5 Browns offer classical sweet treat

Akron Beacon Journal - October 24, 2008

by Elaine Gureglan

So, are they competitive? And who is the best?

The 5 Browns, classical piano's quintuple threat, are used to answering questions like those, which were posed at a quick Q&A session Wednesday during their Tuesday Musical concert. Gregory, the middle child of these 20-somethings, said no, stressing how the siblings supported each other when they all were attending the Juilliard School in New York.

Stage performers don't come any more wholesome than these smiling musicians- Desirae, Deondra, Gregory, Melody and Ryan- who salted their introductions to pieces with adjectives like "cool" and pronounced the E.J. Thomas Hall audience "awesome."

Advance word on this Billboard classical chart-topping group had clearly gotten out. The usual respectably large crowd that turns up for Tuesday Musical concerts was swollen to traffic-jam size on Wednesday. Listners. many of them young, formed a long line after the concert to get autographs or take pictures of the performers, whose five Steinways are trucked from gig to gig.

Earlier in the day, the Browns, ages 23-29, had met with a couple of hundred third-graders at the Akron-Summit County Public Library. Wednesday night, these cheerful performers made it their business to talk a little before they played each piece, wether it was a Brahms Intermezzo in its original solo form (Melody Brown played Op. 118, No. 2) or the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony 5, arranged for five pianos.

The 5 Browns knew their audience, beyond the Tuesday Musical regulars who probablydidn't need the simple musical explanations but seemed to enjoy them anyway.

The Beethoven, arranged by Jeffrey Shunway, established the ensemble's style. Everyone followed Desirae (the oldest), keeping eye contact from their positions in a semicircle of Steinway grand pianos. They played with clean ensemble, good balance, and a tendency toward smooth, flowing playing that, reasonably enough, subsumed the individual to the ensemble.

A constant in the multiple-piano arrangements was rippling patterns that filled in the texture. The technique compensated for the piano's inability to sustain a tone except with pedal, but it did add a certain sameness to the ensembles pieces. Gregory Brown confided to the audience that Prokofiev's Toccata Op. 11 (a substitution on the program) sounds to him like the chase scene from a movie. The word toccata comes from the Italian "to touch," and Gregory nailed the fast, perpetual-motion writing with pointed, bold playing. He could have made the accents sting even more, but that would have been a departure from this group's trademark fluent, light, lyrical style.

When you're used to blending together, your solo playing might end up having a narrower expressive range, too. Ryan Brown's performances of the Fantasie-Im-promptu in C-sharp minor, Op. 66, had everything nicely in place but left a generic impression.

The players worked their way brightly through selections from The Planets, Gottschalk's Grande Tarantelle and familiar works by Rachmaninoff and Milhaud. They know how to build a program, and Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre was well chosen to vault them to a rip-roaring finish. It was a little Haloween candy before the holiday, and the audience ate it up.