Pezzone to Play McGurty Piano Work

Bryan Pezzone follows his gut reactions. Three years ago, while filling out an application for graduate-student status at a New York university (he had just taken degrees in composition and piano from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.), Pezzone came to a series of boxes.

“I was about to put a check in the box marked ‘full-time student,’ ” the 25-year-old pianist and CalArts faculty members recalls, “when I felt my stomach knotting up. That was all I needed. From that, I knew I shouldn’t be going there.”

Where Pezzone went instead was to the school of fine arts at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, where he spent a year practicing, learning new repertory and playing in the George Coates performance-art ensemble.

During his winter in Banff, the bearded composer met his future wife, Susan, a flutist.

After a year at the Canadian resort, the Pezzones moved to the San Francisco Bay area. In September they came to Southern California, where Susan took a position as a flutist in San Diego and Bryan began teaching at CalArts. They commute to their jobs from a home in Pomona.

A contemporary music specialist as well as a pianist who has spent a large part of his career in improvisation and in jazz, Pezzone says he relies on his gut feeling in making many musical decisions.

Talking about the Piano Sonata by Mark McGurty that he played at a private concert in May, its first performance anywhere, Pezzone places three fingers over the middle button of his shirt and says: “That piece gets me right here. Most of the music I play, as much as I may admire it, doesn’t do that.”

He makes similar claims for McGurty’s Piano Concerto, the world premiere of which he will play Saturday night at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

The new work was written in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Orange County. It was commissioned by the Pacific Symphony, which, under conductor Keith Clark, will assist.

The new concerto “is a great piece,” Pezzone says, “dramatic, intelligent, tough, tuneful. It’s quite virtuosic, but it also has line. In style, I would describe it as Prokofiev meets Berg meets Ginastera.

“In the first movement, the composer sets out three basic ideas which then appear throughout the piece. The second movement is, simply, a beautiful song. The third, the finale, is like Ginastera. It uses a Venezuelan folk tune, and it’s quite catchy.”

Clark will surround the new work with music by Beethoven: the “Egmont” Overture and the Ninth Symphony. In the choral-finale, the vocal soloists will be Anita Propich, Jacalyn Bower, William Olvis and James Patterson. Also assisting will be the Pacific, Orange Coast and Saddleback Concert chorales.

CHORAL CENTER: Though legally established last year, the Roger Wagner Center for Choral Studies at Cal State L.A. was only recently announced in a formal way. The new center is financially supported by the Roger Wagner Institute and in June co-sponsored (with the California Council on the Humanities) a Gregorian Chant Conference. The center will announce the winners of its choral composition contest in February. It is also preparing a Festschrift for Wagner’s 75th birthday, in January.

OPERA OUTREACH: Guild Opera and Los Angeles Music Center Opera have announced an alliance in which Music Center Opera will provide productions for educational programs administered by Guild Opera. The programs will bring high school students to preview performances of MCO’s “Katya Kabanova” (a co-production with Paris Opera that French music critics recently voted the best production of the past season) in August; and in October, senior citizens will be brought in for previews of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” In January and February, 14 performances of MCO’s new “Cosi fan Tutte” will be given for school audiences.