Symphony gets off to a classic start

Terrence Wilson got hooked on classical piano music as an 8-year-old growing up in the Bronx, surfing the radio dial, just looking for something to listen to.

No parental pressure. No pattern of family concert-going – just accidental listening.

Now, at 31, Wilson has developed an international concert career that will bring him on a return visit to Spokane as soloist in the Spokane Symphony’s season-opening classics concert Friday.

He will perform Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto as part of an all-Russian program that also includes music from Glazunov’s ballet “Raymond” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pathetique”). Music director Eckart Preu will conduct.

“My parents had been touring rock ‘n’ roll singers in their day,” Wilson said in a telephone interview from his home in Montclair, N.J. “My mother was Baby Jane, the lead singer in a girl group called Baby Jane and the Rock-a-byes, and my father was in a quartet with his brothers called the Wilson Brothers.

“When they started a family, my parents got regular jobs, with my mother working for the telephone company and my father for a polling organization.”

After being bitten by the piano bug, Wilson began studying with a neighborhood piano teacher who gave him a variety of music: classical, pop and jazz.

“But what I was interested in, really, was that next Beethoven sonata,” he says.

Wilson began studying with Juilliard’s Yoheved Kaplinsky even before he entered the renowned New York City school’s pre-college program.

Rightly or wrongly, Juilliard has earned a reputation as a high-stress, hard-bitten environment for young musicians, with a high burnout rate. No so for Wilson.

“Studying with Yoheved, she had you study with several of her colleagues, not just herself,” Wilson says. “So working with several fine teachers and sharing musical experience with other pianists in my class, Juilliard became a very positive environment for me.”

As a 15-year-old, Wilson won the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Student Concerto Competition.

“I got to play one movement of the first concerto I had ever learned, the Khachaturian Concerto,” he says. “So it is like an old friend for me, and I played it fairly often. Then for the past four or five years, I haven’t played it that much, so I am quite excited to revisit it.

“On of the great attractions for me is that this concerto is so ethnically Armenian,” Wilson adds. “Khachaturian uses Oriental-sounding melodies, particularly in the slow movement that sounds so much like a lament. It’s my favorite slow movement in the whole concerto repertoire.

“But he also fuses that ethnic character with a kind of Russian jazz, along with music from lot of other different sources – very much a concerto in the big romantic tradition, with three large solo cadenzas.”

Wilson last played in Spokane in 1999, performing another highly romantic piano concerto, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor.

He has a range of concertos in his repertoire, running from Mozart though Liszt and Rachmaninoff to such contemporary composers as John Corigliano and Michael Daugherty. Next season Wilson will introduce Daugherty’s “Deus Ex Machina,” a work currently being written for him, commissioned by a consortium of orchestras.

As part of his visit to Spokane, Wilson spoke and performed Wednesday for music students at North Central High School, a tradition the pianist enjoys as a continuation of his own school days.

“I remember my own elementary school days when we would have visiting soloists or chamber music groups who played and talked with us,” Wilson says. “Those visits made a big impression on me, and when I have done similar school visits, the kids respond very positively.

“I think this kind of contact is particularly important in light of the state of the arts and arts education in our country right now. If I leave these visits having touched or inspired even one student to pursue whatever that student loves to do, whether it be music or something else, I will think of my visit as being a success.”

Wilson and Preu will join host Steve Becker for a discussion of Friday’s concert at Classical Chats, the symphony’s pre-performance conversation, today at 12:15 p.m. in the council chambers at City Hall. The 30-minute program will be televised on City Cable Channel 5.

On Friday, Associate Conductor Morihiko Nakahara will discuss the program as part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talks series in the INB Performing Arts Center auditorium at 7 p.m.

The gala opening evening will include $1 champagne and live music in the lobby.