Spokane Symphony season begins with Grammy Award-winning pianist, ‘Masterworks 1: The Turning World’

The Spokane Symphony is beginning its season by hosting a Grammy Award-winning musician who has played for Big Bird, Bill Clinton (twice) and Barack Obama.

Which venue did he feel most honored to play: Sesame Street or the White House?

After the first time playing the White House, Sesame Street and the Executive Mansion were probably equal, but after playing the President’s Palace multiple times, the White House, “surged into the lead,” Awadagin Pratt said with a laugh.

“So, I think it’s the accumulation of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton twice,” he said last week after checking into the Davenport Hotel the night before playing the Northwest BachFest with friend Zuill Bailey.

But the first African American pianist to win the Naumburg International Piano Competition has more recent accolades that have brought him into the spotlight. Pratt garnered a Grammy Award this year for his “STILLPOINT” album recording of “Rounds,” by Jessie Montgomery.

Montgomery and Pratt met at another one of Bailey’s concert series: Sitka Music Festival, in Sitka, Alaska.

“I had the opportunity to commission her to write something four years later,” in 2022, Pratt said.

Montgomery presented Pratt the piece, and the duo worked together on adjusting certain octaves or registers for piano; the cadenza is mostly written by Pratt.

“Rounds” won Best Contemporary Classical Composition at the Grammys in February.

“My passion is music,” said Pratt, who remains the only graduate of the Peabody Institute to earn performance certificates in three areas – violin, piano and conducting. “My passion is engaging with music in every way that I do it, whether it’s playing, conducting, teaching. Anything talking about music. I’m lucky to have various outlets, expression and sharing, all that.”

Pratt recorded “Rounds” with a conductorless orchestra, A Far Cry, so Spokane Symphony Music Director James Lowe is unsure if he or Pratt will lead the symphony in that performance. But the pair planned to go over the program over a glass of wine after BachFest festivities.

“What I love about Awadagin and his music-making is it’s so spontaneous,” said Lowe, who is about to embark on his fifth season with the symphony here.

As part of “Masterworks 1: The Turning World,” Pratt will also perform J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in A major, No. 4, BWV 1055, which he played the weekend before as a piano solo as part of Northwest BachFest. This time, he will play it with the orchestra.

“It’s going to be so interesting to hear it,” Lowe said, “because the piano part plays throughout the whole piece, to hear it very much as a solo and then, as a dialogue with the orchestra.”

The night will open with Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila Overture.

“It’s incredibly fizzy,” Lowe said. “If you can imagine champagne in musical form – it’s invigorating, bubbly, really kind of a great way to open the season.”

And the night ends with Pytor Illych Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op.64.

“Glinka was a great influence on Tchaikovsky,” Lowe said. “He was slightly an older generation composer in Russia.”

Lowe calls Symphony No. 5 a “monumental piece.

“If you’re a classical musical lover, you’ve definitely heard this piece,” he said.

Following Pratt’s performances and before the Tchaikovsky finale is Max Richter’s.

“On the Nature of Daylight,” which has been featured in many films and TV shows, including “Arrival,” “The Last of Us,” “Shutter Island,” “Stranger than Fiction” and “Togo,” although “the music came before the movie,” Lowe emphasized.

“It fits so well into the program, because the theme of the program is the Turning World, which is a line from T.S. Eliot.”

A line of Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” inspired Montgomery’s “Rounds” and the name of Pratt’s “STILLPOINT” album.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

“The themes in the Eliot poem have a lot to do with recollection, sadness, hope,” Lowe said.

Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony has this rather gloomy beginning and ends in triumph: “It goes from darkness to light.”

“I like this idea that humanity can always lift itself up from the darkest places,” Lowe said.

Lowe said he aims to have a nice arrangement of music for each weekend.

And that, Lowe hopes, it just what this season-opening Spokane Symphony program should do.

“Going to the symphony is and should be an emotional experience,” Lowe said.