993, opening Mechetti’s first season as music director.

“It’s not easy to choose a piano for the Opera House,” Mechetti says. “The hall is so big; you have to have a piano that will fill up all that space, reaching even to the last row of the balcony, and still have a beautiful sound.

“Horacio and I tried several pianos in the basement of Steinway’s in New York,” the conductor says. “This one sounded wonderful there. We hope it will sound just as wonderful here.”

The symphony’s older piano will not be retired or sold. Plans are to have it reconditioned at the Steinway factory in New York and returned to Spokane for works the symphony performs requiring two pianos. A grant from the Comstock Foundation funded the purchase of the new piano and reconditioning of the older piano.

Mechetti will give pre-concert talk about the evening’s music in the Opera House auditorium at 7 p.m.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SPOKANE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA CONDUCTED BY FABIO MECHETTI, WITH PIANO SOLOIST NELSON FREIRE Location and time: Opera House, tonight, 8 Tickets: $12-$27, available at the symphony ticket office, 624-1200, and G&B outlets