Piano Concerto

Does William Bolcom's new piano concerto Gaea have anything to offer besides its unusual premise? Bolcom's creation, premiered here by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and music director David Zinman, is not one work, but three. It asks one orchestra and one pianist to play in one version, another orchestra and another pianist to play related music in a second incarnation, and both orchestras and both pianists to fit their parts together for yet a third. Adding to that considerable compositional challenge, both piano parts are for left hand alone.

The reputation of contemporary composers as who-cares-if-you-listen practitioners of a restrictive art form has always far outstripped the reality. Even when composers were committing their most serious (alleged) serial crimes, there was Krzysztof Penderecki. The Polish composer, whose new Piano Concerto, "Resurrection," was premiered Thursday night at Carnegie Hall by the Philadelphia Orchestra and pianist Emanuel Ax, was using pure, proud major and minor melodies in the 1970s.

Mozart's final few works reach the summit of expressive genius, an outpouring of the human spirit cruelly silenced at the age of 35. Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia's music director, has scheduled these masterpieces in three weekend pairs called "Ultimate Mozart," wrapping the ensemble's season. The programs feature the final three symphonies and three piano concertos, plus the overtures to the last three operas as openers. To function as conductor and piano soloist in this repertory, Solzhenitsyn achieves a career milestone.

Word association: Tchaikovsky and piano concerto. No, not that concerto. Another one. Yes, there are others. Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 2 in G major is an enormously intriguing work, yet it is his ivory-billed woodpecker. The last time it alighted in a Philadelphia Orchestra subscription concert was in 1968, when Gary Graffman played it under Eugene Ormandy, and its return Thursday night, if an artistic vindication, revealed reasons for the rarity. Specifically, three of them: It requires a pianist of preternatural technique, and a solo violinist and cellist who can conjure a Tchaikovsky pas de deux in mid-piano concerto.

"Whatever financial woes the cash-strapped Philadelphia Orchestra might be having at home, they gave a super performance . . . that glittered and sparkled from beginning to end. . . . This phenomenal orchestra produces a well-balanced sound, seemingly effortlessly. " - Susan Nickalls, Edinburgh Daily News, Aug. 31 " . . . in Lucerne, one could hear precisely which areas Dutoit had worked on with the orchestra and which he had not. . . . Piano Concerto No. 2]

A wind player in the Philadelphia Orchestra told me the other day that from where he sits in Verizon Hall, the sound of the solo pianist's left-hand work arrives at a slightly different time from the sound of the right. Bizarre. It's the kind of acoustical quirk that the orchestra will spend the next several months finding solutions to. The musicians are very much a part of this process, sending feedback to acoustician Russell Johnson. After a period of observation, changes in the hall's highly adjustable acoustical gadgetry will be made.

Playing dual roles as conductor and soloist, Ignat Solzhenitsyn used the Concerto Soloists Chamber orchestra program Thursday to span almost all of Mozart's creative life. He led the Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 40, and was soloist in Piano Concerto No. 27, the composer's last, in the single-performance program at the Convention Center. In Mozart's case, the panorama is less a path from beginner to master than it is from breathtaking youngster to daunting youngster, for there didn't seem to be a beginner level or a sense of summary at the end. At any rate, Solzhenitsyn did more than offer a short course in Mozart: He also brought the ensemble to life.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's Brahms celebration has taken different turns, jostled by the strike early in the season and now by an unforeseen change in soloists. Pianist Andre Watts is currently stepping in to replace ailing violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and to play the Piano Concerto No. 2. For Watts, it's a return to the stage where he played 40 years ago as a winner of the orchestra's children's competition, and also an appearance in a work that has not been closely associated with his career.

Guest conductor Michael Korn led the Concerto Soloists Chamber Orchestra in another of its long and programmatically curious concerts at the Walnut Street Theater last night. A series meant to showcase Philadelphians, this one put the spotlight on composer David Finko, pianist Harriet Rothstein and violist Richard Fleischman, in three of its five works. As usual, the concert was at least one piece too long. This one included Henry Purcell's Chacony in G Minor for Strings; Finko's Triptych for Trio; Mozart's Concerto No. 20 for Piano in D Minor, K466; Ralph Vaughan-Williams' Flos Campi, and Gustav Holst's Saint Paul's Suite.

Sociologists would seem to have planned the Curtis Symphony Orchestra's concert Sunday at the Kimmel Center, in which conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya identified national moods from the 1940s, contrasted haves and have-nots, and even took some musical soil samples to show how music sprouts and grows. The almost simultaneous birth of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 "Age of Anxiety" and Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5 sent the players on a survey of contrasting musical styles reflecting two societies' postwar hopes, memories, and mental positionings.

