Fast-tempo piano piece to open Splash concert

A few things separate Symphony With a Splash from your typical Symphony Classics concert. It’s a little more laid back, there’s live music in the lobby beforehand, some concertgoers actually get to sit on the stage with the orchestra and the programs tend to focus on more offbeat selections.

All four of the pieces in tonight’s Splash concert have unusual elements to them. The program opens with Conlon Nancarrow’s “Player Piano Study,” a breakneck tempo of a piece originally designed for a programmable, mechanical piano.

“It’s super fast with super difficult rhythms, and some of it you can’t humanly play,” said symphony conductor Eckart Preu of the Nancarrow piece. “So when you transcribe it for orchestra, all these musicians shake their heads, saying, ‘I have no idea how to play this.’ ”

The difficulty continues on Miguel del Aguila’s 1988 piece “Toccata,” a Latin-inspired composition that not only involves wine bottles being used as percussion – “We tried out several wine bottles,” Preu said, “and every wine bottle has a different sound” – but includes a wild burst of musical improvisation that’s designed to sound like a frenzied Latin American festival.

“It’s always dancing, it’s always swinging,” Preu said of the del Aguila piece. “There’s no measure like the other; every measure has a different meter, which makes it very difficult to play, but it swings very nicely.

Following “Toccata” is Avner Dorman’s Concerto for Piccolo, which features a piccolo solo by the symphony’s Alaina Bercilla.

“The piccolo is not your typical solo instrument,” Preu said. “It’s usually designed for march rhythms … or for doubling the flute in the upper register. So putting it out there is really strange – what can you do with that little thing? I think that’s what the composer is trying to do here. It’s actually valid as a solo instrument.”

And then there’s the Beethoven piece – well, it’s just barely a Beethoven piece.

Titled Beethoven’s Symphony No. 10, the piece has been constructed by British music scholar Barry Cooper from several musical sketches Ludwig van Beethoven left behind when he died in 1827. Cooper’s interpretation, which suggests how the follow-up to Beethoven’s legendary Ninth Symphony might have sounded, remains somewhat controversial in the classical community, but it’s that kind of strange pedigree that keeps the Splash concerts interesting.

“It really gives us the opportunity to do all kinds of funky, weird stuff,” Preu said, “the stuff we can’t do in our big Classics (programs). It’s all about playing unusual, fun stuff that you hear once in your lifetime but will enrich your horizons.”