Symphony review
Pianist meets Chopin challenge
By Gregory Shepherd
Advertiser Classical Music Critic
While lacking the sense of inevitability that characterizes truly great works, Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 offers a wealth of challenges for the performer and delights for the listener. And when the challenges are taken up by Jon Nakamatsu, as they were on Sunday with the Honolulu Symphony at the Blaisdell, the delights are multiplied substantially by virtue of his flawless technique and the crystalline insight of his interpretation.
The opening movement is perhaps the weakest of the three. The passage work of the movement is mainly pianistic in interest, as opposed to offering any real substance, but Nakamatsu weaves the passages together into an integrated fabric of style and grace. The notes of the elegant Larghetto that follows seemed unmediated by human hands on Sunday, so effortlessly did Nakamatsu allow its cantabile melody grow of its own accord.
Jon Nakamatsu plays Chopin
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With the Honolulu Symphony, guest conductor Anne Manson
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7:30 tonight
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Blaisdell Concert Hall
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$15-$55
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792-2000
The melodic style of the work, like so much of Chopin's music, owes much to the bel-canto style of the Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini, both in the way the melody "sings" and the ornamentation of the melodic line.
Nakamatsu's rubato, whereby the rhythm is given a certain "singing" flexibility, was always tasteful on Sunday. His encore was the simple Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 2.
Chopin relegates the orchestra to a decidedly secondary role, but guest conductor Anne Manson handled the ensemble's contribution with precision and attentiveness. Her handling of the pieces that followed intermission shows a young conductor already at home with two of the more difficult works in the repertory. Bohuslav Martinu's luminous "Frescoes of Piero della Francesca" employs an idiom that somehow transcends both tonality and atonality, making free use of either as the musical ideas demand.
The three sections of the work were partly inspired by biblically-themed paintings the composer had viewed in Italy, and as such, are quite striking in the visual images they conjure in the mind. The opening section, just as Manson had pointed out in her comments before the piece, seemed to scatter like a cloud of birds around a cathedral, so full of life and yet somehow surrounded by a deep spirituality.
Splashes of tone color woven around rich melodies characterize the other two sections of the work, and Manson's direction maintained flexibility. The huge brass section was put to good use in the second movement and Mark Butin's viola solo soared in a quieter passage. The final movement has a bleaker cast, perhaps inspired by World War II, but ends much like a Mahler symphony, with the turmoil ultimately dissolving into a triumphant tutti.
Paul Hindemith's "Mathis der Maler" symphony derives several of its main themes from the composer's opera of the same name. Its nobility of conception is heard best in the way the several climaxes of the work embody a Lutheran chorale style of writing.
Gregory Shepherd has been the Advertiser's classical music critic since 1987.
