Pianist Bidini opens new HSO season with Brahms

Italian pianist Fabio Bidini, a local favorite, returns to open Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra’s sixth season with Brahms’ monumental Piano Concerto No. 2.

The concerto, composed some 22 years after Brahms’ first piano concerto, which was considered a failure, represents all that had occurred in his life — personal and professional failures, his unrequited love for Clara Schumann, as well as his eventual success and fame, Bidini said.

“It’s all connected in his life,” he said. “The generosity and the amount of love that he is constantly expressing in music is absolutely immense. I believe he is the only composer who can express such true passion and love.”

Musically, Bidini sees the work “more like a symphony with the piano,” rather than a piece solely highlighting the piano, he said. Its third movement famously opens with a long, lovely orchestral solo — for the cello. Bidini will listen to symphony principal cellist Mark Votapek play the solo, then react accordingly, according to the feeling and mood at the moment.

“It’s always a matter of give-and-take,” Bidini said. “It could be very different than what he does, or it could be a prolongation of what he does. I don’t know yet.”

Will he discuss things beforehand with Votapek? “Absolutely not,” Bidini said with a laugh. “He is free to do exactly he wants and I will be free to acknowledge his interpretation, and I will be very happy to accommodate everything.”

Conducting will be Michael Stern, who has a special connection to Blaisdell Concert Hall: His father, the great violinist Isaac Stern, was the first guest artist featured in the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert in 1964. “Having Michael open the season 53 years later is kind of fun,” said symphony general director Jonathan Parrish.

Stern leads the orchestra in Dvorak’s “Symphony No. 9 in E minor, op. 95, ‘From the New World’” — “probably the most popular symphony we can program,” Parrish said.