A Teeny Tiny Piano Concerto
review
D
David Hackett9. April 2024
Concert Review:
DR Symphony Orchestra
Friday 5th April 2024
Lorenzo Viotti - Conductor
Denis Kozhukhin - Piano
DR Koncerthuset, Copenhagen
“I want to tell you that I have written a teeny-tiny piano concerto with a very small and pretty scherzo”, Johannes Brahms wrote in 1881 to his friend and confidante Clara Schumann. The composer had a reputation for mischievously mis-selling his music, having once claimed that his sunny and ebullient Second Symphony was so depressing it would need to be printed on black-edged music paper.
The “teeny-tiny” piano concerto in question was in fact a monumental work lasting almost an hour and packed with style and substance – arguably the greatest piano concerto of the late nineteenth century.
But for all its grandeur, something about the B Flat Major Concerto is also very human and relatable. Perhaps no other creation by Brahms suggests the idiosyncratic composer in all his moods: contemplative yet innately optimistic, warm and humorous as well as melancholy and irascible, emotionally complicated yet unpretentious in manner, a romantic sensibility anchored by a studious, classical outlook.
Brahms wrote the piece in his late forties, during a particularly fruitful nine-year period that would bring the bulk of his orchestral musical, including all four of his symphonies. The Concerto certainly shares some of the scope and driving force of the latter. Not least it requires both technique and intellect from its performers to do justice to its large-scale ideas and structural complexities.
Thankfully in virtuoso pianist Denis Kozhukhin and Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti, we had two brilliant, youthful talents with a clear grasp of the music, bringing their own distinctive insights to the performance.
So assured was Kozhukhin's playing that you would not have guessed he was a last minute stand-in for the concert. Born in Nizhny Novgorod in central Russia, he moved to the west in 2000, continuing his piano studies in Madrid before eventually taking Belgian citizenship. A runner-up in the 2006 Leeds International Piano Competition, he was outright winner of the 2010 Queen Elisabeth Competition for piano, held in Brussels.
Kozhukhin evidently relished the challenge of the Concerto as he turned out a performance that was both muscular and yet subtly nuanced, particularly enjoying himself in the work’s unaccompanied passages. My only slight criticism was the piano he had at his disposal, which had a curiously heavy action and did not, at least from my vantage point, always have the necessary brightness of tone to cut through the full orchestra. Perhaps the hall’s acoustic was also partly at fault, and in any case it did not seriously detract from the overall effect.
From the conducting podium, Lorenzo Viotti was suavity personified, coaxing a sumptuously rich sound from his players and allowing Brahms’ orchestration to positively glow. But he also took painstaking care to marshal his instrumental forces around the soloist, allowing the latter plenty of room in which to breathe.
Of the four movements which make up the Concerto, the second (Scherzo), with its tumultuous mood-swings, was perhaps the most effectively rendered. Both conductor and pianist showed a superb instinct for exploring the music’s dramatic contrasts – particularly that soft, melancholy second theme (heard first in the strings then later in the woodwind) which Viotti allowed to hang in the air like a gorgeous morning mist.
Almost as good was the beautiful third slow movement, with Viotti transforming his large orchestral forces into an intimate, chamber ensemble, while Kozhukhin perfectly captured the dreamy tones of Brahms’ more introspective piano writing.
The performance was heard with great appreciation, the audience breaking protocol to enthusiastically applaud each movement. After a rousing final ovation, Kozhukhin returned once more to play a little encore, achieving an almost other-worldly stillness in Robert Schumann’s Träumerei.
It seemed a tall order to follow up this mighty performance, but at least in the second half of the concert the DR Symphony Orchestra was allowed to take centre stage, spreading its wings with two highly colourful, Hispanic-themed crowd-pleasers.
One of the hallmarks of Maurice Ravel’s genius was the way in which he could write a piano piece, then arrange it for orchestra, and in doing so genuinely create two equally meritorious but entirely independent works. His Alborada del Gracioso (1905) is an excellent example of this – on the piano it is, despite its spiky rhythms, a magnificent water colour, utilising the instrument’s subtlest shades and tones. But in its orchestral incarnation (from 1919) it positively sparks and fizzes with the most inventive instrumental combinations.
The concert ended with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnole (1887), a confectionary box of rousing Hispanic dances and beguiling melodies, all of which the orchestra pulled off with deftness and elegance. Despite sharing much of Ravel’s brilliance at handling orchestral colour, Rimsky always bristled at the idea that this was the only salient quality to his art: “The opinion formed by both critics and the public, that the Capriccio is a magnificently orchestrated piece — is wrong”, he once wrote sniffily. “The Capriccio is a brilliant composition for the orchestra. The change of timbres, the felicitous choice of melodic designs and figuration patterns, exactly suiting each kind of instrument, brief virtuoso cadenzas for instruments solo, the rhythm of the percussion instruments, etc., constitute here the very essence of the composition and not its garb or orchestration…” Rimsky would doubtless have been pleased at hearing the “very essence” of his work rendered so proficiently by Viotti and his accomplished musicians, thus concluding the evening in the highest of spirits.
The DR Symphony Orchestra will be championing yet more youthful talent later this month, as it hosts the week-long international Malko Competition, starting on April 15th. Twenty-four promising young conductors from all over the world will be taking turns to direct the ensemble through a mouth-watering programme of orchestral classics, all the while hoping to impress a distinguished jury, led by the DR Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor, Fabio Luisi.
To read more from David Hackett, go to musicbytheyear.com