Jon Kimura Parker

REVIEW | 9.23.2012 | by James McQuillen | The Oregonian

Pianist Jon Kimura Parker brough power, drama and bright energy to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 over the weekend. Photo credit: Maurice J. Beznos

The Oregon Symphony had pianist Jon Kimura Parker back in town to help kick off its subscription season over the weekend, and while Carlos Kalmar and the orchestra played gracious host to their guest while he was at the keyboard, they reserved a fair bit of the evening’s limelight for themselves.

A favorite of Portland audiences and a genial presence on stage, Parker offered a crystalline performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, with power and drama suited to the music’s minor mood and frequent storminess but also with effortless bright energy in its virtuosic solo part. As is often the case with his most intensely dramatic music (parts of “Don Giovanni,” for example, which share the concerto’s D minor modality), Mozart conveyed emotion and drama while also drawing you to how brilliantly he himself was pulling the whole thing off. Parker’s fleet runs, pristine ornaments and magnificent cadenzas gave the same sense; however portentous the material, the playing was still a joy.

Balance was nicely modulated, both between soloist and ensemble (though orchestral swells threatened to swamp the piano at times) and between Parker’s hands.

In the concerto as well as in the encore, Mozart’s Rondo “alla Turca,” even the simplest figures in the left hand emerged clearly again the densest textures in the right. Kalmar led the orchestra in gracious, responsive and carefully shaped accompaniment.

REVIEW | 7.03.2012 | by Melinda Bargreen | The Seattle Times

James Ehnes (formal) and Jon Kimura Parker (casual) by Maurice J. Beznos

Outside the Nordstrom Recital Hall, it was cold and rainy.

Inside the hall, it was smoking hot — especially when James Ehnes and Jon Kimura Parker took the stage to play Bartok in this opening program of the 31st Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival. The festival, which annually opens the week of the Fourth of July, is always a reliable source of fireworks (of the musical variety), but Monday evening’s opener was even more incendiary than usual.

Ehnes, the festival’s artistic director, and Parker, artistic adviser of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, are an ideal pairing of verve and artistry at the violin and piano. Whenever they join forces, it sounds as if they were inventing the music as they go, so spontaneous is their musical partnership. In Monday’s concert, the Bartok Violin Sonata No. 1 took on new dimensions in a performance that really deserved a recording.

Ehnes just goes from strength to strength as a violinist; he’s better every year. In the Bartok, he changed the focus of his sound the way a photographer adjusts an image from hazy to sharp and back again. The ruminative Adagio sounded like an extended meditation, personal and spontaneous. In the hair-raising wild ride of the blazing final Allegro, Ehnes at one point briefly examined his violin, and one wondered if he were looking for scorch marks.

At the piano, Parker was the kind of duo partner violinists dream about: together every step of the way, intuitive, with a technique that verges on the frankly impossible — especially in that runaway-train finale. The audience leapt up with the kind of ovation that only follows a really electrifying performance.

REVIEW | 5.04.2012 | by James Chute | San Diego Union-Tribune

Jon Kimura Parker by Tara McMullen

A John Harbison Sonata at Alice Tully Hall

REVIEW | 04. 27.12 | By Allan Kozinn | The New York Times

Cho-Liang Lin, Jon Kimura Parker, and Liz Parker

New-music fans who object when musical organizations present contemporary works in special concerts, where they won’t intrude on the classics — the New York Philharmonic’s Contact! series, or the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Kaplan Penthouse concerts, for example — would have approved of the way the society presented John Harbison’s new Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano on Tuesday evening at Alice Tully Hall.

The work, which the society commissioned as part of a consortium, was given its world premiere at the concert by the violinist Cho-Liang Lin and the pianist Jon Kimura Parker, and it was surrounded by two staples of the Romantic canon: Beethoven’s Trio in E flat (Op. 1, No. 1), for which Mr. Lin and Mr. Parker were joined by the cellist Gary Hoffman, and Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor (Op. 60), with the violist Richard O’Neill filling out the ensemble. Read More→

REVIEW | 3.05.2012 | By Holly Harris | Winnipeg Free Press

Jon Kimura Parker's hands by Tara McMullen

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra welcomed March not with a lamb, but with a formidable musical lion as it featured world-class Canadian pianist Jon Kimura Parker in its latest Masterworks concert, the aptly titled Parker Plays Brahms 2.

The highlight of Friday night’s concert, led by Alexander Mickelthwate, was the Vancouver-born artist performing Johannes Brahms’ Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 83. Read More→

By David Hawley Special to the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

If the movie “Shine” introduced you to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, be advised that Jon Kimura Parker did not lose his sanity when he performed it Thursday with the Minnesota Orchestra.

And if you’re old enough to remember the Cold War, be advised that nobody bellowed “communist propaganda!” during conductor Andrew Litton’s reading of Shostak-ovich’s Symphony No. 12, subtitled “The Year 1917″ to commemorate the Bolshevik Revolution.

The program, which gets its final performance tonight, is a particularly luscious and compelling one, since neither of its big works are heard that often, particularly the symphony, in a live performance. And if it’s big sounds you want, this is your concert.

To hear Parker play the “Rach 3″ is a particular pleasure. He’s a wonderfully balanced, intelligent pianist who never seems affected in his playing. He knows how to be emotive or bombastic — both necessary objectives in this piece — but you never get the feeling he’s laying it on for the crowd, even if the thunder of the third movement prompts him to rise off his seat to smash the big chords. And, of course, he can roll out a cascade of rippling runs that shimmer like golden silk.

Litton opened the second half of the evening with a short “Intro to the 12th” exegesis in which he argued that Shostakovich was being enigmatically subversive when he wrote the symphony in the early 1960s, not just turning out poster-painted Soviet propaganda as was alleged by Western critics of the time. Parsing this symphony to find anti-Stalinist layers beneath its programmatic surface is nothing new, but it was interesting to listen to Litton break out the musical themes.

But the real source of interest is the whole of the symphony, with its conventional structure conveying an exciting, anxious swirl of sensations. And bombast: It’s the major boomer of the Shostakovich canon.