Wichita Symphony soloist almost gave up on music. Then a concert changed everything. 

The first time Natasha Paremski performed Ravel’s “Piano Concerto in G Major” was when she was 12 years old.

“I’ve done it a fair bit,” she said with a laugh of the piece she’ll be performing next weekend with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra.

Twenty years later, she said her performances then and now are worlds apart.

“It’s inevitable that when you’re 12 you don’t have the same maturity as a musician, you don’t have the same amount of colors in your repertoire, you don’t have the same technique as you do after you’ve learned all of the Rachmaninoff concertos,” Paremski said.

All of the music that she has listened to in the past two decades has changed her performance as well, including the piano music of George Gershwin, who was an influence of Ravel after the latter took a trip to New York.

“When you hear the concerto and you hear anything by Gershwin, I think the influence is too obvious to ignore,” Paremski said. “Even if you had never known Ravel was inspired by Gershwin, if you … didn’t strike the parallel, I think it would be odd, actually.”

For Paremski, the second movement of the Ravel is the most difficult – and the most beautiful.

“It’s technically not a challenge at all, but musically it’s a very long phrase and you have to separate yourself as a performer from overemoting, and kind of keeping the simplicity and continuing the line on an instrument that, the moment you strike the key, begins to decay,” she said. “It’s probably the most difficult thing to do on the piano.

“I think it’s one of the most beautiful melodies ever written,” Paremski added. “I think it’s extremely poignant.”

And how can a pianist convey those emotions?

“By staying out of it,” she said. “As with the Rachmaninoff concertos or anything romantic – Chopin, Brahms, even the lyricism of Beethoven and Mozart -- … you have to be outside of it to really convey it, rather than allow yourself to get emotionally influenced by it.”

Born in Moscow, Paremski made her professional debut at age 9. Her family moved to the United States in 1995, when her engineer father was “poached by recruiters after the fall of the Soviet Union,” she said, landing a job in California’s Silicon Valley.

Her parents made it clear to the teenage Natasha that they did not want her continuing her musical career.

“When I came to the United States, it was made clear that there was no funding in the family for piano lessons – which were free in Russia, and extraordinarily expensive here,” she recalled.

Her father “was not 100% excited about it, because he had a lot of musician friends in Moscow, and he saw how much they struggled and the instability of the business. He did not want his child to be in something that unpredictable and unsteady,” Paremski said. “He wanted me to follow in the footsteps of both my parents and be an engineer.”

She agreed, because she had to get used to a different language, lifestyle, food and “starting a life from scratch.”

“It was sort of easy to forget about the piano in the beginning,” Paremski said.

But that changed when she and her mother attended a concert by her idol, Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin, with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall.

“When I was in the concert hall listening to him play, I couldn’t stop crying because I realized how much I missed the piano and how much I’d missed performing, and how much I was in awe of the energy in the audience that was happening right before my eyes,” she remembers.

Once the concert was over, “I couldn’t stop sobbing. I turned to my mom and said, ‘I really miss it, I really want to do it again.’”

She promised she would work hard at the piano and not only become a professional, but a soloist.

“I did work very hard,” she said, “and seven years later I played with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall.”

Paremski returns to the Wichita Symphony after soloing on Tchaikovsky four years ago. Among her early supporters, she said, was Don Reinhold, WSO executive director, who booked her for concerts when she was in her teens.

“The people who have supported me and helped me get to where I am are and always will be people I’m deeply indebted to,” she said.

The Ravel is the middle piece of next weekend’s concerts that begin with a 4-5 minute piece by composer Chris Rogerson, written in 2010.

“It had an immediate charm, an immediate likeability to it,” musical director and conductor Daniel Hege said of the piece. “It had an effervescent character to it. It’s very attention-getting and alluring and very energetic throughout.”

The second half of the concert will be Brahms’ second symphony.

“Brahms only wrote four symphonies, and each of those four symphonies are so precious,” Hege said. “He’s such a profound, wonderful thinker in terms of music.

“They really work well on the level of the mind,” he continued. “It’s cerebral music, but at the same time it’s very passionate. It goes straight to the heart. The listener is uplifted by that unity of brain and heart, and that’s the greatest music – the music that inspires us on an emotional level because of the sound.”

Hege feels that Brahms and Ravel pair well together on a symphony program.

“It’s because of the different sound worlds, French and German together,” he said. “There’s more of a contemporary spin with Ravel, and you have the virtuosity of the more dramatic, serious music in the second half.”

Wichita Symphony Orchestra: Ravel & Brahms

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 14; 3 p.m. Sunday, March 15

Where: Century II concert hall, 225 W. Douglas

Tickets: $25-$70, with discounts for seniors, military and students, from wichitasymphony.org, the WSO box office and 316-267-7658