“Something changed for me in that moment,” Luby says, “and I started to question why concerts always happen in concert halls. Spaces started to look different to me … everywhere I went seemed like a great place to have a concert.”
The Southeastern Piano Festival’s “Piano X” initiative aims to find alternative and nontraditional ways of connecting people to piano music. This year’s headline features a show on the go.
The aptly named Concert Truck will be returning to its Columbia roots on Monday, June 14th to perform at Boyd Plaza at 8pm. The box truck is a mobile music venue, fully furnished with lights, a sound system and, of course, a piano.
The South Eastern Piano Festival (SEPF) is an annual event that is both education and performance based, featuring shows from some of the world’s best pianists and serving to train some of the nation’s top youth pianists. This year, the festival takes place from June 12 - 20 at the University of South Carolina’s concert halls.
The Concert Truck, however, takes the music hall experience outdoors.
According to Marina Lomazov, SEPF founder and artistic director, the truck erases the “invisible formality” of traditional piano performances, leaving more space for interaction between the audience and performers.
Lomazov noted that not everyone can afford tickets to concerts or is comfortable in a formal music hall environment. The truck brings the experience to people so that they can embrace the music for themselves or at least have enough exposure to appreciate it. “The people who play on the truck … passionately love the music and they want to share that love with as many people as they can,” Lomazov says.
The people who will be performing on the truck next week are its founders: Susan Zhang and Nick Luby. Zhang herself is an alum of the Southeastern Piano Festival and attended as a participant when she was a teenager. Both Zhang and Luby studied piano at UofSC and were students of Lomazov and her husband Joseph Rackers.
Luby first had the idea for the truck while traveling. He had the habit of practicing piano in churches while on the road, and one day found that his playing had drawn a small crowd from the street. “Something changed for me in that moment,” Luby says, “and I started to question why concerts always happen in concert halls. Spaces started to look different to me … everywhere I went seemed like a great place to have a concert.”
Luby started researching mobile concert halls only to realize that they didn’t exist. That’s when he approached Zhang with the notion of the Concert Truck.
The truck debuted its first show on a bright summer morning around five years ago for an audience of nearly 200 people — many of whom had never experienced classical piano before.
The Concert Truck really took off when the pandemic hit.
“Suddenly you could not be inside a concert hall. And that’s when their idea really exploded” Lomazov says. The duo began collaborating with major companies such as the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera, and the Dallas Symphony, to name a few. They hardly had a break in the past year, sometimes performing up to three concerts a day.
Recently, Zhang and Luby signed on with artist management company Opus 3 which is, according to Lomazov, “as high as you can go in the world of classical music, of music in general … it’s a real success story.”
As the Concert Truck continues to tour, Zhang and Luby want to challenge what is expected from a classical piano concert. “Working with organizations during this time is really exciting because we can work with them to push on those boundaries as well,” Zhang says. In the future, the two want to focus on local collaborations and connecting more deeply with the communities they serve.
-Stephanie Allen
