Review: John Storgårds and Nikolai Lugansky deliver the goods in an evening of Rachmaninoff and Bartok

This review originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Pianist Nikolai Lugansky

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Nearly all of the longer than usual St. Louis Symphony program this past weekend (April 22 and 23) consisted of two big early-twentieth-century concerti, one for a single virtuoso and one for an orchestra full of them. Happily, both were on hand at Powell Hall.

The first major event was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 30, from 1909. Known as "Rach 3" to its friends, of whom I am one, is widely regarded as one of the most challenging concerti out there. Fiercely difficult, it's a reminder of what a superhuman pianist Rachmaninoff was. For many years after its premiere, its only real advocate was the composer himself.

Here in Mound City there has been no shortage of great Rach 3's over the past few years, including a real stunner by Steven Hough and Peter Oundjian in 2012. The soloist this time was the remarkably talented Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky, who recorded all four of the Rachmaninoff concerti in the early 2000's and whose CD of Rachmaninoff piano sonatas copped multiple awards.

He clearly knows this material well, and it showed in the easy familiarity with which he approached the music. He and guest conductor John Storgårds took an expansive view of the concerto that highlighted the strong differences among its many moods. In the opening movement, for example, the brisk and authoritative opening stood in sharp contrast to the more lush treatment of the second theme group, while the titanic cadenza had all the flash and power you could ask for.

The second movement was extraordinarily passionate, and the finale raced ahead at breakneck speed to its power chord coda, capped with the composer's characteristic four-note signature ("Rach-man-in-OFF"). Done properly, this never fails to get a standing ovation—which is exactly what happened when we saw the concert Saturday night.

It was a superlative performance, marred only by an unusual murkiness in the overall sound of the orchestra—many woodwind passages, for example, were nearly inaudible—and what sometimes seemed to be a less than ideal balance between the soloist and orchestra, with Mr. Lugansky sometimes swamped by the ensemble. The work that he played as an encore, on the other hand—Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G-sharp minor, Op. 32 No. 12—was crystalline perfection.

Let's turn now to that piece that needs an orchestra full of Nikolai Luganskys: Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra's famed music director Serge Koussevitzky in 1943 when the composer's finances and health were both bottoming out, the composition process worked like a tonic. Bartók threw himself into the project and the final result has been part of the core orchestral repertoire ever since.

Conductor John Storgårds

The work's title refers to the fact that throughout the piece individual groups of instruments or even entire sections of the orchestra are given difficult, attention-grabbing passages which highlight them. This is most apparent in the "Giuoco delle coppie" ("Game of couples") second movement, in which the melody is tossed about among pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes, and trumpets, but there are neat little solos for trombone and oboe in the first movement and the strings get a real workout in the fiery finale. Pretty much every section gets a chance to join in the fun.

It's only fun if the orchestra and conductor are up to the task, of course—which Mr. Storgårds and the band certainly were Saturday night. The second movement was both jaunty and whimsical, the third movement "Elegia" was piercingly intense, and the interjection, in the third movement "Intermezzo interotto" ("Interrupted Intermezzo"), of a theme from the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony (which Bartók heard in a live broadcast while composing the "Concerto") was comically precise. The opening movement had all the ominous drama one could hope for and the whirling finale built a tremendous head of steam and hurtled towards its conclusion, propelled by great slashing gestures from the podium.

This is, as René Spencer Saller writes in her program notes, a work that "boasts brisk contrasts and strange symmetries...a storehouse of stylistic touchstones: Bach fugues, peasant folk songs, angular tonal experiments, birdsong, night music." Mr. Storgårds let us hear all of that in a performance that allowed the music to breathe without sacrificing forward momentum. The players responded with some of the best work I have heard from them in some time. Every section was at the top of its game.

The concerts opened with a brief work for strings getting its local premiere: Valentin Silvestrov's haunting Hymne 2001. The delicate work is a beautiful piece of gossamer sonic filigree that uses silence—or as much silence as one can get in a live orchestra hall, anyway—as an important compositional tool. This is music that begins softly and ends with a prolonged hush. It is, in its own way, every bit as demanding as the far more massive Bartók in that all the lines are very exposed and the players need to be flawless. The SLSO strings proved that they were exactly that, with a performance of surpassing radiance.

Next at Powell Hall: David Robertson conducts the orchestra in two programs. On Friday, April 28, at 8 p.m. he'll conduct an evening of popular classics, including Tchaikovsky's Capprico Italien, the overture to Weber's Der Freischütz, and Walton's Crown Imperial march, along with James Stephenson's bass trombone concerto The Arch performed by the SLSO's own Gerard Pagano. On Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., April 29 and 30, Augustin Hadelich joins the orchestra for the Brahms Violin Concerto. Performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Isn't it Romantic?

