Jon Kimura Parker on Grieg

On August 1, Jon “Jackie” Kimura Parker will close his five-summer tenure as the Minnesota Orchestra’s Creative Partner for Summer at Orchestra Hall with a literal bang, in a performance of Edvard Grieg’s perennially popular Piano Concerto. If you don’t know it by name, you’ll almost certainly be able to recognize the concerto’s iconic opening—featuring a loud crash of piano chords—that has been used on the Broadway stage (Follies), in Hollywood films (The Seventh Veil, Intermezzo) and serves as the basis for Jimmy Wisner’s 1961 Top 10 hit Asia Minor. Parker’s last performances of the Grieg Piano Concerto with MinnOch were 34 years ago this month with conductor James Paul as part of the 1991 Sommerfest.

Grieg began composing his only published concerto in summer 1868 and completed it in 1869; the premiere was given on April 3, 1869, by pianist Edmund Neupert in Copenhagen, Denmark. Containing a wealth of themes, dramatic gestures and brilliant keyboard writing, the concerto is a true virtuosic showcase written in a grand romantic style that also evokes Grieg’s Norwegian musical heritage.

“The Grieg Piano Concerto has a special place in my heart because it’s the first concerto I was paid to play with an orchestra, first, in 1980, with the Vancouver Symphony, and then later that summer I was invited to play it with the Boston Pops. I will never forget that feeling of being in Symphony Hall and hearing the timpani roll that starts the piece and getting ready to play that first cascade of octaves and chords,” says Parker of his long history with this piece. “What those chords set up is one of the most beautiful themes ever used as a principal theme of a piano concerto, and I don’t know what it is about Grieg, but this theme just sounds Norwegian. This is a full-blooded romantic piano concerto, and when you get to the cadenza, Grieg takes that very simple theme and blows it up into something really enormous.”

After the dramatic fire of the first movement, the mood changes completely. “Grieg completely turns a corner into the second movement, and when the piano enters, it’s very much in the spirit of a nocturne,” Parker explains. For the finale, the Norwegian flair returns in full force in a playful dance for piano and orchestra, which Parker explains is based on a traditional folk dance called a Halling. “As he did in the first movement, Grieg presents a theme that really makes you picture the fjords and blows it up at the end of the concerto. This is one of the great Romantic piano concertos—I think it deserves its popularity!”