Kernis, Kodály, and Brahms: Gerard Schwarz, cond., André Watts, piano,  Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 1 and 4.02.2007 (BJ)

Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto was written by the same composer as his First. And he started work on No. 2 when he was in his mid-40s, and finished it well before his 49th birthday. Which reflections are prompted by the quite astonishingly original, profound, and illuminating performance André Watts, Gerard Schwarz, and the Seattle Symphony gave of it last weekend.

This is no greybeard music. We are accustomed to thinking of the Second Piano Concerto as a loftily Olympian work, utterly removed from the youthful storm and stress of No. 1. I thought I knew this concerto–after all, I wrote a book on Brahms, so I ought to–and my view of it has always been, implicitly, somewhat along those lines. Watts’s achievement was to remind us that fewer than 20 years separate the completions of the two pieces, and that beneath the Second Concerto’s lovely lyrical flights similar volcanic forces lurk. The not infrequent explosions of those forces he brought to our ears through wonderfully bold and incisive pianism, without ever neglecting the other–tender, contemplative, and at times wistful–aspect of the work. In the slow movement, the eruptions were apocalyptic in their dramatic power, yet the rapt beauty of the main material was realized to perfection in the pianist’s chamber-musical collaborations with the Seattle Symphony’s superb young principal cellist, Joshua Roman, and his woodwind colleagues.

In moments like those, the music seemed suspended in celestial regions and outside time. The utter wholeness of such an interpretation, in which Schwarz and his orchestra were fully committed partners, is not to be achieved without risk. Watts braved every danger, dropped a note or two here and there, and was even within a whisker of coming adrift for a couple of bars in the hurtling course of the scherzo. But such bravery is a thousand times more worth while than the kind of pusillanimity too often encountered these days, in conventionally humdrum performances that preserve the notes, as if in aspic, at the expense of the music. As another superb American pianist, Russell Sherman, observed in his brilliant collection of aphorisms titled Piano Pieces, if you are not prepared to take risks, there is no point in making music.

The Sunday program was one in the orchestra’s “Musically Speaking” series, in which the conductor prefaced Kodály’s Háry János Suite and the concerto with stimulating commentary and musical illustrations, Watts also contributing insights of his own before the concerto. The pattern on these occasions is to drop one piece played in the foregoing weekday and Saturday program, so I attended also on the Thursday in order to hear Newly Drawn Sky, by Aaron Jay Kernis.

Now 46 (the same age as Brahms in the context of this program), Kernis is one of those American composers who burst on the public in their first youth as the possessors of clearly remarkable talent, only to lapse into a rather New-Age-y self-indulgence around their 30th birthdays. Some recover their original zest and intellectual vigor, and among that group Kernis must happily be numbered, for the new works of his that I have encountered in the past decade seem able to combine the often visionary qualities of a fundamentally tonal vocabulary with the inner core of integrity evident in his first pieces. Described by the composer as “a lyrical, reflective piece for orchestra, a reminiscence of the first summer night by the ocean spent with my young twins . . . and of the changing colors of the summer sky at dusk,” Newly Drawn Sky is a deftly written and vividly imagined tone poem. Its qualities, and music director Schwarz’s obvious sympathy with the composer’s style, make the information that Kernis is writing a larger-scale choral work for the Seattle Symphony’s 2007-08 season good news indeed.

Like the Kernis, Kodály’s picaresque and charming Háry János Suite drew fine playing from the orchestra. Susan Gulkis Assadi’s vibrant viola solo, and some wittily mischievous phrasing from principal horn John Cerminaro, were especially delectable. I felt the suite could have used more warmth of expression and a less hectic rhythmic urgency than Schwarz brought to it, though certainly it was exciting in a visceral way. But it was the Brahms that turned the concert into one of the season’s most memorable and moving experiences.

Bernard Jacobson