Michelle Cann was just 12 when she learned Schumann’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in A minor for a competition.
She didn’t revisit the work again until last month, some 23 years later.
“It’s been really interesting as I re-examined this work to see … that in a lot of ways I’ve found more freedom in my approach to it,” said the 35-year-old Cann, who will make her Tucson Symphony Orchestra debut with the concerto this weekend. “When I was 12, I’m following the rulebook a little bit. … But coming to this piece as a professional, I’m able to see in his writing of the concerto there is so much flexibility. … There is so much that he adds. The second movement itself could just be a complete improvisation. As I approach it, I play it as if I just came up with this idea in the moment.”
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Cann will perform the concerto with the orchestra, under the baton of guest conductor Perry So, three times at Catalina Foothills High School, and no two times, she said, will sound the same.
“That’s one of my favorite things about this fabulous concerto,” she added. “It is full of possibility and spontaneity that it is very fresh in that sense. … For a concerto that is so old (written in 1845), to have it feel, even as I play it now, fresh every performance is a great thing. It’s almost brand new for me.“
Schumann wrote only one piano concerto, despite several attempts in the late 1820s, and it is ranked as one of the most widely performed and recorded of the Romantic period.
The Schumann is on a program that also includes Mendelssohn’s uplifting Symphony No. 4, “Italian,” inspired by a tour of Europe in the early 1830s.
Performances are at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 4, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 5, at Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive.
Tickets are $50-$88 through tucsonsymphony.org or by calling 520-882-8585.
Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at [email protected]. On Twitter @Starburch
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