SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT  REVIEW
 

Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert:   Awadagin Pratt, piano, Douglas Boyd, cond. and commentator, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 28.10.2007 (BJ)


After the previous week’s hit-and-miss concert under the “Basically Baroque” rubric, Douglas Boyd’s program of the Viennese classics in the Seattle Symphony’s “Musically Speaking” series came as a tonic. At these Sunday afternoon concerts, it’s the practice for the conductor to talk about the music that is about to be played, sometimes with illustrations provided by the orchestra. Boyd, formerly the principal oboist of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and now a conductor with an impressively growing reputation, charmed his audience at once with telling comments on Beethoven’s Coriolan overture and Schubert’s Second Symphony.

Happily, the performances that followed lived up to their spirited verbal exposition. Silence plays a vital part in the unfolding of the Beethoven overture, and Boyd gave every pause its full value, shaping the nervously intense musical rhythms also with a sure hand. Schubert’s symphony, written when the composer was 17, sparkled from beginning to end, the delicious trio section of the third movement, in particular, benefitting from the delicacy that marked the orchestra’s work throughout.

The piano concerto of the evening was the bigger and later of Mozart’s two in the key of A major, K. 488. Here Awadagin Pratt offered limpid tone and unforced clarity of articulation, dovetailing his phrases cogently into the luxuriant textures of this unusually tutti-oriented Mozart concerto. There was, too, some stylish embellishment in such passages as the closing pages of the central Adagio, which, enunciated in pregnantly hushed tones, amply fulfilled its role as the emotional heart of the work.

Pratt’s own cadenza in the first movement strayed well beyond the stylistic context of Mozart’s music, but that is fair enough: it was the kind of thing Beethoven might have come up with if he had written a cadenza for this particular concerto. What bothered me was not that it was out of style, but that it was out of scale–somewhat too long, and in dynamic terms the most forceful statement in the whole work. Near the end of the finale, I thought Pratt missed the humor of the insistent left-hand part in his last big solo passage; those poker-faced bass figurations need to be emphasized to make their impact felt. But these are the only two complaints I have to make about a performance, both solo and orchestral, of compelling artistry and admirable technical polish.

 

Bernard Jacobson