PORT ANGELES — This is “a dazzling showpiece … a spectacular fusion,” maestro Jonathan Pasternack says.
Inside a single work, we hear the blues.
We hear dance music from the Roaring Twenties.
Then some New Orleans ragtime, a bit of klezmer and unmistakably honky-tonk piano.
We even hear flavors borrowed, Pasternack adds, from Rachmaninoff and Ravel.
It could only be “Rhapsody in Blue,” George Gershwin’s 1924 score. It’s one of three works to come alive in the hands of the Port Angeles Symphony in its season-opening concerts at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center on Saturday.
But wait. A Russian pianist is coming to town to play “Rhapsody,” that most American of works.
Alexander Tutunov, principal guest artist with the 66-piece Port Angeles orchestra, is his exuberant self when acknowledging the irony.
The native of Belarus, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, also points out some connections: Gershwin’s parents, Morris Gershovitz and Rose Bruskin, were immigrants from Russia.
They came to Brooklyn, N.Y., which happens to be conductor Pasternack’s birthplace.
Tutunov first performed “Rhapsody in Blue” in the 1980s when he was a teenager, growing up in the Soviet Union.
“It was a little bit brave,” he recalls.
Gershwin was considered jazz, jazz was American and hence capitalist music — “considered not cool. In theory, you could be expelled from the conservatory,” Tutunov says.
The pianist did graduate, magna cum laude, from Moscow’s Central School of Music; he also won the Russian National Piano Competition and completed a doctorate in concert performance at the Belarusian State Conservatory.
He later migrated to the United States, where he teaches at Southern Oregon University in Ashland — and travels the world, teaching and performing.
Tutunov has been coming to Port Angeles since 1998 to play Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Chopin.
Saturday’s performances — the 10 a.m. public rehearsal and the 7:30 evening concert — mark the second time Tutunov has come here to play Gershwin.
Back in the winter of 2001, he joined the Port Angeles Symphony for the Concerto in F, a work Gershwin played for the first time at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in 1925.
“I don’t know how and why,” Tutunov says, “but I love these rhythms.”
“Rhapsody in Blue” is but a third of the symphony’s offerings. Pasternack will lead the orchestra in Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3, a piece the conductor said has “an epic breadth.”
Listen, he added, for the overture’s coda, which he calls triumphant and optimistic.
Also on the itinerary is “Scheherazade,” Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s most famous piece of music.
Inspired by stories from the Orient collected in “The Thousand and One Nights,” the work provides virtuosic writing for every section in the orchestra, Pasternack says.
Saturday’s performances are the first of five Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra concerts in the 2015-2016 season.
To find out more about it and the Dec. 12 performance — to feature the music of Tchaikovsky, Grieg and other masters — see PortAngelesSymphony.org.
