Pianist brings urgency to Beethoven concerto
Pianist Jonathan Biss delivers a performance of Beethoven's Third Concerto with keen musical instincts and brimming energy.
Pianist Jonathan Biss plays with rich, tensile sonorities and keen musical instincts.
But the most interesting thing about his performance of Beethoven's Third Concerto was its sense of restless urgency.
This sort of nervous, at times joyously brimming-over energy kept the level of proceedings well above Beethoven-as-usual, even if it caused him at times to rush ahead of the orchestra.
The Kansas City Symphony was led by music director Michael Stern.
It was the final concert set of the symphony's season, the second of a pair of piano concertos that opened and closed the season.
It was also Biss' third outing in Kansas City since 2006, and his first appearance with the orchestra. He's shown different facets of himself each time, and it seems clear he is a unique talent in the making.
Lanky and bespectacled, Biss has sometimes been compared to Rudolf Serkin, whose febrile imagination and deep seriousness of approach to the European repertoire he shares.
These qualities served Beethoven's glowering concerto: Its grand C-minor gestures brought out his muscle, its tender slow movement his poetic side.
Biss strives for integrity of musical detail: Rather than storming through Beethoven's first-movement cadenza like an adolescent, as some pianists do, he imbued it with a sort of Apollonian balance between clarity and wildness.
If piano and orchestra battled over tempo and flexibility in the first movement, things were more on the mark in the finale, where Biss got to establish his own tempo at the outset.
Among details I might quibble with were the upward-arpeggiated chords in the finale, which sounded more like broken chords than melodic line.
Overall, I wish he'd taken a few more chances on daring sonorities and turns of phrase. But it was a handsome showing all the same.
The rest of the program was devoted to Berlioz' splashy "Symphonie fantastique," where the orchestra's playing was vivid and convincing and the solos were vibrant and interesting. Especially touching was the English horn-offstage oboe duet of the bucolic "In the Country" movement.
Some inner detail was lost in loud passages throughout -- thanks partly to the Lyric's close acoustics -- and the brass in the "Dies irae" finale nearly drowned out everything else.
Stern took the proceedings pretty straight, focusing more on textural details than on phrase-shaping, and driving the finale like a juggernaut.
