Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven: three safe choices for a concert here in Bangkok. And the sellout audience that filled the Main Hall of the Thailand Cultural Centre on Tuesday to hear pianist Krystian Zimerman and the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra under the baton of guest conductor Charles Olivieri-Munroe in a programme of works by the three titans knew they would be spending the evening in safe musical territory. But they may not have expected that the evening would include one of the most memorable Bangkok musical experiences in recent memory.
Krystian Zimerman performs with the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra.
The programme's centrepiece was an account of Brahms' D-Minor Piano Concerto that gave full rein to the work's intense mood-swings, reflections, as Harry Rolnick points out in his programme notes, of emotional torment that the composer was experiencing at the time. The piece had a long and difficult gestation period, too, with Brahms experimenting with different forms — a four-hand sonata, a symphony — before finally realising the piece as a piano concerto.
In a way, the symphony almost won out. The piano soloist and the orchestra are equal partners in the concerto, which opens with a long orchestral introduction so full of violence and despair that it seems like a tough act for the soloist to follow. But the piano's response, when it finally comes, is completely different in tone and brings in just the note of inward sadness that was missing from the orchestral music that preceded it. Zimerman and Bangkok Symphony realised the difficult transition, one of many in this strange movement, with an eloquence that would continue throughout.
Charles Olivieri-Munroe.
Brahms' compositional style changed very little during the course of his life, and throughout Zimerman's performance I noticed something that I had missed before — the close similarity between the ruminative, elegiac mood of the solo passages in this early work and that of the composer's late piano pieces, the ones he described as "repositories for all of my sorrows". Zimerman's interpretation of the Adagio second movement, enhanced by the whispering sonority that Olivieri-Munroe drew from the orchestral strings, was deeply moving, steeped in a feeling of nostalgia that seems remarkable coming from a 25-year-old composer.
Trills assume different roles throughout the concerto much as the famous four-note motif does in the Beethoven symphony that followed it on the programme, adapting their character to the the emotional landscape. Zimerman played the violent trills in the first movement with a steely brilliance that yielded nothing to the orchestra's screaming execution of them in the opening music, but created very different colours for the ascending chains of soft-focus trills in the Adagio and the stacked-up trills in the Finale.
Mozart's brief overture to his final opera, La Clemenza Di Tito, launched the programme in performance that could have been a little crisper in the martial music that starts it, but that improved and came into sharper focus as it progressed.
Some people may have been disappointed to find that the Mozart Jupiter Symphony, originally included in some early announcements of the concert, had been replaced by Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but Olivieri-Munroe's potent performance brought the evening to a strong conclusion. He chose a fast tempo for the opening Allegro Con Brio — a little too fast for the orchestra, perhaps, as the first three notes of the famous motif were often blurred, but the symphony's power came through at full blast, as it always does in a good performance, despite its familiarity.
A memorable evening, with the audience calling Zimerman back repeatedly to receive the long and loud applause. Conductor Olivieri-Munroe obviously has a strong rapport with the orchestra, who played beautifully for him. When might we expect him back?