Few current pianists have played and recorded as much Rachmaninoff as Nikolai Lugansky. And no orchestra had such an intensive association with pianist/composer Rachmaninoff as the Philadelphia Orchestra. The combination is such that each side welcomes the other almost as if they're cousins. Maybe they are. "Here, this music is unbelievably close," Lugansky said Thursday, having just rehearsed Rachmaninoff with the orchestra. "This is the best Russian style. " But what such a collaboration actually would sound like on Friday and Saturday night at the Kimmel Center performances of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 - and how much Lugansky would follow in the composer's footsteps - remained to be seen.

Sociologists would seem to have planned the Curtis Symphony Orchestra's concert Sunday at the Kimmel Center, in which conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya identified national moods from the 1940s, contrasted haves and have-nots, and even took some musical soil samples to show how music sprouts and grows. The almost simultaneous birth of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 "Age of Anxiety" and Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5 sent the players on a survey of contrasting musical styles reflecting two societies' postwar hopes, memories, and mental positionings.

"Whatever financial woes the cash-strapped Philadelphia Orchestra might be having at home, they gave a super performance . . . that glittered and sparkled from beginning to end. . . . This phenomenal orchestra produces a well-balanced sound, seemingly effortlessly. " - Susan Nickalls, Edinburgh Daily News, Aug. 31 " . . . in Lucerne, one could hear precisely which areas Dutoit had worked on with the orchestra and which he had not. . . . Piano Concerto No. 2]

We know from many happy encounters over the years what Marc-André Hamelin thinks of Charles-Valentin Alkan, Nikolai Kapustin, Nikolai Medtner, and Kaikhosru Sorabji. But how does he do in Mozart? Hamelin's Thursday night performance of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major (K. 453) with the Philadelphia Orchestra didn't pack the punch and revelation of his other appearances here. The Canadian-born pianist - once a Philadelphian, now a Bostonian - is known as the conquering hero of towering technique.

Word association: Tchaikovsky and piano concerto. No, not that concerto. Another one. Yes, there are others. Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 2 in G major is an enormously intriguing work, yet it is his ivory-billed woodpecker. The last time it alighted in a Philadelphia Orchestra subscription concert was in 1968, when Gary Graffman played it under Eugene Ormandy, and its return Thursday night, if an artistic vindication, revealed reasons for the rarity. Specifically, three of them: It requires a pianist of preternatural technique, and a solo violinist and cellist who can conjure a Tchaikovsky pas de deux in mid-piano concerto.

It began like almost any other orchestra summer idyll, with Leonard Bernstein's Candide Overture . And then, with the middle movement of a Mozart piano concerto, Tuesday night's Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Mann Center suddenly took on rare auras of celebrity, politics, and the general idea that history of a sort was in the making. The source of the extra-musical messaging was the soloist: Condoleezza Rice, former national security advisor, 66th U.S. secretary of state and public face of the Bush 43 administration.

Though pianist Andre Watts is one of the most immediately identifiable figures in classical music, even his more devoted admirers could easily have failed a blindfold test at his Wednesday performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 at the Mann Center. Watts' consistent artistic manner in the past is a hallmark of the Van Cliburn generation, which in some quarters carried the belief that you hit a high mark with a great piece of music, then strive to maintain it in subsequent performances (rather than evolving and changing with age)

Any critic who rolls his eyes about confronting yet another Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 needs to experience the piece at the artistic confluence of Charles Dutoit, pianist Nikolai Lugansky, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. A great interpretation justifies its own existence. Not that there was anything mannered or eccentric about Lugansky's performance Friday afternoon. His characteristics - a limpid sound, a large presence, and a tendency to push his playing to the outer edge of fleetness - were natural foils to some of the orchestra's tendencies.

Age-appropriate repertoire is a nagging question for young conductors: Should they conduct nothing deeper than Carmina Burana until age 40? Yannick N?zet-S?guin, 34, shows no caution in this regard: He's a "ninth symphony" kind of guy, embracing late-period Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler with unexpected success. What of the flashier, youthful stuff that figures into everyday concerts? At his Lincoln Center tour stop with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra on Wednesday, he faced a program of potboiler Liszt and Richard Strauss as well as the Philadelphia Orchestra search committee in the audience, eager to hear what he's like in calling-card repertoire and with the near-world-class orchestra he has headed for almost two years.

Behind great pianists, there's usually much more than just Steinway grands and the genius composers who wrote for them. In spare moments, when you'd think pianist Leif Ove Andsnes would be analyzing the great Brahms recordings of the past in preparation for this week's Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, he's rhapsodizing over music so distant from what he does as to be irrelevant to his career. And that's Bach's 200-plus cantatas - rarely heard vocal works meant for utilitarian use in church services almost 300 years ago. "It's such an unbelievable world, an inexhaustible world," he said the other morning in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton, where he's staying during his Thursday-through-Saturday concerts at the Kimmel Center.