Here is my Saturday December 11 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday, December 9, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Xian Zhang and pianist Stephen Hough. You can find the erudite Hough's outstanding weblog -- which covers a vast and eclectic array of subjects (including "hats and puddings") -- hosted by the UK's Telegraph newspapers here.
Pianist Stephen Hough, pictured in June 2009, is performing three lesser-known Tchaikovsky works this weekend. Thursday’s program will be repeated tonight. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times
Tchaikovsky rarities sparkle in Hough’s hands
BY ANDREW PATNER
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Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.
We can’t put ourselves in the position of hearing a piece of music we already know well for the first time again. There’s no way of knowing what the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or “I Want To Hold Your Hand” would sound like to us now if they -- or we -- appeared from space one day. And this makes it hard to make a direct comparison with or analysis of a neglected work by a great composer or recording artist that many people have not heard before.
Such is the case this week at Orchestra Hall as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra hosts the adventuresome English pianist Stephen Hough playing three concert hall rarities by Tchaikovsky on three different programs. In an interesting ordering, Hough will be back in a few weeks to kick off the CSO’s 2011 calendar with two performances of the Russian master’s beloved First Piano Concerto, the 1875 B-flat minor, Op. 23., January 6 and 8. But this visit he’s been offering the massive 1880 G Major Second Concerto, Op. 44, not heard at Orchestra Hall since 1988; the 1884 Concert Fantasy, Op. 56, not played downtown since 1892 (!), and the first-ever CSO performances of the 1893 E-Flat Major Third Concerto, Op. 75. Hough has recorded all of these works on a new two-disc set with Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra on the British Hyperion label.
Over his 30-year career Hough, 49, has revived the tradition of the bravura pianist who performs works that are often much more interesting for their piano parts or the performance of those parts than they are as symphonic or compositional masterworks. And it is a thrill to hear a player of his technical abilities in these showpieces. Thursday night brought the Concert Fantasy and the Second Concerto, along with the orchestral suite Mozartiana, and it is this program that will be repeated Saturday night. Alas, I had to miss the one-movement Third Concerto, which was played Friday afternoon only.
The Second Concerto has suffered from both misperception and a truncated edition that was used for decades. Its beautiful central slow movement is almost a piano trio with orchestral obbligato with concertmaster Robert Chen and principal cello John Sharp joining and nicely matching Hough in his own transcription of the original, which gives the piano additional prominence. The brief, peppy third movement has been radio broadcasting time-filler for years. The strange and lengthy opening movement, along with the two-movement Concert Fantasy, shows Tchaikovsky in a neither-nor posture, with constant back and forth between solo cadenzas, orchestral passages, and sections for both soloist and orchestra.
Similar manipulations and harmonic shifts in the great First Concerto helped make it eternal. Here we get over-the-top choppiness, however well performed by Hough. He could, too, have given us a bit more soulfulness as he later demonstrated in his solo encore, his own dekitschification of the popular 1950s Russian song “Moscow Nights.”
Chinese-born and -trained conductor Xian Zhang, one of the few female conductors getting steady bookings and now music director of Milan’s G. Verdi Orchestra, has been an exciting presence at Grant Park. Here she showed only spunk, which made the orchestral parts rigid and free of character.
In the 1887 G Major Mozartiana orchestral fantasia, Op. 61, she did not give much help to a work that needs it, a Romantic scenting of several Mozart excerpts whose real use was not found until George Balanchine made ballets out of it 50 and 95 years after its composition. Even its most successful section, based on the “Ave verum corpus,” was stiff in Zhang’s hands. Concertmaster Chen and acting principal clarinet John Bruce Yeh offered fine solos, the clarinet part sounding like a 19th century prototype of boogie-woogie.
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