Cover image: Benjamin Grosvenor, pianist (Photo: Patrick Allen/Opera Omnia)
At the start of last Thursday’s Seattle Symphony Masterworks program, the final of the season at Benaroya Hall, Board Chair Leslie Chihuly came on stage to announce that the Symphony has been nominated, one of eight in the world, for a brand new Gramophone Award: “Orchestra of the Year,” based on 2017-18 recordings — which will be voted for by readers. Seattle Symphony is the only orchestra included from the United States.
Kudos to music director Ludovic Morlot, recent executive director Simon Woods, the orchestra’s musicians and Chihuly herself for their essential roles in creating these recordings.
The orchestra lived up to its reputation in the concert. Two younger generation musicians with already very fine reputations made their Seattle Symphony debuts: guest conductor from Japan Kazuki Yamada, 39 this year, and British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, 26 next month.
Yamada gave excellent interpretations of the three works played, but Grosvenor seemed to be having an off night, at least to start with.
He played Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (composed at 19), a work already full of the technical pianistic wizardry we expect from Chopin’s music, and this Grosvenor achieved with ease. Only once during the first movement was one of his long roulades of notes a little less than clear. However, his playing, particularly in the first movement, seemed full of tension, his touch steely even in soft playing—no caressing of the notes at all—and very much so in louder sections. This style doesn’t fit with our understanding of Chopin, and to an audience member, it did not feel as though Grosvenor was inside the music, more on the outside observing.
This impression continued, though lessened a bit, in the second, slow movement, which did not have enough of that sense of liquid pools of sound with which Chopin touches the emotions, though there was overall good shaping. However, by the third movement, Grosvenor showed more involvement with the music. There was more nuance, a much lighter touch, the whole was more satisfying to hear.
The audience loved it and brought him back for an encore, Liszt’s “Gnomenreigen” (“Dance of the Gnomes”), another piece with many fast, light-fingered runs.
Two works by Saint-Saëns bracketed the concerto, the concert opening with his “Danse Macabre” and ending with his Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, the “Organ”: so-called as it is one of the very few symphonic works to marry that majestic instrument with the equally majestic sound of a full orchestra.
Kazuki Yamada (Photo courtesy artist)
Yamada brought out the other-worldly components Saint-Saëns wrote into the “Danse,” with its soft start, the rising up of the ghosts who dance more and more wildly to the sound of Death’s violin (ably played by the evening’s concertmaster, principal second violin Elisa Barston), and the increasing orchestral frenzy around the discussion between the violin and solo flute (played by Jeffrey Barker) and shivery chromatic runs. At cockcrow (oboe) the scene collapses and the music dies back as the ghosts shrink back into their graves. All this Yamada brought out vividly, abetted by fine orchestra playing.
The grand finale to the program was the “Organ” Symphony, with Joseph Adam at the organ. In it Saint-Saëns encompasses many mood changes, each following quite swiftly from the previous one and Yamada, who has a fine sense of colors, brought all these out like a musical kaleidoscope, from cheerful to darker to thrilling to will-o-the-wisp and more, as well as the many off-accents and unexpectedness in rhythms, and plenty of forward energy particularly in the last movement. It is here that the organ really comes to the fore as the work progresses to a towering climax of sound and intensity, when the rumble of the organ is felt through the floor as well as heard through the ears.