San Diego Veteran Is Back for Mainly Mozart Concerts

Among the current crop of international competition winners, pianists Gustavo Romero and Kevin Kenner have established San Diego as fertile ground for concert pianists. Gregory Allen, who won both the 1980 Arthur Rubenstein Competition and the 1978 Queen Elisabeth Competition, is part of that winning tradition.

Allen, who is performing in several of the Kingston Mainly Mozart concerts this week, qualified his status as a native son, however.

“I think of myself as somewhat native. When my father retired from the military, we moved here, and I spent three years at Clairemont High School,” Allen stated. The lanky, easygoing pianist, who has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1973, manages to return to San Diego every few years, either to perform or judge a competition. Two years ago, he gave an inspiring solo recital at Civic Theatre.

Allen’s duties at this year’s Mainly Mozart festival include soloing in Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488, on Thursday’s opening concert and performing in the Beethoven Triple Concerto June 8 and 9. In between the festival’s opening and closing orchestral programs, he will play Haydn, Schubert and Mozart in a pair of chamber concerts.

Allen noted that this repertory spans the great divide of keyboard music performance.

“Beethoven is the dividing line between piano music that is primarily finger-oriented and music that is primarily arm-oriented. Most 19th-Century music requires a much wider range of ways of using the arm to direct sound into the keys.”

According to Allen, most performers today fall into the fingers camp or the arm camp, although he admitted that he vacillates from one to the other.

“You see pictures of (the late Canadian pianist) Glenn Gould sitting on the floor with his fingers curled over keys. He’s obviously not an arm player, and his specialty was music up through Mozart. When Gould got into the Romantic literature, Brahms and the odd Strauss works he recorded later on, he was not very convincing.”

According to Allen, it is possible to deduce the personalities of both Mozart and Beethoven from the qualities of their piano music.

“From the huge dynamic contrasts in Beethoven we know that the man was a far more wired, more passionate. He was breaking boundaries, trying to infuse a much wider emotional range into his music. And, by 1815, he had an instrument that was capable of playing it.

“I have a vision of Mozart sitting at a smaller and somewhat more fragile instrument. Fortissimos are very rare in Mozart’s piano music, although in his A Minor Piano Sonata’s first movement, there is an eight-measure fortissimo followed by eight measures of pianissimo. It’s hard for me to visualize Mozart--if you can imagine that he had Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Sonata to read through--playing Beethoven very well.”

Although Allen appreciates the subtle differences in performance practice between Mozart and Beethoven, the educator-performer is not an advocate of performing on replicas of instruments from the late 18th and early 19th Century.

“I performed a concert on a fortepiano once with very little preparation. It was unsettling. I have played harpsichord, although I don’t picture myself as an expert at it. I just have the sense of how different it is and what kind of things you have to think differently when performing on a modern piano.”

This spring, the final recording on the Musical Heritage Society label was released of Allen’s project to record all the compositions written for Arthur Rubenstein. Allen is now engaged in putting all of the piano works of Joaquin Rodrigo on two compact discs for Bridge Records. Although Rodrigo is moderately well-known for his guitar concertos and works for solo guitar, the Spanish composer’s facile idiom has been appropriated by Muzak and its imitators. His distinctive nationalistic style has become better-known outside the concert hall.

“If I mention Rodrigo, and I get a blank look, I’ll sit down and play the second movement of the ‘Concierto de Aranjuez.’ Then I remind them that they’ve heard it in the grocery store, and the light bulb flashes.”

Talmi to the rescue. Today and Sunday, the San Diego Symphony music director will conduct the New York Chamber Symphony in a pair of concerts featuring works by Mozart, Vieuxtemps, Dvorak and Britten. At the last minute, Talmi was drafted to replace the ailing Sergiu Comissiona, music director of the Vancouver (B.C.) Symphony. This sort of rescue operation has brought Talmi good fortune in the past. In January, 1990, when he stepped in to replace Christoph von Dohnanyi at Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, he was invited to return to Zurich on the spot. Talmi’s performance with the Tonhalle Orchestra last month--a program of Bartok Schumann and Liszt--drew rave reviews from the Zurich critics.

Another San Diegan on the podium. Karen Keltner, associate conductor for San Diego Opera, will conduct the finalists’ concert in Sunday’s Zachary National Vocal Competition at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium. In July, Keltner will return to New York State’s Chautauqua Festival to conduct Donizetti’s comic opera “Don Pasquale.”

CRITIC’S CHOICE: A Chance to Compare the Clarinet Concerto

Mozart comes to East County Sunday at 3 p.m., when Israeli Philharmonic clarinetist Eli Eban plays the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the Jewish Community Center Orchestra at El Cajon’s East County Performing Arts Center. Music director David Amos will also conduct his ensemble in Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 and the Overture to Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”

For another interpretation of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, Michael Collins will play the ubiquitous opus Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. with the Kingston Mainly Mozart Festival orchestra under maestro David Atherton in the Spreckels Theatre. Collins, a respected British clarinetist, is known for his recordings of 20th-Century repertory.