Pianist Beatrice Rana taking a bow with conductor Kent Nagano and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (from the Web page for the performance being discussed)
Yesterday’s electronic mail from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) announced a “watch party” to be held today beginning at noon Pacific Time. Entitled Music of Prokofiev, this event will “synthesize” a program by conjoining selections from two videos of performances in the archives. The first of these is Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 26 (third) piano concerto in C major, featuring pianist Beatrice Rana performing with conductor Kent Nagano. This will be followed by the six-movement orchestral suite that Prokofiev compiled from the score for his opera The Love for Three Oranges, conducted by Juraj Valčuha. These selections will be streamed through Facebook Live, rather than the DSO Replay Web site.
While I appreciate the “watch party” concept, the technical side of me tends to raise an eyebrow over anything that is likely to impose a load on Internet traffic. As a result, I decided to focus my attention on the piano concerto and experience it through its DSO Replay Web page. This performance took place last season on May 25, 2019; and my decision to view it was motivated by both soloist and conductor.
One of my greatest regrets is that I never took the opportunity to listen to Nagano conduct while he was based in Berkeley. Indeed, my knowledge of his work has been pretty much confined to his recording of Olivier Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise. (I have to confess that I have my own way of listening to this music that is considerably at odds with how it was presented when I saw the San Francisco Opera performance.) On the other hand, readers that have been following this site for a while know that I have not been particularly enthusiastic about Rana through either of her two solo albums or her San Francisco recital debut presented by San Francisco Performances in April of 2017. In that context it seemed fair for me to observe her work as a concerto soloist.
The “bottom line” is that I was far from disappointed. Opus 26 tends to be the most popular of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, and one reason is that an abundance of wit for both soloist and ensemble makes the music highly accessible. At the same time the technical demands on the soloist are challenging unto an extreme. There is also its “American connection,” since the world premiere performance took place on December 16, 1921 during the composer’s visit to the United States. He performed the piano part with Frederick Stock conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and, as might be guessed, the music was subsequently championed by conductor Serge Koussevitzky.
The video account of the DSO performance is one that can be relished for both solo and ensemble work. At the piano Rana was all focus. Over the course of the many finger-busting passages that Prokofiev had written to show off his personal technique, her overall body language maintained a composure that was consistently serene. Her head was clearly “in the game;” but she knew better than to call attention to her talent by any means other than the sonorities she evoked from the keyboard.
Those sonorities, in turned, echoed back and forth across Prokofiev’s extensive palette of instrumental colors, almost all of which were brought to listener attention through skilled camera work. One consequence of that attentiveness is that the viewer saw far more of the performers than of the conductor. However, one could still appreciate the overall sense of shape that Nagano brought to the score, particularly over the course of the variations in the second movement. As a result much more could be gained by observing the results of his efforts rather than the efforts themselves.
The popularity of this concerto is such that one can rarely go through an entire concert season without encountering it at least once; but this video document of last year’s DSO evening is definitely “one for the books.”
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