IN
CONCERT... THIBAUDET in LA with Antonio Pappano and the LA Philharmonic
April
3, 1999 was a celebration of sorts for French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
It was the last of his 3-day engagement with the Los Angeles Philharmonic
and his 50th public performance of Liszt's Piano Concerto # 1. (He first
performed it in 1986; and yes, that's his own personal score of the concerto
on the piano in his dressing room at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion.)
True to type, Jean-Yves delivered - with eloquent passion, brilliant mastery,
precision and panache. Trademark traits that would have surely pleased Franz
Liszt, by all accounts the piano virtuoso of his time. Some who were seeing
Jean-Yves on stage for the first time marvelled at the way his long fingers
seemed to caress the keys as he played. (No, the red socks
were not a distraction.) Not surprising for a pianist who is a romantic at heart,
an unabashed champion of Franz Liszt whose playing brings new respectability
to Liszt's oft-trashed-because-familiar music and allows, if not commands, us
to look at Liszt with new eyes and to listen to his music as if we were hearing
it for the very first time.
True to type, Jean-Yves delivered - with eloquent passion, brilliant mastery,
precision and panache. Trademark traits that would have surely pleased Franz
Liszt, by all accounts the piano virtuoso of his time. Some who were seeing
Jean-Yves on stage for the first time marvelled at the way his long fingers
seemed to caress the keys as he played. (No, the red socks
were not a distraction.) Not surprising for a pianist who is a romantic at heart,
an unabashed champion of Franz Liszt whose playing brings new respectability
to Liszt's oft-trashed-because-familiar music and allows, if not commands, us
to look at Liszt with new eyes and to listen to his music as if we were hearing
it for the very first time.
This performance with the LA Philharmonic was also somewhat of a celebration
of youth in music. The orchestra was masterfully led by the youthful conductor
Antonio Pappano who at 36 is a year younger than Thibaudet. The London-born
Italian became the Music Director of Brussels' Theatre Royal de la Monnaie
at age 32, a position he holds to date. While principally a conductor of opera
- and when he's not in Brussels he wields his baton in most all the world's
great opera houses (before this, FanFaire last heard him at the Met's
Eugene Onegin) - he is as at home on the concert stage as in the
orchestra pit, as he amply demonstrated at this Easter weekend performance with
the LA Philharmonic. (Need it be mentioned that this great orchestra
is energized by youth - as personified by its brilliant Music Director Esa
Pekka-Salonenwho, still boyish-looking at 40, has led the orchestra through
this decade to the exalted status it enjoys today?) The chemistry between Pappano
and the orchestra was evident in their reading of the evening's musical fare
which, with the exception of the Piano Concerto, resounded with religious undertones
appropriate to the season.
The
opening number was Arthur Honegger'srarely performed Symphony
No. 3 otherwise known as Symphonie liturgique. Composed
in 1946 at the end of World War II, the music is cinematic. Its lush orchestration
calls for a dazzling use of wind and percussion (with occasional piano) that
in the first movement, aptly subtitled Dies irae, produce waves of explosive
dissonances that evoke wrathful images of war, dissolving in the second movement
into the plaintive sound of the flute made to exemplify the soul pleading for
deliverance, rather like a bird rising from the ruins.
In the final movement Honegger, engaging in a bit of sociology, recalls both
the clangor of the first movement - this time in a marching rhythm evocative
of man enslaved to machine, at war so to speak with industrialization, desperately
crying for peace (Donna nobis pacem!) - and the hushed, bird-like sounds
of the second movement as peace is finally granted, bringing the symphony to
an uncharacteristically quiet end.
The closing number, Felix Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 5 (chronologically his
second symphony, aka Reformation) is the least known of his symphonies.
The subtitle derives from the fact that it was commisioned in 1829 (when Mendelssohn
was but a lad of 20!) to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession,
the Lutheran document of faith. (Originally Jewish, the prominent Mendelssohn
family became Lutheran converts.) However, because of revolutionary disturbances
and protests from the Catholic Church, the symphony was not performed as planned.
And although it later premiered in 1932, the work was not published until 20
years after Mendelssohn's death. While scholars and critics are at one about
the programmatic nature of Honegger's Symphony liturgique, they are divided
about applying the same description to the Reformation. Mendelssohn's
symphony, some say, is an abstract piece of music, devoid of any religious or
celebratory meaning. But what does it matter? Like all of Mendelssohn's works,
it is a thing of beauty bursting with many melodic and grandiose passages, in
itself worthy of celebration in today's concert halls. The LA Philharmonic is
to be commended for introducing us to these orchestral rarities, and for happily
rounding out the evening with a virtuoso performance of an ever popular piano
concerto. Bravo!
A MESSAGE FROM JY (1999)
UK
