Music Director Joanne Falletta returns to the podium to conduct a pair of Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra this Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, featuring one of the most beloved piano concertos in the classical music repertoire. The rising young Italian piano virtuoso Enrica Ciccarelli will be the soloist in Edvard’s Grieg’s Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 16.

Pianist Enrica Ciccarelli

The BPO has a long, rich history of performing Grieg’s only piano concerto. The BPO’s first performance of the concerto in 1943 was by the Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger who also conducted. Grieg, who premiered his concerto in 1869, revised it five times before his death in 1907, but the version usually heard nowadays is the edition prepared by Grainger in 1917. Grainger had studied the concerto with the composer, who had declared that Grainger played it better than anyone else did. Grainger’s early performance of the piece was recorded on piano rolls, and modern restoration has proven that Grainger did indeed play the work superbly, if not better than everyone else. The concerto is something of a favorite of Falletta’s—this weekend’s performances mark the third occasion that she has programmed the work on the BPO Classics series.

Pianist Enrica Ciccarelli graduated from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan, in piano and organ, as well as studying with Hans Graf at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. She has performed with leading orchestras in Europe, South America, Australia and Asia. Ciccarelli made her 1999 debut at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw playing the Grieg’s Piano Concerto, in an acclaimed performance that was recorded and released as a live CD. A review of a performance in Switzerland noted, “Enrica Ciccarelli impressed the audience greatly with her interpretation of the Grieg’s almost ‘too-much-loved’ concerto. One has heard it so many times: one ‘knows’ it. But Cicarelli interpreted it with fresh warmth.”

Falletta has also programmed a pair of rarities, two orchestral works by the Hungarian composer Erno Dohnanyi (1877-1960), also known as Ernst von Dohnanyi, who was one of the leading European piano virtuosos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Praised by the New Grove Dictionary for his “legendary musicianship,” Dohnanyi made many highly successful tours of Europe and America, before concentrating on teaching, first in Germany and then in his native Hungary. He was an early supporter of Kodaly and Bartok, who credited him with keeping music alive in Hungary during the tumultuous early post World War One years. As music director of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra during the 1930s and early 1940s, he championed the new music of his compatriots while rarely performing his own compositions. Basically apolitical, Dohnanyi’s stance did not sit well with either the fascist regime of that period, or the Communist post World War Two government, and the composer spent the rest of his life away from his native land, teaching at Florida State from 1949 till his death in 1960.

Influenced by the compositional style of Brahms, who helped promote his first published work, a piano quintet, Dohnanyi continued to compose in the great 19th century central European classical tradition. The influence of folk music on his own compositions remained similar to that of Liszt as opposed to the more authentic uses of Bartok and Kodaly. Yet while following a traditional path, Dohnanyi’s works were not mere replicas of earlier composers, with his unerring sense of harmony allowing him to push the boundaries of chromaticism without ever losing the tonal center of a work, keeping his compositions listener-friendly. Dohnanyi’s compositions often exhibit a well-developed wit, no more so than in his Variations on a Nursery Song, Op. 25, where the long, mock-tragic opening morphs into the French folk song Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman, better known in English as the tune Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

This weekend’s concerts include the Suite in F# minor (1919) and the Symphonic Minutes (1933). The BPO has performed both works only once before, the Suite in 1937, and the Symphonic Minutes in 2004, under Falletta, who also programmed the work in this season’s opening concert of her other orchestra, the Virginia Symphony. Both works are being recorded this weekend for future CD release on the Naxos label. Falletta is becoming something of a specialist in the music of Dohnanyi. The recent release of a Naxos CD of the two Dohnanyi Violin Concertos, superbly played by BPO concertmaster Michael Ludwig, with Falletta leading the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, has been garnering very favorable reviews.

For more information, visit www.bpo.org or call 885-5000.