Vladislav Kovalsky
By TOM CHESEK
Beethoven? Perhaps you know him as the stony countenance that glowered from atop Schroeder’s toy piano in a half century’s worth of Peanuts comic strips.
Even the most musically illiterate among us is familiar with the portentous opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. More well-known themes of the German giant come at us daily from cable network newscasts, from TV commercials, Disney cartoons.
Growing up as he did in the former Soviet Union, Vladislav Kovalsky probably didn’t have much access to Charlie Brown and Snoopy. But as the executive director of Red Bank-based Monmouth Conservatory of Music, the concert pianist knows that Beethoven and his brethtren continue to have something to say in the education of our kids. He’s been part of the faculty of the nonprofit music academy for decades, teaching his private students with the same dedication that he’s brought to his role as advocate for music education in our public grade schools.
Kovalsky has also been known to take center stage on occasion, for concert events that range from solo settings and chamber duets, to guest turns with orchestras of all sizes and configurations. This Sunday afternoon at the Count Basie Theatre, he appears in concert with Roy D. Gussman and the Monmouth Symphony Orchestra on a bill highlighted by Ludwig van B.’s Piano Concerto No. 4. It’s another all-Beethoven lineup that further features MSO performances of Symphony No. 7 and the Fidelio overture.
Ask Kovalsky, as redbankgreen did one afternoon at the Conservatory’s White Street offices, and he’ll dismiss any talk of his being a “Beethoven specialist.”
“I don’t believe in ’specialties’ when it comes to art,” the silver-maned Kovalsky asserts. “Does it make Mozart a lesser composer, when someone concentrates upon Beethoven?”
Still, the educator is quick to concur that “Beethoven was daring for his day,” and that his prodigious output remains “very relevant to modern audiences.”
In last Sunday’s Asbury Park Press, the paper’s music columnist Carlton Wilkinson quoted MSO maestro Gussman as saying of Kovalsky’s participation on the program that “it’s like having a second conductor up there.” Wilkinson also wrote this of the Piano Concerto No. 4:
The opening is, indeed, breathtaking… its boldness shocked audiences who first heard it in 1807. Concertos of the period typically begin with a robust orchestra section, where the band plays through a handful of melodies that are then echoed by the piano in a long passage. But this concerto stands that tradition on its head, opening with a gentle, almost hymn-like music played on the piano, all by itself, lasting only a few seconds. Then the orchestra comes in, re-imagining the simple melody in a distant key.
Asked about the unorthodox opening moments of the concerto’s First Movement, Kovalsky offers that “I don’t know whether Beethoven did this on purpose, or if it was because he was very busy at the time conducting and playing… It’s something to set the mood for the orchestra.
“The Second Movement is very unusual; the orchestra has its part and the piano has its own part,” Kovalsky continued. “There’s an attempt to reconcile in the Third Movement, which has common ground for both the soloist and the orchestra.
“This is not what you would call a student’s piece,” Kovalsky concludes with a smile.
Following the Basie event, the pianist returns to public performance on the evening of June 4, when he joins tenor Douglas Clark of the Monmouth Civic Chorus in the intimate setting of the Middletown Township Public Library main branch for “a sampling of German lieder.”
Included on the 7:30p program at the library will be excerpts from Schumann’s 1840 Dichterliebe and “perhaps some Brahms.” It’s the latest in a well-received series of free Wednesday evening presentations by the faculty and students of the Monmouth Conservatory, offerings that have helped to make the township’s impressively renovated resource into a popular venue for arts and cultural fare.
“Whoever planned the library must have had a great knowledge and love for music,” Kovalsky says of the performance space that’s seemingly more suited to lectures. “It seems to go against all laws of acoustics and building materials, but it’s been a wonderful place for music.”
Tickets for the 3p Count Basie concert are priced at $30 general admission, and can be reserved by visiting the MSO website or the Basie box office. Admission to the June 4 concert at the Middletown Library is, as always, free of charge.
The Monmouth Conservatory of Music 2008 performance season continues on Saturday, June 7 with a Faculty Classical Concert that’s part of the upcoming TriCity Arts Tour.
