Last week, the New York Philharmonic presented Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto as part of a wide-ranging program under visiting Belfast-born conductor Courtney Lewis and pianist Jonathan Biss.
Beethoven endorsed the work to his publisher as “a piano concerto which, to be sure, I do not claim to be among my best. ” He asked for just half the price paid for his First Symphony. It is nonetheless an extraordinary and beautiful piece, full of youthful verve and brisk excitement and much under the influence of Mozart.
The Second Piano Concerto actually precedes the First, and was written largely between 1787 and 1789, before Beethoven’s eighteenth birthday. It was not performed in public until 1795. The famous first-movement cadenza, which Beethoven added in 1809, is musically distinct from the rest of the concerto and is advanced even for its late composition date: the climbing micro-fugue and subsequent dissolve over a tremolo pedal-point foreshadow Opus 101 and Beethoven’s last and greatest sonatas. The sudden encounter with late style in the middle of early Beethoven is a jolt of energy that kicks the whole concerto up a notch. Mr. Biss did not play it well.
Jonathan Biss, tall and almost pelican-like at the keyboard, is cursed with a lead foot and constantly on the damper pedal. This is an affliction common to modern pianists that, on a Beethoven-era instrument, would have sounded like a blacksmith at his bellows. But it is the least of Mr. Biss’s worries. He performs Beethoven like a fifteen-year-old piano prodigy whose technical abilities far exceed his musical understanding. (For the record, Biss is thirty-six.) He is skittish and applies rubato in the wrong direction—speeding through passages that he should emphasize by slowing down. This might be excused as nerves at the keyboard, but his studio recordings have similar problems, albeit less pronounced. During the dramatic high-point of the cadenza, the orchestra around him appeared to be falling asleep, like a gaggle of factory workers kept for too much overtime.
The other piece on the program that featured Mr. Biss was a new concerto by young contemporary composer Timo Andres. Contemporary music is the fifty-year-old joke still waiting for its laugh: It has yet to produce a composition to which a member of the public would willingly subject himself if nobody else was watching. That said, Andres has done better than any contemporary composer recently featured in New York, and his sophisticated short concerto has an actual narrative which we follow and, at times, enjoy.
The program was capped on either end by two orchestral works: a selection from Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliette, and Elgar’s vigorous symphonic tone-poem In the South (Alassio). The focus was entirely on conductor Courtney Lewis, who is director of the Jacksonville Symphony and here made his debut in a New York Philharmonic subscription series. The Berlioz was perfunctory, but the Elgar was beautiful, almost rapturous: Lewis says In the South is a staple of his repertoire, and it was easy to see the difference in passion, energy and enthusiasm both from conductor and orchestra. (The only holdout was a recalcitrant percussionist who made numerous attempts to massacre the music and may finally have been bumped off by one of the harpists.)
In the South is a single-movement, twenty-minute epic, inspired by Elgar’s 1903 trip to the Italian Riviera: He watched a lonely shepherd driving his flock up an ancient road and the whole thing came to him in a flash. A reviewer at the 1904 London première noted the piece invoked “the joy of living in the midst of ‘blue Ionian weather,'” which is nonsense. In the South is sturdily grounded in the German and French traditions and there is nothing Italian about it. It looks back on Brahms and Berlioz and looks forward with sensuous, brassy, chromatic striving to Wagner. And yet it is much easier to listen to than Wagner. It is a display-piece for a good orchestra, immediately accessible and appealing to an audience. Lewis chose well. It would make an excellent addition to the regular symphonic repertoire.
