When Richard Danielpour was a student at Twin Lakes High School and thinking about being a musician, he used to go down each week to Spec’s Music at the Palm Beach Mall and go trolling for LPs.
One day he bought a recording of the Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, in a performance by a French pianist named Philippe Entremont, accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. He liked the performance, but actually getting to know Entremont decades later has been something he likes even better.
“I’ve only known Philippe for six years now, but I feel as if I’ve known him for 20,” Danielpour said earlier this month from his office in New York. “In all the interactions I have had with him, I’ve always learned something from him, which is a wonderful thing, to have a friend and a colleague like that.”
This Monday night, Danielpour, who has built a notable and impressive career for himself as a composer, will conduct the Vienna Chamber Orchestra at the Kravis Center in the North American premiere of his Souvenirs, a five-movement orchestral suite commissioned by the Kravis in honor of Entremont’s 75th birthday, which fell in June of this year. Entremont had planned to conduct the work, as well as solo in a Haydn concerto, but became ill this week and has had to bow out.
Pianist Gottlieb Wallisch will be soloist Monday night in the Piano Concerto in D of Haydn (Hob: XVIII/11), and the VCO under concertmaster Ludwig Mueller will perform the Haffner Symphony of Mozart (No. 35 in D, K. 385) and the Voices of Spring waltz of Johann Strauss II. Danielpour will conduct Souvenirs again Tuesday afternoon, Wallisch will play the Mozart Concerto No. 23 (in A, K. 488) and Mueller will lead the VCO in the Beethoven Symphony No. 1 (in C, Op. 21).
Entremont is expected to be on hand Thursday night to lead the VCO in another performance of Souvenirs at the Lyric Theatre in Stuart, officials there said Saturday. The program includes the Mozart concerto and a selection of dance music by Johann Strauss II.
Danielpour, 53, said the commission for Souvenirs came through Susan Tilley, then the Regional Arts administrator at the Kravis.
“The sense that I got from Philippe, even though he’s originally from Paris and makes his home there, he is really one of those truly international citizens. His home is the world,” he said. “I thought that I could create these musical postcards, if you will, of a number of different cities that had meant the most to him in his working life, and also these are cities that have been of interest to me.”
The piece contains five short movements depicting Paris, New York, Vienna, New Orleans and Kyoto, in “musical paintings,” Danielpour said. “I tried not to do it so it becomes a parody or a caricature of the place. [Each movement] just speaks for the spirit of each place, rather than a cliché about it,” he said.
That’s not to say there aren’t things about each that don’t evoke familiar sounds associated with each. “The New Orleans movement is like a march, and I thought of it not as When the Saints Go Marching In but as a kind of parade, because they’re very big on parades down there,” he said. “It’s kind of like there’s something parade-like about that movement, celebratory, and it’s only at the very end that you get this kind of stride piano sound.”