Howard County Times

Sundays program puts pair into solo spots

02/07/08
By Anthony Sclafani

Columbia's Sundays at Three concert series is readying two concerts for the price of one as its Feb. 10 installment. The afternoon program "Peabody's Rising Stars" will showcase a young classical guitarist and a flutist performing five chamber music pieces -- though not together.

Guitarist Lukasz Kuropaczewski and flutist Anastasia Petanova have performed together at past engagements. This time, though, the pair decided to split their bill for artistic purposes.

"We do play together sometimes, and it's a lot of fun," explains Petanova, the 23-year-old Moscow-born flutist. "This time we decided to do something different, so he would have a half (of the concert bill) and I would have a half. That would allow us to do something more with the program, because flute and guitar music is a rather limited repertoire."

The program leads off with two performances by Kuropaczewski, a Polish musician with a master's degree from the Academy of Music in Wroclaw, Poland who studies at the Peabody Conservatory under world-famous guitarist Manuel Barrueco. Kuropaczewski has recorded four CDs and in 2007 alone performed in such diverse locales as Germany, Spain, Canada and his native Poland.

For Sunday's concert, Kuropaczewski will perform Mauro Giuliani's "Rossiniane No. 3" and Alexander Tansman's "Suite in Modo Polonico."

The second half of the program will be comprised of three performances by Petanova, accompanied by pianist Timothy Hoft. Petanova is a graduate of the Moscow State Conservatory and currently performs as a soloist with the Russian State Chamber Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi. She now studies at Peabody under Marina Piccinini.

Petanova says she programmed her segment of the afternoon's first two pieces (Carl Reinecke's sonata "Undine" and Claude Debussy's "En Bateau") because they were written around the same theme.

"I wanted to have a water theme in the concert," she explains. "Which may sound a little weird, but it's related to the first piece more than anything." The Reinecke composition, she adds, "is one of his most famous pieces for the flute.

"He took the idea for the title 'Undine' from a medieval legend. Undine is actually a spirit of water. In the legend, there's a very sad love story between her and the knight -- who is a human -- and at the end, it ends very tragically, and she throws herself into the river. "So the whole piece is actually representing the different conditions of water. It's really pictured for the listener. It can get pretty peaceful, very beautiful or very dramatic -- so it's very obvious what's going on."

The concert's final offering will be Francois Borne's "Fantasy on Bizet's Carmen," with an arrangement by Petanova herself. She says she got the idea of arranging her own version after hearing an arrangement done by her flute professor.

"I looked at the example of my music teacher," Petanova explains, "and I really liked what she did. She said 'You know, I thought some things were missing, so I decided to add them.' And she did it very successfully.

"I thought to myself that there are also some things that are missing that I love very much," she explains. "They're different from hers, but I think they're just as good."

One inspiration for doing an arrangement is that Petanova wants to expand the standard repertoire for flute. Even at 23, she says she was already feeling stifled by the lack of pieces for her instrument.

"You have to look around and do things like (new transcriptions), otherwise you get very bored. And I do this all the time, because it's impossible just to stick with the flute repertoire alone."