PORT ANGELES — What a difference three years have made.
Marika Bournaki, the Canadian-born, Juilliard-trained pianist, gave a recital with her new husband, cellist Julian Schwarz. It was deep in the pandemic, and the two transmitted their music to Port Angeles audiences from a studio in Virginia in March 2021. The Port Angeles Symphony created and presented a video of the performance, free to anyone.
This Saturday, Bournaki will appear live and in person with the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra. It’s the first full symphony concert of the 91st season, and it highlights one of Bournaki’s favorite pieces of music: the Concerto for Piano in A minor by Robert Schumann. While Schwarz is well-known to Olympic Peninsula music lovers, this will be his wife’s turn on the concert stage.
Along with Bournaki’s guest performance, the symphony also will present Mozart’s Overture to Idomeneo and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pathétique,” in two public events: the dress rehearsal at 10 a.m. Saturday and the concert at 7:30 that evening. Both will take place in the symphony’s home, the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave.
At 6:30 p.m., conductor and artistic director Jonathan Pasternack will give a brief pre-concert chat about the program to come. Tickets and information about the whole symphony season are available at portangelessymphony.org, while tickets are also sold at Port Book and News in Port Angeles and at the door.
“Marika is a wonderful pianist and I’m thrilled that she will make her concerto debut with the Port Angeles Symphony on Saturday,” said Pasternack.
“I was introduced to her exquisite musicianship when she made the duo recital video for us with Julian,” he added. During the pandemic, “they gave our community this beautiful gift of a command performance, just for us.”
Bournaki, who has performed across North America, Europe and South Korea, remembers that recital well.
“What a wonderful thing it was that we had the opportunity to do that. We had so little to do. What we love doing the most is playing music,” she said from her home in Winchester, Va., where she teaches at the Shenandoah Conservatory.
“It was so kind of Jonathan to give us the chance to play and to share at such a lonely time … [the recital] was a moment of happiness.”
Saturday, Bournaki will take her place at the piano, surrounded by the symphony orchestra. She’ll play Schumann’s masterwork, which she calls “a very intimate kind of concerto. I love the exchanges that happen with the orchestra.”
Bournaki began her relationship with this concerto when she was just 16.
“That’s when I started working on it,” said the pianist, now 32.
Pasternack, for his part, looks forward to filling Saturday’s performances with soul-stirring music.
The Mozart Overture to Idomeneo is an unjustly neglected piece, a romantic one with changing moods and some plaintive melodies, he noted.
“I like the way it leads into the soft opening of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique symphony, which I’ve programmed in the first half of the concert. This symphony has one of the widest range of emotions and characters of any orchestral work I know.”
Pasternack noted that specially priced packages for the season’s five symphony concerts are still available through Saturday.
“People are welcome to call or email us for more information,” he said, at 360-457-5579 and pasymphony@olypen.com.
