THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS
Esplanade Concert Hall
Friday (2 November 2012 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 November 2012 with the title "Orchestral colours in four moods".
Some
33 years ago, this reviewer heard a two-dollar pirated cassette recording of
Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto
by Gary Graffman and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
The romantic, opulent and heart-wrenching music, rendered in an
honest-to-goodness yet viscerally thrilling performance, proved to be a
life-changing event. The tape was played so often that the reel soon
unravelled, chewed up and spat out by the player’s mechanism. In short, I was
hooked.
Cassette
tapes have gone the way of the typewriter, but the octogenarian Graffman still
goes strong as a pedagogue. His students at Philadelphia ’s Curtis Institute have included Lang
Lang, Yuja Wang and this evening’s soloist Zhang Haochen. Zhang, the first
Chinese pianist to win First Prize at the Van Cliburn International Piano
Competition in 2009, relived many of those cherished moments in the very same
concerto.
Zhang
does not come across as a barnstorming pianist, but rather a thinker who
instinctively knows the tide, ebb and flow of the music, and how to build up to
the big moment. The opening chords gave a clue, beginning with a sigh and closing
with a roar. Unfailingly musical, he breathed the same air as the orchestra,
never surging unimpeded but always listening to his partners.
The
second movement brought out these qualities best, playing the ever-sensitive
accompanist as flautist Evgueni Brokmiller and clarinettist Li Xin sang out
their solos. And when his turn came, Zhang accepted the gauntlet gratefully,
his impeccable technique ever in service of the music. The finale’s tricky
interplay of finger-twisting virtuosity and arch-lyricism fell easily within
his hands, as pianist and orchestra raced to an exciting photo-finish.
Ever
modest and self-effacing, his encore of Debussy’s little prelude The Girl With The Flaxen Hair was the
perfect antidote to the surfeit of loud notes that came before.
The
concert began with Hindemith’s Concert
Music For Strings And Brass, its title typical of the 20th
century German composer’s idea of utility music, compositions crafted for the
sake of pedagogy and practice. The dissonance and somewhat astringent themes fell
on fertile soil in its two movements, as the orchestra’s brass chorales and
busy string counterpoint rang out an enthralling, and even entertaining
performance.
After
the Rachmaninov, the audience had significantly thinned in its ranks. Those who
left missed an excellent showing of Carl Nielsen’s Second Symphony under the baton of SSO’s Finnish Principal Guest
Conductor Okko Kamu. The Dane Nielsen, like his contemporary Sibelius, saw the
symphony as his greatest vehicle of musical expression.
Its
four varied movements took the Four
Temperaments as their inspirations, beginning with the Choleric, with short tempered and volatile outbursts colouring the
first movement. Orchestral colours were on vivid display, even in the Phlegmatic second movement’s leisurely
and good natured waltz, aided by a tottering pair of bassoons. A degree of
gravitas was injected into the Melancholic,
as Brucknerian strings built up to a dead serious and tragic climax.
Even
if the joyous outpourings of the Sanguine
finale did not fully dispel the earlier gloom, it was the sheer range of
emotions covered in its eventful half-hour that impressed, not least by an
orchestra that plays like it really means it.
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