Above: pianist Steven Osborne, photographed by Benjamin Ealovega
Author: Oberon
Friday August 9th, 2019 - My ballet-loving friend Monica Wellington and I were very keen to hear Shostakovich's Piano Concerto #2 in a concert setting tonight at the Mostly Mozart Festival. We've enjoyed this music many times at New York City Ballet, where choreographer Alexei Ratmansky created one of his very finest ballets - Concerto DSCH - to this score.
Conducted by Louis Langrée, the concert opened with Haydn's Overture in D-Major. Written in 1777, this was most likely meant to have been the overture to an opera but instead became a free-standing work. It certainly has an operatic feeling: from its bustling start, the music wends thru a gentler passage that is marked by dramatic accents. Then there's a flow of lyricism before a zesty finale is reached. The Maestro and his Mostly Mozart players gave the overture a sense of both elegance and energy.
Steven Osborne then took his place at the Steinway; what transpired was one of those thrilling performances that I am sure to remember fondly for years to come. Shostakovich opens this concerto with some bassoon drollery, and then we are off to the races with the pianist - urged on by the snare drum - providing remarkable feats of virtuosity. The music looms huge, and the keyboard gets pummeled.
Piccolos screech over driven themes, arriving at a place of grandeur. Mr. Osborne impeccably delivers a fascinating cadenza, and then the race is on again: simply such fun music to hear! A jaunty march takes over, leading to a splashy finish.
For the Andante, the mood shifts radically, with the strings evoking an autumnal dream. And then: the melody. The melody. So poignant in its simplicity, with that aching, soul-reaching harmonic shift that simply kills me every time I hear it. Mr. Osborne's breath-taking control and the spine-tingling blend of the string choir made for a dream performance, filled with sublime modulations over which Maestro Langrée presided with a sure sense of the music's poetic resonance.
The concerto's Finale-Allegro is so clever and so alive. Do I hear distant echoes of the William Tell overture? And what about that lilting à l'espagnole passage, the plucked strings, the rambling scales? Everything here makes me smile, especially as Mr. Osborne's goes scrambling up and down the keyboard so deliciously. The snare drums...the horns...what a treat for the ear.
The audience really went wild for Mr. Osborne, and, after being re-called for a second solo bow, he offered an encore that had the feel of an after-hours improvisation. I made a hasty note to myself to be sure Mr. Osborne's Great Performers all-Beethoven concert is on my calendar (it's set for April 7th, 2020, at Alice Tully Hall).
A sort of comic interlude followed the interval: Alfred Schnittke's Moz-Art à la Haydn. Two groups of violinists - led respectively by Ruggero Allifranchini and Laura Frautschi - enter and stand in the dark on either side of the conductor. Their instruments whisper, sigh, squeak, purr, and sizzle, whilst occasionally taking up melodic fragments by the Master. During a mass shivering of strings, the lights come up. There's a courtly but off-kilter dance, with plucking and dissonances, and the players move closer together for a doleful, sagging melody. Chased back to their places, they carry on with "seasick" music until darkness falls and they disperse.
Though listed as being 12-minutes in duration, the Schnittke seemed longer, and it began to wear thin after a bit. Brevity is still the soul of wit.
A very polished performance of Mozart's familiar 'Haffner' symphony, K. 385, closed the evening. It's a concert that I'll recall fondly as time goes by, thanks to Steven Osborne's Shostakovich.
~ Oberon