Philadelphia Young Pianists Academy series at Curtis Institute of Music

School as concert

Some of the techniques are standard maneuvers, but they have effects that may not be obvious to listeners who aren’t string players. For example, in the movement labeled “Up, down,” the performers contrast the difference between the sounds they produce when they pull down the bow, and the sounds produced by up strokes. Other techniques, like drumming the strings with the fingers, are less familiar to most audiences.

For their appearance in the concert series presented by the Philadelphia Young Pianists Academy (PYPA), the Parker Quartet presented a condensed 15-movement version of Capriccio. Gill wrote the piece for the Parkers in 2012 and they played it with skill and panache. The movement labeled “Colors: normal, fingerboard, bridge” may bear a straightforward title, but it includes a beautiful viola solo that was beautifully played by Jennifer Bodner. In the second movement, “La Chitarra,” three musicians simulated guitars while Kee-Hyun Kim played a cello serenade just as memorable as Bodner’s solo.

Gill divided Capriccio into two parts and ended each half with a longer section. The first half finale was devoted to Eros and included a violin-viola duet that both musicians played at the extreme high end of their range. The second half ended with an homage to two Baroque composers that featured antique harmonies and the kind of restrained, balanced celebration you only hear in 18th-century music.

Innovating on an innovation

PYPA is another entry in the round of events that’s currently keeping Curtis’s facilities occupied during the summer. Like the other summer offerings, PYPA is a combination of concerts and high-level instruction for aspiring musicians. The founder and artistic director is a rising young pianist, Ching-Yun Hu.

For the second half of the program, Ching-Yun Hu joined the Parkers in one of the great innovations of musical history, the Schumann quintet for piano and string quartet. Schumann was the first composer to team the piano with the string quartet and his invention is the forerunner of some of the loftiest masterpieces in the chamber music repertoire.

Hu and her partners hit the first movement with so much force it sounded like they were trying to imitate a piece written for a full-size orchestra. I would have preferred less volume, more nuance, and a milder pace, but I have to admit their approach did pick you up and sweep you right along. The second movement had the tender moments it should have, and the quintet’s smoothly executed high speeds suited the last two movements.

On October 9, 2016, at the new season’s first Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia concert, Hu will play the world premiere of a new concerto, The Red Cliff, by Yiu-Kwong Chung. Chung is a celebrated Taiwanese composer who once studied percussion at one of the forerunners of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts. Later in the season, in Boston, Hu will premiere Before the Wresting Tides by Jeremy Gill, who now resides in Boston after a long sojourn as a member of Philadelphia’s highly active cadre of composers.

The classical music tradition is still a work in progress, as it always will be, and Philadelphians can take some pride in their city’s continuing role in the process.