Famed pianist tackles concerto with gusto, grace

By Gregory Shepherd
Advertiser Classical Music Critic

With the bear-like build of a Greco-Roman heavyweight wrestler, Alexander Toradze hardly fits the stereotype of the consumptive artist starving in a garret somewhere. And when he had finished muscling Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 into submission yesterday, there was no doubt that his artistry transcends the most challenging technical obstacles that a composer can throw at a performer.

The "Rach Three" gained fame in the movie "Shine" where its difficulties were enough to drive the lead character over the edge. In Toradze's case, he fights back.

Thundering octaves, quicksilver scalar passages, grape bunches of notes all over the keyboard — you half expect a kitchen sink to come flying out of the instrument.

But Toradze seemed to embrace the difficulties with gusto, sending supercharged musical molecules out into the audience of the half-full Blaisdell Concert Hall with just about every section.

This not to say that his style is all just impetuous flash, far from it.

As the notes swirl around in every direction in his first movement solo cadenza, he suddenly releases all but one of those notes, which he then sustains for several long seconds.

The effect was like that of a brightly lit room suddenly plunged into darkness except for a single votive candle.

Rachmaninoff makes full use of the instrument's many sonorities, with the more percussive passages balanced by harp-like measures and Toradze invests these latter sections with as much tenderness as can be imagined.

Samuel Wong once again was the most supportive of collaborators with an orchestral accompaniment that kept pace with Toradze and was never overpowered (a real possibility with Toradze) nor overpowering (fat chance).

The orchestra opened the program with a sensitive reading of Brahms' Serenade No. 1.

The fertile imaginativeness of the work comes from its unexpected but perfectly natural flow of musical ideas, ideas that the symphony invested with an elegant sense of ensemble.

Gregory Shepherd has been the Advertiser's classical music critic since 1987.