A skilled musician can play almost anything. However, notes on the score page are just the starting point. Beyond that, why are artists suitable for a particular sound or style? year? personality? experience?
These are complicated and elusive questions that delve into the recent appearance of young pianist Sungjin Cho in New York. Earlier this month, he played Ravel's full solo piano work marathon at Carnegie Hall and joined David Geffen Hall's New York Philharmonic on Thursday as soloist for Prokofiev's second piano concerto. (The program continues until Saturday.)
If these concerts share something, it's pure athleticism. Ravel's investigation involves intense focus and finger work in the 3-hour evening. The Prokofiev Concerto packs probably the same amount of notes into about 35 minutes.
However, the similarities end there. And Cho is the difference that revealed the state of his artistry at the age of 30, 10 years after the career making find prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition.
There was also a surprising difference between his readings from Ravel Works and recordings of the same material, and a recording of the same material released last month on Deutsche Grammophon. We celebrated the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth. (His related albums of two piano concertos on the label with the Boston Symphony Orchestra came out on Friday.) His interpretations of these extensive works were more free and expressive at Carnegie. It would be interesting to hear Cho revisit them again.
Cho is a pianist with extraordinary precision and shading. He barely misses the notes, and sounds as if he could allocate another weight to each finger. However, over decades of composition, in Ravel's solo work, which includes both the exciting broad strokes of Impressionism and the bright idiosyncraticity of the Point Rhythm, his approach can have a variety of results.
At Carnegie, he sounded most comfortable, reminiscent of his previous style: the Baroque-style suite “Le Tonbaud de Couperin”, “Menuette Antique” and “Menu Le Nome da Haydn” . His delicate pedal work created the atmospheric “Pavan Un Infante Defante.” This was melancholic yet imposing.
It was a work that evaded him to remind him of poetic images. They are meticulously documented, but they seek a kind of researched looseness. Cho's “Jeux d'Eu” had the sparkle and mechanical precision of the music box, better or worse. From the suite's “Miloire” there was little openness to his “Une Barque Sur L'océan”. Also, his overly rhythmic “Ondeen” lacked much of a fascinating fluidity in “Gaspado de la Nui.”
At Thursday's Philharmonic, Cho found more matches at Prokofiev's second piano concerto. It's breathless and dazzling, but the melody of Haystack's needles demands more than just a virtuoso. It is also music for young people. Prokofiev began writing it early in his career, but is still a student at the brash conservatory to showcase the brash muscularity and the fatigue-free thing that becomes difficult to come with age.
Cho had a thrilling strength that clearly managed to get through the orchestra, regardless of its thickness. (Under Santu Matthias Louvalli, the Philharmonic is a responsive, supportive partner, elsewhere in the program, the wonderful, sometimes surprising, and even more frightening, Shostakovic's Symphony No. 15 and his operetta. Provided a musical description of “Moscow, Cherio Muschki”.
But he also had the skills to spare for subtle touches and a sense of perspective in the occasional lubato and accents. With the incredibly long and dense cadenza of the first movement, he showed no signs of fatigue as he successfully pulled the melody from the cake grime of the notes surrounding it, leading directly to the sprint of the second movement.
Interestingly, he chose Ravel for the encore: “Ala Maniere des Borozin”, a faint, formidable little waltz. It was a declaration of Cho's width that juxtaposed with Prokofiev. This is a work that is still ongoing, looking at two of his recent concerts more widely. For him, and fortunately for his listeners, he has plenty of time to understand it.
