BPO earns ovation in performance of selections from three centuries
The three works JoAnn Falletta has chosen for this week’s concerts have such an audience-friendly demeanor, in their Romantic and conservative modern expressiveness, that it’s surprising to notice they were written in three different centuries.
From 1891, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor radiates the same brooding Russian melancholy and distinctly memorable themes that have made his Concertos No. 2 and 3 worldwide staples. So it’s another surprise that Falletta is presenting the first BPO performances of No. 1.
The concerto opens with a theme of such captivating sad beauty you’d swear you had heard it before.
As soloist, Lebanese pianist Abdel Rahmann El-Bacha displayed all the fluid agility and reserve strength needed for the rhapsodic first movement, plus the ruminating reflectiveness to project the distantly poetic slow movement.
El Bacha also produced great clarity of articulation in etching the rattlingly busy, discursive piano lines in the Finale, needing only a little more juice here and there. Soloist and orchestra seemed in complete spiritual partnership all the way. As an encore, El Bacha played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude, Op. 23 No. 5.
From 2002, the concert opener was “An American Place” by Kenneth Fuchs, a friend of Falletta’s from their Juilliard days. It’s a bright, sunny piece of largely celebratory character, said to be a reflection on the music of earlier American composers. It succeeds largely on the wings of Fuchs’ excellent orchestration. That said, however, it’s also a work of annoying excess whose ceaselessly chattering lines and staccato rhythmic underpinning provide an initial sense of momentum, but eventually become nervous and monotonous. Good musical ideas tumble over each other but are not well connected, and the whole work needs more breathing room in its crowded textures to give a sense of memorable profile to the music’s longer lyric line.
To complete the century trifecta, Falletta called on a 20th-century masterpiece, Shostakovich’s 1937 Symphony No. 5. The performance was distinguished by a clarity that revealed many inner details one may not have noticed before, especially in the first movement’s lonely, troubled main theme and its even more lonely responding lyrical motif. But there was no lack of strength where needed, as in the first movement development and the pounding jubilation of the Finale.
In-between, the sardonic, tongue-in-cheek Allegretto and the sublime Largo spoke volumes about the oppressive Soviet shackles on the composer. The Largo, crown of the symphony, was both icily distant and beguilingly tender. The performance showed why it is one of the most chillingly exquisite moments in the orchestral repertoire.
The Finale was crisp and thrusting, and amid all the tumult Falletta kept the textures clean enough to follow the inner details being worked out. It was a superb performance, and the audience let the musicians know it. Standing ovations are overdone in Buffalo, but this one was well deserved.
Concert Review
Buffalo Philharmonic
Orchestra
Classics concert featuring pianist Abdel Rahman El-Bacha. Saturday and today at 2:30 p. m. in Kleinhans Music Hall.
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