Concert of premieres at Capilano University
by Scott
On October 3, 2025, we gave a concert of six world premiere four-hand arrangements that I wrote throughout the summer. We have been invited back every year to perform at Capilano University since 2020, and we’re always thankful for the opportunity to try out new arrangements in such a beautiful hall (Blueshore Performing Arts Centre) and on a wonderful 9-foot grand piano. We even performed there in 2021, one year into the COVID pandemic, to an empty hall, with the concert livestreamed. Quite a memorable experience for us!
Three of the pieces on this year’s program were opera arias transcriptions. Mozart’s La ci darem la Mano is among the most well-known opera duets featuring soprano and tenor, and it was enjoyable to arrange and perform! Verdi’s La donna e mobile is another well known opera aria, this time for tenor solo. I took the secondo for both of these pieces, as I put all the tenor’s lines in the secondo part. Puccini’s Nessun Dorma has always been on my wish list of pieces to arrange, and it fit perfectly into the Italian opera theme that we had for this concert! I first heard the piece on TV in the 1990s, when TV ads for The Three Tenors aired pretty often. The melody of Nessun Dorma always stuck with me over the years, and Clare and I loved how this sounded on the piano when we first tried it out!
Surrounding the three opera arias, we had three large-scale Russian works. The first was the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. I mostly used the composer’s 2-piano version as the basis for my 1-piano four-hand arrangement. I only had to move a few passages up or down an octave, but most of it fit well onto one piano.
For a long time, Clare urged me to arrange Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, but I kept putting it off because I felt it would be too difficult and complex. But eventually I was convinced and worked on it all summer. The end result was demanding to learn and play, but not as hard as I first thought it would be, and ended up being a lot of fun to perform!
For this year’s and last year’s concert, my parents came to visit us for a week. I was happy to dedicate one work to them for both concerts. Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances is a work that I heard a lot while growing up, and I am thankful that my parents introduced me to Classical music early on in my life, and encouraged my interest in it. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
