Hershey Felder may have saved his best for last.
TheatreWorks is presenting Felder’s final one-man-show portrait of great music composers this month, with the pianist-writer-actor portraying pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Felder’s portraits of composers such as Irving Berlin, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin and Debussy have been the most popular and lucrative attractions at the South Bay/Peninsula’s premier theater company for about a decade.
“Hershey is beloved by our audiences, who flock to see his shows and break box office records,” says Giovanna Sardelli, TheatreWorks’ artistic director. “Last year, when we announced our ‘Save TheatreWorks Now’ campaign, he called us right away and offered a benefit concert, which helped us significantly in reaching our goal.”
Felder, 56, has dared to tinker with the tried-and-true format for this finale, adding a second actor via a fictitious premise involving Rachmaninoff’s thoughts on his deathbed. And he dares to perform the material he has so idolized since childhood, when the budding pianist used to listen to a recording of Rachmaninoff’s beloved Piano Concerto No. 2 every night.
“Rachmaninoff was the finest pianist the world has known,” says Felder, who in the show plays the entire C-Sharp Minor Prelude, a favorite of Rachmaninoff connoisseurs. All told, he says, he plays “four preludes, a nocturne, huge chunks of the 2nd concerto, chunks of the Paganini Variations, excerpts from a symphony…”
What a way to go.
Felder is moving full-time to Florence, Italy, where he and wife Kim Campbell, the former prime minister of Canada, have been living part-time.
He will primarily be in charge of Teatro Della Signoria in Florence as it reopens in March after a 40-year closure. He also will keep producing films and will perform frequently in the U.S.
But for now, he is focused on Rachmaninoff and the Tsar, and he is not underselling the tsar part.
Jonathan Silvestri portrays the deposed (and deceased) Tsar Nicolas II—in 1942. The setting is the United States, where Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) has spent much of the previous 25 years since fleeing Russia during the 1917 revolution. The musician is dying of cancer and is mourning the certainty he will never return to his beloved homeland.
So how did Felder write the tsar into the show?
“It’s a fever dream,” Felder says. “There’s a reason why he’s there … and the why is the big question.”
There have been rumors that the trigger also involves Nicolas’ daughter Anastasia. But ultimately, he says, the plot depicts how it feels “when you have to leave Russia, leave the home he loved. His music was banned at a certain point. What is that like? What do you think about?”
Felder’s take on the reputedly volatile 6-foot-6 pianist may surprise those expecting relentless bombast. “He was very wry, though he didn’t smile very much,” Felder says. “But he was very warm.”
But Felder isn’t alone in his assessment of Rachmaninoff’s ranking among piano virtuosos. Even those who contend Vladimir Horowitz was the greatest have to concede Rachmaninoff was Horowitz’s role model.
However, there were phases in which Rachmaninoff compositions were derided for a neo-romanticism that had gone out of style. It may seem to some that those compositions—aided by the attention to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in the 1996 movie Shine—have been on the upswing in recent years.
Felder begs to differ. “Upswing? It’s been this way for a long time. … In his day in Russia he was THE most famous composer. When he came to America, he toured playing his old works.”
Those certainly included the third concerto, Felder says. “Horowitz played it all over the world. I think it’s becoming more familiar in concerts. My introduction to that concerto was really Horowitz playing it.”
And now, it’s a component of a farewell production. But Felder’s legacy remains. ”The other shows are still in the repertory,” he points out to those who bemoan this transition.
Thanks in part to his European background, he says, “I’ve been able to bring music and history to American audiences who want to know where this music originated.”
Rachmaninoff and the Tsar, a production by TheatreWorks, runs Jan 10–Feb 9 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St. Tickets: $39-$99. theatreworks.org
