Pianist Milton Schlosser uses words such as “sassy” and “provocative” to describe a chamber music recital, something completely at odds with the stuffy stereotype that immediately springs to mind.
Schlosser is part of a trio that includes soprano Kathleen Corcoran and cellist Tanya Prochazka who plan to debut their musical vision at the St. Albert Chamber Music Recital Series this Saturday evening at Don’s Piano Warehouse.
And he is eager to point out the light-hearted evening will be a journey from the romantic period’s rippling emotional music to the more populist contemporary stylings of today.
The piece under discussion is Four Songs, a four-movement composition by André Previn with words by Toni Morrison, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author that wrote novels with richly detailed black characters.
Schlosser focuses on the movement titled Stones.
“It’s in a jazz style, very provocative and very funny. The singer has to be sassy and belligerent. It’s sexy but with a little bit of a playful jab at our male dominated society,” says Schlosser, a music professor at Augustana College, a University of Alberta satellite campus.
The trio has been good friends and musical collaborators since they first released a recording Landsmal: The Lyrical Dialect of Edvard Grieg back in 1997.
Of Corcoran, a co-worker at Augustana, Schlosser says, “She has a beautiful voice. It’s very rich. She’s very good at knowing the text. She does her research and is very sensitive to language and poetry.”
And Prochazka, conductor of the University Symphony and Academy Strings Orchestra “brings a wide perspective in orchestral sound. She is able to think through complex textures. When you work with her, she insists on using different colours. She wants to sound richer, like an orchestra, and she pushes us to get different qualities.”
The trio reflects its diverse musical tastes in a three-part collection that starts with Four Songs and shifts to an all-Canadian composer segment featuring six works, including the world premiere of Northern Lights by Augustana composer James Neff.
The closing collection has Schlosser and Prochazka performing Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in G Minor, Opus 19. “It’s very romantic, very virtuosic in terms of writing. It’s very moving, and for me it’s the most physically demanding of the recital.”
St. Albert’s emerging pianist Elsie Hoover, 14, opens the recital with Beethoven’s Sonata in C Major, Op. 10. Hoover was the second place winner for the Alberta Provincial Music Festival competition held in May 2010.