Andrés Orozco-Estrada
Photo: © Werner Kmetitsch

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada with pianist Louis Lortie
What: Music of von Weber, Beethoven, and Bartók
When: Friday through Sunday, January 17-19, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

This weekend the second of the symphony’s four "Beethoven Festival" concerts brings us music of Beethoven, a younger contemporary of Beethoven, and a 20th century composer who acknowledged Beethoven as a major influence—all done up by guest conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada in that dramatic, late Romantic Austro-German style I associate with the recordings of Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer that were so much a part of my youth.

The concerts open with the overture to the 1823 opera "Euryanthe" by that younger contemporary of Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber. Unlike Weber's "Der Freischütz," "Euryanthe" has never found a place in the active repertoire, probably because (as Paul Schiavo writes in his program notes) the libretto by German journalist, poet, and playwright Helmina von Chézy (once described by Mahler as a "poetess with a full heart and an empty head") "was an incompetent botch." Still, the overture is a real crowd pleaser, with engaging themes, plenty of dramatic contrast, and a rousing finale.

Here, as in the rest of the program, Mr. Orozco-Estrada made the most of those contrasts—part of that aforementioned echt Romantic approach. The "ghost" theme was (you should pardon the expression) haunting and the fugato run-up to the finale was nicely articulated. Mr. Orozco-Estrada was an exuberant and very physically demonstrative figure on the podium, with big but crisp gestures suggesting a good balance of emotional involvement and intellectual control.

This week's Beethoven is the "Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major," op. 73 (a.k.a. the "Emperor"), a work which bristles with nobility and grace despite being written under the cloud of war and occupation. When Beethoven was writing the concerto in Vienna in 1809, the city was under heavy siege by Napoleon. "[L]ife around me", he wrote, "is wild and disturbing, nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, misery of every sort." You can even hear a bit of that bombardment, I think, in the heavy piano chords that show up early in the development section of the first movement just as you can hear a kind of impassioned yearning for peace in the wistful second. It's a work of inescapable emotional power.

Louis Lortie

Soloist Louis Lortie channeled all that power beautifully. This was a very visceral performance; Mr. Lortie truly threw himself into the music, with every emotion etched on his face and visible in his body language. Like Mr. Orozco-Estrada, Mr. Lortie gave us a nearly perfect combination of head and heart. Between them, we got a powerfully noble first movement, a transcendent second and, after that wonderfully suspenseful transition, a completely engaging finale.

This sort of big, colorful, high-wattage reading might not work for some of the earlier Beethoven concerti, but for the Fifth I think it's very valid. The piano part, in particular, seems to cry out for the fuller tone and wider range of the modern, metal frame concert grand—a type of piano that wouldn't be perfected until shortly before the composer's death. Mr. Lortie's muscular approach couldn't have been a better fit.

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was a great admirer of Beethoven, so it seems only right that this weekend's concerts should conclude with what may be Bartók's most famous work, the 1943 "Concerto for Orchestra." Written, like the "Emperor" concerto, at a time of great personal travail, the "Concerto" is nevertheless a dramatic, appealing, and sometimes even humorous work. Indeed, as Paul Schiavo points out in his program notes, Bartók, although impoverished and suffering from leukemia, declared that the commission to compose this work was "the wonder drug I needed to bring about my own cure."

And it really is a wonder. The "Concerto" provides an opportunity for the members of the symphony to show off, either individually or in small groups—and on Friday morning they did it beautifully. If I were to list everyone who managed to "shine with a virtue resplendent" this morning, I'd just be listing all the principal and assistant principal players in each section, which might make for tedious reading. So I'll merely note that, once again, the St. Louis Symphony lived up to its reputation as an ensemble of virtuosi. Mr. Orozco-Estrada gave all the featured musicians a chance to stand and receive their applause at the end, which they fully earned.

For his part, Mr. Orozco-Estrada gave Bartók the widescreen, Technicolor treatment the "Concerto" deserves. The little dance of the second movement "Giuoco delle coppie" ("The Game of Pairs," featuring a series a duets) was appropriately jaunty; the interjection, in the third movement "Intermezzo interotto" ("Interrupted Intermezzo"), of a theme from the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony (which Bartók heard in a live broadcast while composing the "Concerto") was thoroughly cheeky; and the finale was charged with wild energy. Lively and completely captivating stuff it was, and a welcome antidote to a chilly and blustery winter morning.

Next at Powel Hall: David Robertson continues the "Beethoven Festival" with the "Symphony No. 3" (the "Eroica") along "Testament" and a "Viola Concerto" by contemporary composer/violist Brett Dean. Mr. Dean will be the soloist for his concerto. The concerts are Friday and Saturday, January 24 and 25, at 8 PM. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

For more information on the music, check out the symphony program notes and my symphony preview article.