This morning I realized that my knowledge of the conductor Karina Canellakis has been limited to the music of two Russian composers. The primary work on the program that she prepared for her debut with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) this past October was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 60 (“Leningrad”) symphony; and my first encounter with her through the DSO (Detroit Symphony Orchestra) Replay Web site involved a performance of the following symphony, Opus 65 (eight) in C minor, recorded on January 27, 2019. Both symphonies provided the second half of a program, whose first half was a piano concerto. In San Francisco that selection was Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 10 (first) piano concert in D-flat major with pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk also making his SFS debut.
Screen shot from the video being discussed
The Detroit program, on the other hand, allowed me to experience Canellakis’ approach to music from another country in another era. She conducted pianist Lise de la Salle in a performance of Robert Schumann’s Opus 54 piano concerto in A minor. In addition to presenting a marked shift in repertoire, I also had the chance to see how Canellakis would work with more limited instrumental resources. I felt this was critical to the overall performance, since one of the most interesting qualities of de la Salle’s performance was her ability to command a wider breadth of dynamic levels than I tended to expect from this particular concerto. When this involved accompaniment by the orchestra, Canellakis was always there with just the right dynamics to balance de la Salle’s keyboard work.
I suspect there will be readers that will take issue with my doing such a deep dive on what many would take to be a “surface structure” issue. However, the sad truth is that Opus 54 is part of that rank of piano concertos that tend to get performed far too frequently, at least when one considers all those concertos that are performed seldom, if not at all, in any given season. Unless both soloist and conductor can confront the why-is-this-performance-different-from-all-other-performances question, one might as well go home and enjoy a recording of [insert name of your favorite pianist here].
In other words it is not enough for a pianist to display a confident technical command of all the challenges that Schumann posed. De la Salle rose to the occasion as any good pianist should; and, truth be told, I would have appreciated more camera shots of her fingerwork at the keyboard during many of the more intricate passages. Nevertheless, no seriously attentive listener is going to sit there checking off the boxes in a scorecard as if (s)he were judging a piano competition. There must be more to the performance than technical proficiency, and de la Salle expressed her own approach to the overall architecture of the concerto through attentiveness to dynamic levels. Furthermore, she managed to do so in a way that conveyed insight, rather than mere gimmickry.
I would not be surprised if others would take issue with my priorities, but they happen to be the ones that kept my mind from wandering elsewhere during this particular performance!
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