Mozart in Madrid

As the snow flies in December, Sergei Kvitko’s thoughts are drifting back to summer 2021, and not just because of the weather.

A sparkling new CD, released in November, documents a high point in the musical life of the Lansing-based pianist and recording engineer.

“At the time it was a dream come true,” Kvitko said. “Now it just feels like a dream.”

After recording hundreds of musicians and ensembles for his Blue Griffin label, based in Lansing’s Potter House, Kvitko traveled to Estudio Uno in Madrid to be the soloist in a new recording of Mozart’s 20th Piano Concerto and two other Mozart nuggets with the young and talented Madrid Soloists Chamber Orchestra.

Kvitko poured a lifelong love of the concerto into the recording, and even dared to add a few flourishes of his own.

“I just had to do it before I die,” he said. “Maybe the pandemic brought it home — oh no, we’re all going to die sooner than we thought.”

The project came together thanks to Tigran Shiganyan, a bridge-building musician who serves on the faculty at the Flint Institute of Music and regularly brings American music and musicians to Uzbekistan.

Over the years, Kvitko has engineered several recordings involving Shiganyan, at his Potter House studio and abroad. 

Shiganyan knew that Kvitko was in love with the concerto. Kvitko first heard it as a kid, growing up in Russia, and learned to play it in his early teens.

“My obsession with it never went away,” Kvitko said “It has everything — tragedy, fun, love, humor.”

Over the decades, he listened to dozens of recordings by other artists and dreamed of making one himself.

He played it two years ago with a string quartet at a music festival in Innsbruck, Austria, but this was the first time he played it with an orchestra.

Shiganyan is a longtime friend of Madrid Soloists Chamber Orchestra’s artistic director, Gabor Szabo, and part of a nonprofit, Global Music Partnership, that helps such international projects take shape.

The orchestra proved to be a perfect partner for Kvitko, matching him note for note in exuberance, clarity and precision.

Besides performing as soloist, Kvitko engineered, produced and mastered the session for a CD. He freely calls the idea “insane,” but he had fun — and it shows.

“I had a dream team of old and new friends,” he said.

Shiganyan has worked with Kvitko for 15 years, but always as a violinist. This was the first time Kvitko saw him conduct. 

“I was blown away,” Kvitko said. “He has the perfect spirit, and he was so well prepared. He has very strong opinions and musical ideas, but he was there to support me.”

Kvitko’s zigzagging, restless musical personality is evident throughout the disc, but his roiling brain is most vividly exposed in the cadenzas, the solo bits just before the end of each movement.

“They’re a little bit romantic, but so am I,” he said. The cadenzas are also full of “Easter eggs,” snippets from other parts of the concerto and other Mozart works. If you’re not an expert, you can just sit back and grin at all the tumbling ideas as they rush by.

The disc also includes two rondos for piano and orchestra (K. 382 and 386 if you’re keeping score).

Outside of the corseted rocking out permitted in cadenzas, Mozart’s scores are as sacrosanct as they come in the classical world. Nevertheless, Kvitko pushed a few boundaries, if only out of love. He sparkled up the score of the Rondo in D major with flourishes and embellishments that give the music a high-definition richness and wrote out some fancy curlicues for the orchestra to match.

His solution to the burning question of whether to play one of the variations in a legato (smooth) or staccato (punchy) manner was classic Kvitko — he did it both ways, even though that part was not repeated in Mozart’s manuscript. After all, why pick between strawberry and pistachio? This passes for a scandal in the Mozart bubble, but that made it even more attractive to Kvitko. “Maybe he just forgot the repeat, or he didn’t want it to go over 10 minutes and 47 seconds,” he speculated. “I told Gabor the recording would be scandalous, and he said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Kvitko made a serious study of another rondo that rounds out the disc. The gentle Rondo in A Major was only discovered in full form, with orchestral parts, in 1980. Again, Kvitko wrote out his own embellishments, for both piano and orchestra, but he also filled out some orchestration he felt was missing from more recent reconstructions. His editions of the rondos will be published by his recording studio, Blue Griffin.

Assembling the orchestra and technicians during COVID travel restrictions was not easy.

“It came together so fast,” he said. “I’ve never done a project that involves so many people before. It was a miracle, and a miracle, and a miracle every day.”