A grand affair WSO doubles up on piano power for concert featuring return of Rei Hotoda By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 3:00 AM CST Friday, Mar. 4, 2022

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This article was published 04/03/2022 (1659 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What’s better than one piano? Two pianos, obviously.

Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos will be the centrepiece of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s concert on Saturday night at the Centennial Concert Hall, and will feature former WSO assistant conductor Rei Hotoda and current assistant conductor Naomi Woo, both on piano.

“I think there’s something so striking and unusual about seeing two pianos onstage,” Woo says. She loves the juxtaposition between the piano — a large, machine-like instrument — and that of the “living, breathing” orchestra.

“I love piano concertos,” she says. “I’m a bit biased because I play them, but I love them. I think they’re tremendous pieces of music and extremely striking on stage. And so, having two pianos is all the more striking.”

Hotoda, who served as the assistant conductor for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2009 and is currently the music director of the Fresno Philharmonic in California, says she’s honoured to be back on the podium with the WSO as a guest conductor for Saturday night’s program, which also includes Records from a Vanishing City, an autobiographical tone poem from the young, buzzed-about American composer Jessie Montgomery, and Robert Schumann’s Spring Symphony.

“To work with Naomi, who is their new assistant conductor, is even more of a thrill,” Hotoda says. “And to find out that she’s a wonderful pianist and a conductor just like myself is a wonderful convergence of things that are kind of full circle for me.”

Woo joined the WSO as assistant conductor in 2019 at just 29 years old. One of the biggest opportunities at this stage in her career, she says, has been mentorship.

“I’ve been so lucky in my time here in Winnipeg to have both Daniel Raiskin, our music director, and Julian Pellicano, associate conductor, who have been tremendous mentors to me,” she says. “And I’m also always grateful when guest conductors come to visit.

“And it’s very special to have a mentor who has so much in common with me. I feel like I have a tremendous amount that I can learn from Rei, and I’m really excited to really pick her brain.”

It’s fitting, too, that Concerto for Two Pianos itself was the product of mentorship.

“The thought is that Mozart wrote this for himself and his sister (Maria Anna Mozart, or Nannerl as she was nicknamed), that that’s the origin of this piece,” Woo says. “His sister — who was his older sister, mind you, and a tremendously accomplished pianist before Mozart himself was, but for all of the reasons didn’t go on to have the same kind of career as Mozart — she was his mentor when he was little. And I think here’s something nice about remembering that.”

Canadian conductor Tania Miller, longtime music director of the Victoria Symphony, is someone Woo looked up to as a musical kid growing up in Vancouver. Seeing Miller “sparked something inside my little brain that I didn’t even pick up on until years later,” Woo says.

Having mentors who share and recognize your experiences can be a boon, Woo says. “But the other thing is, sometimes it’s nice because then you don’t have to talk about those shared things,” she says.

“I have a lot of friends also who are women who conduct. And when I talk with them, we very rarely talk about being women. We just take that part of it for granted as shared, and then we can talk about the conducting. That’s actually so refreshing, because so often as a women in male-dominated fields, I feel that we’re asked to also talk about being women all the time.”

On Twitter, Woo’s name is “Naomi Woo, Lady Conductor.” It’s a joke that hits squarely on what tends to happen to women who happen to work in male-dominated fields. The are not conductors but lady conductors. Lady cops. Lady doctors. Er, lady reporters.

In music, regardless of genre, you see this play out time and time again in interview questions: “What’s it like to be a girl in a band?” “What’s it like to be a lady conductor?”

“I think that’s the narrative that we want to change, is that we as women feel like, it’s really about who’s on the podium, what you bring to the orchestra, what you bring to the music, and it’s not really about, you know, is it a woman?” Hotoda says. “I feel like now more and more, we see more of that. And it’s really invigorating for me to be a part of this wonderful movement, uplifting each other. I feel like this is such an incredible way to do that, with Naomi doing this concerto with me.”

For her part, Hotoda will be playing and conducting simultaneously during the Mozart concerto, which raises the question: how does that work?

“Sometimes you’ll see me moving my head when I’m playing — It’s like heightened multitasking to the hundredth power,” she says with a laugh. “For me, it’s just the marrying of the two disciplines that are part of me. It just feels so incredible to physically make music as a pianist but also to move the orchestra as a conductor. To connect with them in both of those ways is really a blessing.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @JenZoratti