Concert Review: The Departed

The Orchestra of St. Luke's exercises its labor rights.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Where's the orchestra? Conductor Bernard Labadie stands alone.
Photo © 2019 Orchestra of St. Luke's

When an orchestra brings in a new music director, there is always a shift in terms of programming and focus. Consider if you will the Orchestra of St. Luke's that outstanding and flexible ensemble that gives regular concerts at Carnegie Hall, and its new boss Bernard Labadie. On Thursday night, the Orchestra played a program of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, celebrating the virtue of all things right, proper and classically structured.

Concert Review: Break Glass for Beethoven

Jonathan Biss steps in at Carnegie Hall.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

A higher state of Biss: Jonathan Biss and friend.
Photo by David Bazemann.

The piano sonata was still a relatively new form when Beethoven published his first set in 1795. In the next twenty-seven years, the composer would revolutionalize the way composers wrote for the instrument, placing ever greater technical demands not just on the stamina of performers and audiences but on the instruments that were used to play them. Today's piano, the modern concert Steinway favored at Carnegie Hall is an engine of steel, not the wooden box that Beethoven and Liszt were forced to contend with and sometimes break with the ferocity of their attack.

Concert Review: Up the Down Banister

The noisy return of the New York Philharmonic.

by Paul J, Pelkonen

Pianist Jonathan Biss doing what he does.
Photo from Onyx Records.

The New York Philharmonic are back from their 2017 European tour. Thursday night marked the ensemble’s return to its home stage at David Geffen Hall with a program of heavyweight orchestral works by Berlioz and Elgar, flanking a pair of interconnected piano concertos with soloist Jonathan Biss. At the podium: the young Irish conductor Courtney Lewis, making his subscription debut.

Concert Review: The Swan and the Pigeon

Tenor Mark Padmore gives a Schubertiade.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Tenor Mark Padmore. Photo by Richard Termine.

No composer had it harder than Franz Peter Schubert. His greatest symphonies were locked in drawers until long after his death. His songs brought him some fame but his operas and choral works remain neglected outside his native Austria. And to top it all off, he died at 31, younger even than Mozart and Mendelssohn who each lived four years longer.

Concert Review: Connecting the Dots

Jonathan Biss and the Orchestra of St. Luke's at Caramoor.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Joshua Weilerstein (standing) conducts Jonathan Biss (seated, center)
and the Orchestra of St. Luke's on Sunday afternoon at Caramoor.
Photo by Gabe Palacios © 2016 Caramoor Festival of the Arts.

This year, the Caramoor Festival awarded the prized post of Artist-in-Residence to Jonathan Biss, the New York-based pianist whose exhaustive approach to Beethoven and Schumann and commitment to modern music has made him a favorite son among New York-based pianists. Sunday's concert saw the first fruits of this collaboration with the Westchester-based arts venue, located on the sprawling faux-Italian Renaissance Rosen Estate, somewhere in the woods outside Katonah, NY.

Superconductor 2016 Summer Festival Preview II: Caramoor

The elegant estate in Katonah, NY has a full slate planned.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Baton out of nowhere: Gil Shaham in concert at Caramoor. The violinist will
close out the 2016 festival season Aug. 7. Photo © Caramoor Music Festival.

The Superconductor survey of the upcoming summer festival schedule moves just north of the city to Caramoor, an elegant, sprawling estate with shady, graveled walks, rolling grassy lawns and its own hedge maze. Caramoor also boasts a strong schedule of classical concerts, and the annual Bel Canto at Caramoor concert performances in the Venetian Theater are a magnet for Gotham opera-goers.

Concert Review: Rebels With A Cause

Beethoven and Shostakovich at the New York Philharmonic

Jonathan Biss, at the Steinway. Photo © 2009 EMI Classics

Friday morning's New York Philharmonic concert featured a pairing of two composers who spent their lives struggling against the systems that spawned them: Beethoven and Shostakovich. Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons led the stylish pairing of the former's Third Piano Concerto, (featuring soloist Jonathan Biss) with the latter's Fifth Symphony.


After the lengthy orchestral introuction, Mr. Biss played the piano solo part with elegance and Mozartean grace. His limpid playing emphasized the melodicism in Beethoven's solo part, contrasting with the thoughtful commentary from the orchestra. This was especially true in the second movement, played with a smooth-flowing legato and a very gentle attack.

The final rondo took the piece to new, playful heights, as Mr. Biss engaged in a game of chase-and-tag with the orchestra, racing higher and higher on the keyboard and then soaring back down in a rush of arpeggiated notes. As the soloist played his final round of repetitions, Mr. Nelsons and his orchestral forces raced to catch up, with band and pianist finishing together in an exuberant outpouring of song.

Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony as a response to Joseph Stalin's series of devastating artistic purges in 1936, that were themselves a response to the dictator's (over)reaction to his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Shostakovich quietly locked his just-completed Fourth Symphony in a drawer and began working on the Fifth, which he referred to as "A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism."


Politics and history aside, the Fifth has grown to be the most popular of the 15 Shostakovich symphonies, a big-shouldered four-movement bruiser that requires heroic brass playing and a conductor with tight control over the orchestra's balance. This performance had the former, but the strings were repeatedly drowned out by the brass and percussion. Perhaps that was Shostakovich's message: the little guys can't win.

The epic first movement, with its four-note theme in search of a final resolution took the shape as a proletarian struggle between the strings and brass for supremacy. (The strings lost.) The Allegretto, with its marching theme for low basses and plaintive dance for woodwinds seemed to symbolize the composer's private struggles with the censors and the Soviet state.

The Largo is one of Shostakovich's best-known movements, a sweeping theme for winds that builds to a thunder of brass. The trumpets and timpani hijacked the orchestra in the slamming fourth movement, an orchestral showpiece that was performed with an admirable lack of restraint. This was Philharmonic music-making at its most exciting: a big sonic steamroller that flattened everything in its path, including the enthusiastic audience.