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AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW
Brahms, Bolcom, Mozart, and Rachmaninoff:
Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman, pianos, Benaroya Hall, Seattle,
11.11.2008 (BJ)
In the course of a whirlwind tour covering 13 cities in about as
many days, Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman brought some of the finest
music ever written for two pianos to Seattle and played it with
enormous dash and compelling artistry. The outer works on their
program, Brahms’s St. Antony Variations and Rachmaninoff’s
Symphonic Dances, exist in both orchestral and two-piano versions,
and in a good performance each is no less rewarding in its keyboard
than in its admittedly more colorful orchestral garb.
Alternating through the program between first- and second-piano
seats, these two fine musicians made Brahms’s rich textures and
complex rhythmic writing impeccably clear, while giving full value
to the often intense lyrical expression of the Variations. The
Rachmaninoff was played with awesome power, yet with never a hint of
harshness. Here the contrast between the incisiveness of the
composer’s late style in the first movement and finale made an
eloquent contrast with the more familiar melancholy tone of the
slowish central waltz.
Between these two works we were treated to one rarity, a Latin-Americanesque
triptych by William Bolcom titled Recuerdos (Memories),
and to what is probably the supreme masterpiece of the two-piano
medium, Mozart’s D-major Sonata, K. 448. The Mozart performance was
to my ears a touch less successful than the rest of the evening, for
here a certain heaviness of tone and texture militated against the
clarity of the wonderful melodic writing–too much sustaining pedal,
perhaps? But Bolcom’s charmingly nostalgic set of dances came off
brilliantly, as did the encore the pianists offered at the end of the
evening, the eupeptic A-flat-major Slavonic Dance from Dvořák’s Opus
46.
Bernard Jacobson
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