‘Tapestry’ celebrates the energy of dance

Music flows through time in patterns of its rhythm, composer Aaron Copland wrote somewhere, and those patterns come from the accents of speech or the lilt of the dance.

Dance dominates Saturday evening in “Tapestry of Dance,” a concert of dance-inspired music for two pianos performed by Kendall Feeney and Margaret Brink as a part of The Cathedral and The Arts series at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist.

The music ranges from arrangements of the songs of George Gershwin and Cole Porter to ballet music by Copland to Maurice Ravel’s tour-de-force “La Valse.”

“Dance is the word that evokes a multitude of images, from ballet to the twist,” Feeney says. “What we’re doing in this concert is celebrating the energy and elegance of dance and opening the dance floor for our audience to dance vicariously to some of the greatest dance-inspired music.

“What we’re hoping for,” she adds, “is that the audience will feel the same warmth people experience when they dance.”

Feeney is a well-known figure on the Spokane musical scene. She was artistic director of Zephyr, a 20th-century chamber music series. She performs with most of the classical music groups in town and is on the music faculty at Eastern Washington University, where she teaches piano and directs the EWU Contemporary Music Ensemble.

A graduate of the University of Southern California, Feeney plays in chamber music festivals throughout the country and maintains piano teaching studios in Seattle and Portland.

Brink is coordinator of keyboard studies at Washington State University and is active as a soloist in chamber music and with orchestras in the Northwest. A California native, Brink earned a doctorate in piano performance at the University of Washington. She made her New York debut in 1996 in a solo performance at Carnegie Recital Hall. Like Feeney, Brink also maintains a piano teaching studio in Seattle.

“Margaret’s regular flights to Seattle are what really enables us to work together,” Feeney says. “Were it not for Margaret’s landing here after flying to Seattle and back, it would be much harder for us to get together with her in Pullman and me here.”

The duo met when Brink taught as visiting professor of piano for a year at EWU. “It was one of those things that happen when two like-minded musicians meet. We just clicked,” Feeney says.

The music Feeney and Brink have chosen ranges from the famed “Blue Danube” by Strauss and De Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance” to some not-so-well-known dance-inspired works by Albeniz and a Pulitzer Prize-winning American, William Bolcom.

Both Brink and Feeney will perform solos on the program, with Brink playing Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor and Feeney playing Debussy’s “La plus que lente.”

“That quiet little Debussy piece leads right in to our ending with Ravel’s spectacular two-piano arrangement of ‘La Valse,’ ” Feeney says. “Most people know it in its orchestral version, so you can imagine that Ravel’s two-piano arrangement requires every bit of both pianists’ resources.

“If the two pianists don’t come out of it without nearly expiring, they just haven’t gotten inside this wild music far enough to have been taken over by it. We mean to do just that.”