Inon Barnatan Triumphs in Both Shostakovich Piano Concertos with the San Diego Symphony
Pianist Inon Barnatan is a sufficiently frequent guest soloist with the San Diego Symphony that he deserves a title—Pianist in Residence, perhaps. In concerts this past weekend, Barnatan performed both of the Dmitri Shostakovich Piano Concertos with the San Diego Symphony under the baton of Music Director Rafael Payare.
Inon Barnatan at piano; Rafael Payare on podium and Paul Merkelo, trumpet [photo by Jenna Gilmer]
In September, Barnatan played Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini on the orchestra’s concert that celebrated the re-opening of the Jacobs Music Center after its renovation. Last season, when the orchestra was performing at The Rady Shell, he played Johannes Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto, and in 2021 he joined the orchestra at The Rady Shell for Maurice Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto.
His debut with the San Diego Symphony in January of 2017 also featured a pair of piano concertos: Aaron Copland’s 1926 Piano Concerto and Andrew Norman’s 2014 piano concerto titled “Suspend.”
Although I cannot think of another soloist who appears as frequently on San Diego Symphony programs, by no means is this observation a complaint. In truth, Barnatan brings not only his ample technical prowess and stylistic acumen to every performance, but he also displays an uncanny sangfroid that dispenses even the most bravura challenges with unruffled composure.
On the program’s first half, Barnatan gave an athletic account of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major, scored for strings and winds, but no brass save for four horns. The combination of Rafael Payare’s bright, effervescent tempos and Barnatan’s incisive, brilliant articulation of the composer’s angular themes aptly communicated the ebullient character of the concerto’s opening “Allegro.” Barnatan’s elegant but ardent interpretation of the modal, cantabile theme of the “Andante” suggested the ideal underscoring for a romantic scene in a motion picture, and the rousing finale–another “Allegro”–could have sounded downright rowdy in less sophisticated hands than Barnatan’s.
Shostakovich wrote his Second Piano Concerto as a graduation gift to his pianist son Maxim as he finished his conservatory studies, and Maxim premiered the concerto in 1957. It is unthinkable that the avant-gardists of the 1950s, say Pierre Boulez or Charles Wuorinen, would have written a work so friendly to traditional tonality or to the expectations of concert audiences, but in terms of the styles that emerged after the postwar serialist straightjacket was removed, this concerto sounded surprisingly au courant.
Shostakovich premiered his Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor in 1933, when he was still in favor with the Soviet musical establishment, and the story of the work’s genesis is well-known. Although the composer started out to write a trumpet concerto, when the limitation of the trumpet’s range frustrated his musical invention, he decided to make the work a piano concerto with obbligato trumpet. The work’s approachable neoclassical idiom has made it an audience favorite, and Barnatan revealed the composer’s virtuoso feats as well as his coy humorous twists–a trait his colleague Igor Stravinsky could have used more of–throughout the concerto. Trumpet soloist Paul Merkelo brought his mellow sonority and suave legato line to his various descants and executed the more showy figurations and the final cadence with consummate skill. For this concerto, the orchestra is limited to strings, but Payare was able to draw a wide range of colors and moods from his colleagues. Their dulcet, ghostly waltz in the “Lento” proved unusually winning.
Because neither Shostakovich concerto required the full orchestra, Payare wisely surround the two concertos with a pair of Richard Strauss tone poems, Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, that richly engaged the full orchestra. With the exception of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Don Juan‘s opening salvo, a three-octave ascending rocket theme, is arguably the best known opening in the orchestral repertory. Principal Horn Benjamin Jaber and his crew supplied a plethora of mellifluous, well-tuned horn calls throughout, and Principal Oboe Sarah Skuster provided an enchanting solo line that floated through the tone poem’s center section. Unlike Mozart’s opera on this subject, Richard Strauss offers only Don Juan’s romantic successes and omits the rake’s ultimate demise.
Rafael Payare and the San Diego Symphony gave polished, deeply felt accounts of these Strauss tone poems.
This program was presented by the San Diego Symphony at the Jacobs Music Center in downtown San Diego December 6 – 8., 2024. The December 8 matinee was attended for this review.
Ken Herman, a classically trained pianist and organist, has covered music for the San Diego Union, the Los Angeles Times’ San Diego Edition, and for sandiego.com. He has won numerous awards, including first place for Live Performance and Opera Reviews in the 2017, the 2018, and the 2019 Excellence in Journalism Awards competition held by the San Diego Press Club. A Chicago native, he came to San Diego to pursue a graduate degree and stayed.Read more…