Iowa City native featured in Orchestra Iowa ‘Homecoming’ concerts

Forget drifting off to dreamland with Brahms’ lullaby. His Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor will keep you wide-awake, as Iowa City native Conor Hanick joins Orchestra Iowa for a pair of “Homecoming” concerts in Cedar Rapids on Saturday evening and Coralville on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 19 and 20, 2022.

“If you're a pianist, there are a handful of concertos that are at the top of the mountain, and the Brahms concerti — both of them — rank among the most profound and the most satisfying piano concertos to perform. They are very symphonic in scope,” Orchestra Iowa Maestro Timothy Hankewich said.

“It's like eating a big roast beef dinner.”

And with that, the performers mostly likely will be ready for a nap — or at least an intermission — after running a marathon more than 50 minutes in length.

Hanick said he’ll be exhausted at the end of the piece.

“You're not doing it right if you're not completely wiped,” Hanick said by phone from the home he shares with his wife and their 3-year-old son in Hastings-on-Hudson, north of New York City. “It’s one of the tour de forces of endurance and technical challenge. It asks you to do everything. … You leave everything on the field.”

Even though Hanick gravitates toward new music collaborations, which have helped him build a community of musical colleagues doing “exciting” work, the Juilliard graduate said revisiting a masterwork brings a certain freshness, as well.

“It's a bottomless hole of challenge and thought and interpretation,” he said. “These are great masterpieces because no one has claim over them. They're ours. And it means that everybody is allowed to look at them and say something about them that is different from everybody else. And that's extremely exciting.

“It took me a long time to kind of understand that about quote, unquote ‘older’ music or ‘canonized’ music. And honestly, it was working with composers and making new pieces that reminded me that all of these pieces were brand-new once. … For the sake of the pieces and because they are so limitless, you have to approach them as if they were just written. You have to look at them as if you're the first person to see these notes.

“That’s extremely exciting, and it opens up permission to do things that aren't so tied to the baggage that we bring to these masterpieces,” he said. “We've heard them so many hundreds of times, there’s so many iconic interpretations of these pieces.

“Every pianist plays Brahms’ D minor Concerto. It's not a reason not to do it, it's a reason to look at it fresh and to make decisions about the piece that have to do with the score on its own terms, not what 150 years of interpretation has said about it.”

He sees similarities between revisiting Prokofiev’s 3rd Piano Concerto, which he performed in his debut with Orchestra Iowa in January of 2010, and the Brahms, as we’re emerging from the pandemic.

Speaking of the 2010 performances, he said: “I just remember feeling this sense of gratitude that the concerts were happening, and that the season wasn’t derailed by this disastrous flood” that damaged the Paramount Theatre in Cedar Rapids in 2008.

And now, being “sort of on the downward slope of the pandemic,” he said it’s a similar sensation, with "gratitude that we can again, be together and experience these incredible pieces of art together.”

Then and now

While he learned the Prokofiev in his youth, and the Brahms later on, he’s embraced the chance to awaken these pieces within himself.

“I was still kind of a kid when I was performing (the Prokofiev), but I remember revisiting that piece, and kind of confronting a younger version of myself and having to relearn certain things, and sort of being pleasantly surprised by other things,” he said.

“And the Brahms actually is the same situation for me. I learned that piece right around the time that I was playing with Orchestra Iowa back in 2010 — maybe a little bit before. I played it a couple times in between, but revisiting it now it’s like you're just sort of updating your software version of yourself and you hit the reboot button.

“I guess Tim (Hankewich) has a way of taking pieces that force me to confront these older beta versions of myself,” he said with a laugh.

He described the Brahms as “very quintessentially youthful Brahms.”

"It’s not the Brahms that you think of when you see older pictures of him kind of old and weathered, bearded. He was in his 20s when he finished this piece. He obviously was trying to make a powerful, bold statement, and it’s tremendously effective in that,” Hanick said.

“This piece was sketched as a symphony, and then he turned into a piano concerto. This was a sort of trend that he had a lot in his writing. … Even though it is in piano concerto form, it still feels symphonic. The orchestra plays a huge role, and it never really escapes that sense that the piano is being amplified by this much greater kind of titanic force that is happening behind it.

“I think the other thing about it, is that in contrasting that feeling of elemental power, the piece has fundamentally this deep sense of lyricism and a vocalization quality about it to me, that begins the first movement. That sense of lyricism and expressivity never leaves the sort of expressive bandwidth of the piece. Even when it’s at its most tumultuous and thunderous, it’s still kind of, to me at least, fundamentally lyrical,” Hanick said.

“It’s also a deeply personal piece. There are a lot of little autobiographical storylines that occupy the first and second movements in particular, with the attempted suicide of Robert Schumann and (Brahms’) relationship with Clara Schumann, and the complicated web of emotions stemming from that.”

The orchestra also will shine in the concert spotlight.

“There are two approaches to writing concertos,” Hankewich said. “One is having a flashy soloist with the orchestra in the background. And the other way of approaching it, which Brahms has mastered, is to feature the orchestra and soloist as equals. The orchestra has meaty substance to perform as does the pianist, and the two are in constant partnership and dialogue with one another. …

“It begins with an extremely dramatic and dark opening. There are melodies in there that will just break your heart. And by the time we get to the last movement, there is one flash of Hungarian bravado that will make you smile.”

Hankewich has been following Hanick’s career, and during the pandemic, the pianist was a guest on Hankewich’s weekly “Happy Hour” virtual conversation.

“Offline then and there, I said, ‘Hey — we need to have you for our 100th anniversary (season). This is too special not to have you.’ … I made it very clear to him that of all the guest artists, I started with him. It was most important to feature him as a soloist on the season,” Hankewich said.

“Our theme is ‘100 years into our future.’ When we first featured him, he was an up and comer. He has now he has arrived — and then some. He is the future.”

Dvorak

The upcoming concerts also feature Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.”

While some say the work was written in Spillville during the summer of 1893 and others say it was written in New York City, where the Czech composer served as director of the National Conservatory of Music from 1892 to 1895, Hankewich said both schools of thought are accurate.

“Symphonies just don’t happen overnight. They have a gestational period,” he said, “and a considerable time of working out. And certainly between his time in New York and Iowa, this symphony was being composed. So he definitely was working on the manuscripts of the New World Symphony and the cello concerto and the ‘American’ string quartet all at the same time.

“Now, whether you want to call it New York where he finished the score, sure, but the fact is, when he was coming west, he was inspired by (Native American) folk songs as well as (African American) spirituals. In fact, at this time in his life, he was charged with trying to find an American National sound.

“An African American composer by the name of Harry T. Burleigh suggested to Dvorak that he look at American Indigenous material for his melodies. This was something that Dvorak was doing already in the old country, with Czech folk song, and he merrily applied the same techniques, except in an American context.

“And because of that, an American sound was born.”

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