Majewski returns to play with SSQ

The best classical chamber music, like the best jazz, is a partnership. And Sunday’s Spokane String Quartet concert sees the return of pianist Tadeusz Majewski, a familiar guest partner.

Majewski will join the quartet’s first violinist, Mateusz Wolski, in the “Devil’s Trill” Sonata by Giuseppi Tartini and Henryk Wienewaski’s “Legende,” Op. 17.

He also will perform a group of Frederic Chopin’s solo works, finishing with the popular Polonaise in A-flat major. Majewski will end the concert with Brahmas’ Piano Quintet in F minor with the full quartet: violinists Wolksi and Misha Rosenker, violist Jeannette Wee-Yang and cellist Helen Byrne.

“I first performed in this area when I was in my early 20s,” Majewski recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Minneapolis.

“I had been in a chamber music residency at the Banff Center. And since I had a wife and two very young children, I needed to have a little extra income so I was playing at a resort at Emerald Lake.

“Three vacationing doctors from Idaho heard me, we started talking and they invited me to Coeur d’Alene to give a house concert,” he said. “Then the next year I played a recital at the college there, and I had been introduced to Dr. William Britt, who was a board member of the Spokane String Quartet.”

Majewski has performed with the quartet several times, most recently in 2004.

“This time the members of the quartet are entirely new to me,” he says. “I was surprised and happy to learn that the new first violinist is, like me, Polish. But we had never known each other.”

Majewski grew up in Cracow, Poland’s “second city,” where he made his debut at age 13. He won the Chopin Society Competition in Warsaw in 1977 and played for Pope John Paul II’s first papal return to Poland in 1979 before leaving the country in 1981 during the Solidarity Crisis.

“I had relatives who lived in Minneapolis, cousins I’d never met, who invited me to visit them,” Majewski says. “And I decided to live there and have been there ever since.”

He won the first New York Chopin Competition in 1984, and made his New York debut after receiving a McKnight Career Grant in 1997.

Like most Polish pianists, Majewski frequently performs the work of Chopin, and has recorded several pieces on compact disc for the Emerald label.

But Brahms’ Quintet for Piano and Strings is a special case for him.

“This is such an interesting work because Brahms had such a hard time giving it its final form,” Majewski says.

“First he wrote it as a string sextet, but his best friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, didn’t like it. Then he rewrote it as a sonata for two pianos, but the woman he played all his new works for piano with, Clara Schumann, didn’t like it.

“So at last he decided to compromise and rewrote it again for piano with string quartet,” Majewski says. “It is one of the really great masterpieces, one which, no matter how well you play it, there is always something more to be done with it just out of your reach.

“That challenge is what makes it such a great experience no matter how often I play it.”