SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Liszt, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky: Stephen Hough (piano), Pablo Heras-Casado (conductor), Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 11.11.2010 (BJ)


Stephen Hough’s dazzling performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto came as a reward for sitting through Prokofiev’s baleful and somewhat turgid Third Symphony before intermission at this Seattle Symphony concert. It was greeted with an instant standing ovation of rare unanimity and vociferous enthusiasm.

In his local debut, the young Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado had opened the proceedings with a zestful reading of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, which is pretty baleful too, though in a more ironic way, and not at all turgid. The Prokofiev work, hardly recognizable as coming from the pen of the same composer who had created the limpid and charming Classical Symphony less than a dozen years earlier, is not calculated to appeal to any listener unequipped with a taste for vehement hysteria.

The music comes by that hysteria honestly enough. It was adapted from a Prokofiev opera dealing with a frenzied amalgam of diabolical possession and monstrous exorcisms, in which the heroine, Renate, ends by being burned at the stake. (The program note omitted to mention that the composer had originally conceived the themes symphonically, describing their use in The Flaming Angel as a “temporary operatic sojourn.”) Honest or not, the symphonic result seems to me unrelievedly hostile and rebarbative in manner, even the music associated with Renate’s entry into a convent being far from unshadowed in its tranquillity.

The textures, too, are more muddy than brilliant. Still, from a technical viewpoint, Prokofiev offers one fascinating lesson in orchestration: building to the symphony’s frenetic close, with the whole orchestra going full tilt, he ingeniously effects the actual climax by momentarily silencing the strings, thus leaving the brass section to sing out in unveiled splendor.

Heras-Casado, conducting without a baton, captured the sheer unrestrained violence of the work skillfully. My impression is that he is a conductor more concerned with how music goes than with how it sounds. The orchestra’s sonority was less cultured than usual, even in Tchaikovsky’s more genial and luxurious textures, so that solos by flutists Scott Goff and Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby, concertmaster Maria Larionoff, and acting principal cellist Eric Gaenslen were more beguiling than the full tuttis.

In the Tchaikovsky, ensemble between orchestra and soloist threatened once or twice to come adrift, though it never quite did, and there were moments when the soloist seemed to be having to conform his phrasing to the conductor’s, which is not how a concerto should work. But there was no denying the excitement of the performance. Hough played mightily, and perfectly caught the spirit of the piece, which is a spirit of rhetoric rather than drama.

Bernard Jacobson

A shorter version of this review appeared in the Seattle Times.