Joyce Yang’s sublime Rach 2
Joyce Yang. Photo by Oh Seuk Hoon.
Rachmaninoff wrote plenty of brawn into his Piano Concerto No. 2, and soloist Joyce Yang had more than enough muscle for it Friday night, with Edo de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. She gave those ominous chords and that very low F pedal at the start not just volume but weight, of a rumbling deep in the earth.
Yang thrilled us in the big, virtuoso moments, as much for her feeling as her dazzling skill. She conveyed the intensely Romantic urgency of that second theme of the first movement with no reservation whatever. It was electrifying, as were the vertiginous runs and madly twittering high arpeggios in the finale.
The Second has its share of big drama and grand gestures, but this most lyrical of Rachmaninoff’s major works turns on intimacy. Yang’s most striking moment emerged in the exquisite slow movement. She wasn’t even playing the melody; clarinetist Todd Levy did, gorgeously and with great feeling. Yang had nothing to do but the simplest of arpeggios. She turned these little nothings into some of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard come out of a piano. Such arresting beauty causes you to hold your breath, which might explain the collective sigh of the big audience.
That audience exploded at the end of the concerto and called Yang back for bow after bow. She finally played an encore, some dreamy Chopin with just enough meter to create the sense of a dance not danced or even witnessed, but remembered wistfully. She did not announce it, but I’ll take a guess: My Joys, Opus 74, a Chopin song that Liszt transcribed for piano alone. (If I’m wrong, I’ll let you know.)
Beyond that, Rachmaninoff took a daring approach to melody. He reveals his themes in accumulating and volatile fragments. This, like the rhythmic/metric displacement, gives the music a certain instability and nervous excitement.
And beyond all that, some really crazy things happen. The most notable is the giant tam-tam crash that stops the fourth and final movement in its tracks a few yards from the finish line. A reprise of the brooding gestures of the introduction come back to haunt the developmental coda.
The densely scored Symphony No. 1 abounds with aggressive brass punctuations and difficult, exposed solos. It must be a bear to play. De Waart clearly spent a lot of time with this score and guided the MSO with a sure hand. They gave him a performance crackling with precision, vigor and confidence.
One moment, in particular, showed just how good this orchestra has become. A long, meandering transition begins as the high-energy principal theme in the first movement dies down. The music settles into the lower depths of the cellos, from which it rises in to set the stage for the lyrical second theme. Rachmaninoff ran out of high range on the cello before reaching his landing point. So he wrote one line that crosses from the top of the cello range and into the first violins, to continue the ascent to the second theme. Friday night, new principal cellist Susan Babini and concertmaster Frank Almond made eye contact at the right moment. They passed the baton so smoothly that the whole line seemed to play out on a single instrument.
Wow.
Joyce Yang, Edo de Waart and the MSO will return to Marcus Center Uihlein Hall with this program at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 4-5). Call the Marcus box office, 414 273-7206, for tickets. For further information, visit the MSO website.
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Was this Susan Babini’s first concert as principal cello? I missed the Rite of Spring last week, so I don’t know if she was playing in it.
It’s her second week–she’ll be here for several weeks this season, then full-time in the fall. Can’t wait to hear this concert tonight!
The First Symphony performed at this level reveals the extent to which Rachmaninoff’s music grew from the loins of Edvard Grieg, and would not exist as we know it without that foreward-thinking composer having preceeded it. I would also say that Grieg’s music
could be thought of as coming “after” Rachmaninoff artistically, with the First Symphony having a better–even godlike–handle on the sum total of Grieg’s scattered ideas.
I’m happy I’ve lived to hear the silken hand of De Waart on Rachmaninoff’s second concerto. Some day one of us pianists is going to get around to rewriting the piano parts in the first movement which are not heard, a flaw in the composition itself and something that inevitably happens regardless of the caliber of the performance.
It was fun to have Lecce-Chong give the pre-concert talk and bring that silent hulk of a piano to life for us with illustrations from the two works on the program, as well as he and Scott Tisdale playing for us the slow movenent from the cello sonata, which Arkady Volodos has so aptly transcibed as a solo. [It is also possible to reduce the opening of the 2nd concerto to a solo [hint]–the 4th finger in the right hand plays the theme and all the other notes redistribute very comfortably.]
Yang’s encore was Chopin/Liszt “My Joys”, an arrangement hardly to be contained for long as an intimate piece in Liszt’s hands, but in this performance retaining the sense of Chopin more than Liszt, and as if played in the dark, where Chopin most liked to be when composing.
Yangs Rach 2 was neither ascetic nor agogic, as we’ve come to know the work, but instead tenderized throughout. Ultimitely, it’s the moment that counts, and each performance is a thing unto itself. As Glenn Gould once said, there’s no point in doing something unless one is going to do it differently. Rrachmaninoff’s own playing on record was utterly fragile, vulnerable, crushable in every phrase.
Hi Stefanie,
Full-time in the fall? It’s not possible that she’s moving to Milwaukee, is it? Whatever for? — t.
Hi Kyle,
I saw her playing Rite of Spring last week, and she was on the roster as principal then. — Strini
This remark from Valarie Kraemer :
>Some day one of us pianists is going to get around to rewriting the piano parts in the first >movement which are not heard, a flaw in the composition itself and something that >inevitably happens regardless of the caliber of the performance.
…is certainly intriguing and even provocative. I admit to know next to nothing about early 20th century piano concertos (and Rach’s contributions in particular…wonderful stuff but just not my thing.) I do know this, however: there are several sublime example form “the canon” (for lack of a better word) where the composer wrote parts that are not audible
to the audience. One example is the 6th Brandenburg; the viola da gamba parts are really smothered by the rest of the ensemble. But having hacked my way through one of those gamba parts several times in my life , I know that Bach knew exactly what he was doing (after all, he was Bach…the man just didn’t make instrumentation errors.. So if the audience can’t hear the parts, why did he (or for that matter, Rach, write the parts that way? Here is an idea: these composers generally may write for an audience, but there are times when they are writing for the players themselves. In the Brandenburg, the gambists can hear the gamba parts, the rest of the ensemble can hear the gamba parts; the fact that the folks out front can’t hear the gamba parts doesn’t mean the piece is flawed. It means that there are hidden, intimate veins of sublime material that is written just for the band. If anything, such moments may very well make the music even more sublime in the eyes of St. Cecilia or whomever is making the artistic judgements that day. So, Ms. Kraemer, before you re-write the parts, I would tread carefully….or at least consult with St. Cecilia first…
I was more interested in hearing Symphony No. 1 than the Concerto No. 2, as it is so rarely performed. I tried to get a recording of it beforehand to “prep” myself. It is interesting to note that the entire Milwaukee Co. Library System has only one or two CD’s of this piece. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on one of them two weeks prior to the performance. I am happy to report that this was just one more occasion when hearing the piece performed live was so much better than the recording. The second movement sounded like a soundtrack for a conclave of faeries and wood nymphs, something I’d expect to hear behind “The Tempest.” Material from the first and second movements could be heard recycling in the fourth. When I first heard the recording I thought, “Rachmaninoff does not know how to end this piece.” But hearing the piece played under de Waart’s direction, it made much more sense.