Let's continue to consider the past. An elegy in music is reflective, sometimes mournful, but certainly reflective, such as this, Josef Suk’s Elegy for Piano Trio.
This piece will be part of a pair of concerts taking place this weekend, one in Fayetteville and one in central Arkansas. The concert programs are dedicated to the concept of elegy.
“And so in this day and age where we’re, you know, hustling and bustling and things are moving too fast, it’s a nice time to reflect on things from the past or reflect on certain feelings that you had for longing.”
Hakutani is an assistant professor of piano at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the artistic director of Up Close: A Steinway Salon Chamber Series. The series is beginning its fourth year this weekend, and the expansion into Fayetteville is new.
Hakutani says each of the three pieces making up the first program this year includes a central movement that is elegiac, including the only piano trio written by Carl Maria von Weber.
“So the first piece is a piece by Weber, and it’s the trio for flute, cello, and piano. And it’s from right at the change from the classical period to the romantic period. So Weber was a contemporary of Beethoven.”
Both this weekend’s Fayetteville and Little Rock concerts are inside Steinway showrooms — smaller venues with almost no distance between the musicians and the audience. This series started with performances at the Central Arkansas Steinway Showroom just as the pandemic began to taper.
“Where we spent a couple of years of not being able to perform in public. And so after that period, a lot of the musicians really missed being near the audience and performing and being up close. Right? Because we were distant. And so performing is, you know, it’s kind of like you’re like an athlete. You’re practicing, but it’s not the game. You know, famous athletes said it’s just practice. It’s not the game. And so it’s very similar when you perform. If you don’t perform, it’s such a different experience from the performer’s side because nothing happens without the audience.”
Along with von Weber, musicians will present Josef Suk’s Elegy for Piano Trio, Opus 23, and Anton Arensky’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor.
“It’s played often, but I feel like it’s not played often enough. It’s just got lush melodies, and the interaction between the three instruments is amazing. You know, with a piano trio, the conventional piano trio, you have the violin and the cello and the piano. They’re all solo instruments by the time he composed for them, as opposed to around Beethoven’s time. And so the cello is just as involved as the violin, whereas the classical period, you have this, you know, cello might not be doing anything for a while.”
Naoki Hakutani talked with us from his home. He was sitting in front of his full concert grand Steinway. Unlike his colleagues who can travel with their own violin, cello, or flute, he can’t travel with his piano. But he says the parameters of this series make that less stressful for him.
“What will be really nice about these concerts is the consistency of the Steinway instrument. And also the fact that they’re at the Steinway Gallery, where they’re prepped as much as you could ever ask of a piano to be prepped, and they’re just in tip-top shape. And so we’ll be able to create chamber music with that. And I think the instrumentalists really appreciate that, too, because you get like a true sound of the Steinway, and then you get a true sound of the chamber.”
The first concerts of the 2025–26 Up Close: Steinway Salon Chamber Series are this weekend — Saturday afternoon at 3 at Steinway Piano Gallery Fayetteville and Sunday afternoon at 3 at Steinway Gallery in Little Rock. More about the series can be found at steinwaylr.com.
Naoki Hakutani talked with us by Zoom earlier this month.
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