The past week has had its share of surprises for pianist Garrick Ohlsson, not all of them pleasant.
First, his concert Tuesday with the Philadelphia Orchestra - its gala season opener - was derailed by the members of that orchestra going on strike. Then the death of a close friend's father meant a quick trip to New Jersey for the funeral. After which his schedule took him to Spokane for yet another season opening, then to Georgia for an all-Chopin recital today, in the wake of which he comes to Utah.And what will he be doing here? Not surprisingly, more Chopin - the E minor Piano Concerto - as part of the Utah Symphony's first classical concerts of the season, Friday and Saturday, Sept. 27 and 28, at Abravanel Hall. But even here there is one new wrinkle, in that Ohlsson will be playing that concerto not on the Abravanel Hall Steinway, nor on his long-favored Boesendorfer, not even on the Falcone he used the time before last (in Saint-Saens' "Egyptian" Concerto).
Instead, the American-born pianist will be making his first public appearance on a Fazioli piano, becoming one of the first major artists to do so in this state. And thereby hangs a tale.
"I had a very unpleasant experience with Steinway back in 1972," Ohlsson recalls. "I was, like most artists, a Steinway artist, meaning that sight unseen I would select that piano. But that year I gave an interview to the New York Times, to run the same day as my New York recital, in which the reporter interviewed me at my house and said, `Is that your Steinway?' To which I said, `It's my piano, but it's not a Steinway. It's my Boesendorfer.' And I explained how they were made in a small factory in Vienna, a bit like a Rolls Royce, wonderful but not common. Which was condensed down in the newspaper to `Ohlsson gestured and said, `This is my Boesendorfer, the Rolls Royce of pianos.'
"Well, Steinway took exception to that, of course. And what they did to punish me was to pull their piano off the stage at Alice Tully Hall - the one I was renting from them for money and had already rehearsed on the day before. And not only that, but they removed middle C from the house Steinway `for repairs.'
"Anyway, we did find a Boesendorfer and gave a successful recital, with pictures and stories in all the papers. And that got Newsweek into the fray and they called Steinway for comment. And they said, `Not only did Ohlsson not play a Steinway last night - he'll never play one again.' "
The result, in Ohlsson's words, was that "I was an outcast for about a year, but eventually we made peace. But in 1977 I walked away from them and became a Boesendorfer artist."
Still, once burned, twice shy. This time Ohlsson and Boesendorfer agreed that on occasion he would be free to play other instruments without penalty. And during his last trip to Utah, in 1994, he had a chance to test drive a Fazioli, courtesy of Utah Symphony piano technician Rick Baldassin.
"I've been a Fazioli dealer about 2 1/2 years," Baldassin says from his store, Performance Pianos in North Salt Lake. What he does not say is that if Boesendorfer is the Rolls Royce of pianos, Fazioli is perhaps the Maserati, each Fazoli instrument being meticulously turned out, on a limited basis, by a small Italian company with very few dealerships in this country. At present, in fact, Baldassin's is the largest Fazioli dealership in the United States. Which means he has sold five of them to date, at prices from $50,000 to $100,000 apiece.
"They build only 60 pianos a year and are very selective about the wood," Baldassin says of Fazioli, "particularly what goes into the soundboard. It comes from a forest in northern Italy, the same one from which Stradivari got the wood for his violins."
Whatever the reason, when Ohlsson got his hands on the one in Baldassin's store he was, by his own account, "very, very excited. And I said if I had the chance I would love to play one in public. So here we are.'
We are also here, as it happens, in the very concerto Ohlsson rocketed to fame with in the 1970 Warsaw Chopin Competition, becom-ing the first American to take the top prize. And despite a refusal to be typecast, he has never been very far away from Chopin in the years since, having just completed a six-recital survey of the complete solo piano works, in three different cities, and a recorded set of the same for Arabesque.
Nonetheless, he admits to having stayed away from the E minor Concerto in recent years, partly in response to the heavy exposure that followed his victory in Warsaw.
"I had not even played it before then," Ohlsson recalls, "but must have at least a hundred times afterward." Now, with yet another recording of that concerto in the offing - by my count his third - Ohlsson is tackling it again. And this time with the insight all those years of playing the rest of Chopin's music affords.
"It's certainly a beautiful work," he says of the concerto, "a youthful work he wrote when he was 20. But it's not of the stature of the greatest of his solo works. But it has great tunes, brilliant piano writing and the slow movement, like that of the F minor Concerto, is, as they say, to die for. It never fails to give me the shivers."
The shivers Friday and Saturday start at 8 p.m., as music director Joseph Silver-stein leads the orchestra in Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz." After which come Ohlsson, Fazioli & Co. in the Chopin, followed by Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.
Tickets are priced from $12 to $35 ($6 students); for information call 533-NOTE.