Search - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Simon Trpceski, Vasily Petrenko :: Piano Concertos 2 & 3

Beautiful renditions, but be prepared for seriousness rather

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 03/09/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Simon Trpceski slipped beow my radar after is initial CD in the Debut series from EMI. Macedonian born and trained, he was launched as one of the BBC's New Generation artists in 2001 and is now thirty. On the strength of this Rachmaninov pairing, I should have paid more attention. The standard for Russian music has soared with the proliferation of Russian performers. Young Vasily Petrenko is one of six prominent post-Soviet conductors in the UK, and his feeling for the composer is unassailable. The same must be said of Ptrpceski, whose two recordngs have centered on Russian repertoire with a sprinkling of Chopin and Debussy, even though he's personally from outside the Russian orbit.



What struck me from the first notes of the Rachmaninov Second is the seriousness and even nobility of intent. In the West this work has sunk to the level of cliche, almost kitsch. But beyond its use as music for popular songs in the Forties, Rachmaninov's solo writing can sound loungy and a touch seamy. Not in Trpceski's hands. For some, this reading may bend over backwards to sound dignified; the big tune in the third movement isn't lingered over or romanticized. This finale is meant to dazzle; it's impossible to set off too many fireworks in it. Petrenko and Trpceski pussyfoot a bit, so the charisma quotient is a bit too low. Avie's sound is fine, even though the piano timbre is fairly hard.



The Rachmaninov Third, which Horowitz basically owned during his lifetime, coaxes pianists into either competing with him for dazzlement or to bend in the other direction and aim for seriousness. I find the work too weak to sustain too much seriousness; I want to be reminded of Horowitz, even if his special fire can't be duplicated. Petrenko and Trpceski clearly have other ideas. They begin with one of the most understated, restrained openings I've ever heard. Under James Levine, the Keyboard wizard Arcadi Volodos had much the same idea, but as the passagework got more difficult, he upped the wattage. Trpceski does, too, but the magnetism of a Martha Argerich, say, isn't his to command. The middle movement is dignified and lyrical, with a touch of the melancholy. It's well proportioned and beautifully phrased by both conductor and soloist. They make their best impression here. The finale is knuckle-crunching frippery unless the soloist can generate extra excitement. No surprise, Trpceski and Petrenko instead slow the pace and rely on precise, detailed musicianship instead. On its own terms, this approach works well, I must admit.



In all, I came away feeling that Trpceski really had something to say in these two warhorses, which is praise enough. But there's something deeper here, and I imagine he and Petrenko are set to impress their audiences for a long time."

Careful, noble readings which don't really take off

Ralph Moore | Bishop's Stortford, UK | 03/25/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I am still in two minds about these performances and might yet revise this, my initial response, but I find myself torn between two reactions: first, that this is first class music-making by sensitive musicians who have decided that the only way to approach music which has become a cliché is to re-think matters entirely, and go for a more cerebral, serious interpretation; secondly, that this very decision robs the music of a certain vulgar vitality essential to its nature. Of course, the second alternative is the direct result of the first decision. The Santa Fe listener has neatly anatomised the dilemma in his perceptive lead review; if I want to hear Horowitz tear a passion to tatters in the Third I know where to go, but there must surely be room for this more considered version.



This disc certainly didn't take me by storm the way Petrenko's other recent Rachmaninov medley on Avie did. My appreciation of those performances and the fact that they almost instantly became my first choice for "The Isle of the Dead" and the "Symphonic Dances" led me to have high hopes of these concertos; that expectation has not been fulfilled but I do not want to dismiss these versions out of hand, as they might well repay careful re-listening. Trpceski is fleet and fluent in the passagework but, compared with the brilliant, breathless attack of, say, Byron Janis and Dorati on the old Mercury recording, the tempi set by him and Petrenko seem a bit tame and careful - although they create a kind of contemplative, melancholy quite other than the more traditional, barnstorming showmanship we have become used to.



Try to listen before you buy; meanwhile for me I think the jury is still out on this one."

Trpceski, Petrenko, RLPO: Rachmaninoff P Ctos 2 & 3: Slavic

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 03/27/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Simon Trpceski first registered on my recording catalog radar when EMI released a solo piano music disc in the young artists series. (He's Macedonian-Balkan, not Urtext Russian Urals as such.) Then came a Chopin disc which I liked a lot, including his readings of the four Chopin scherzos. I skipped the solo Rachmaninoff disc; but now this concerto disc arrives with the second and third concertos. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is accompanist, with their rising star band leader at the helm (Vasily Petrenko). I've just gotten a stellar disc of Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances and some tone poems, so expectations for the conductor and band are running high at the moment.



The red book PCM disc carries very good sound; albeit not high resolution, nor multiple channels. I don't think EMI has ever quite taken to surround sound super audio. The venue is our band's home base, Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. Generally, this disc probably brings the music into your listening room about as nicely as any stereo PCM master of these two piano concertos.



By way of fair disclosure, let me admit that I hardly ever like, only a single player(s) in all four piano concertos by this composer; with the late-composed rhapsody rounding off the batch. I tend to pick single readings, instead. Readings that I think happen to dig a little deeper into the features which distinguish one work from its siblings. My touchstone in the first has long been Vardan Mamikonian. The shelf stretches way out with Ashkenazy (Haitink), Byron Janis (Reiner), and others. My preferred second has long been Yevgeny Kissin with Gergiev at the helm, a reading so expertly paced with such Slavic juice flowing that I cannot say I have ever found better. Stretch out with others, too, a super audio surround disc of Konstantin Scherbakov among them. My third is an Ashkenazy reading, with Eugene Ormandy leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in its heyday. I also like the odd but convincing Alexis Weissenberg with Leonard Bernstein, and for piano sizzle, Santiago Rodrigo in Bulgaria (not Illinois). My fourth tends to be the exacting Michelangeli on EMI, along with Ghindin and Ashkenazy doing the original edition that the composer later edited, along with Ashkenazy-Haitink. My Paganini Rhapsody is Libor Pesev conducting the Philharmonia of London with Pletnev at the piano.



All that said, I have lately added the complete sets by Kun Woo Paik (Fedoseyev, Moscow Radio Tchaikovsky SO), and the nearly disappeared Canadian Arthur Ozolins. Truth is, I think part of the genius of Rachmaninoff's music is that it seems to stand up well across a variety of musical manners, provided the players are bothering. On this new disc, Simon Trpceski is bothering a good deal. So, too, is Petrenko with the band in Liverpool. And the bothering is all deeply musical, first upbeat to last flourish.



The solo piano opening of the second concerto often predicts what will turn out to be this or that artist's way with Rachmaninoff. So it is, with Trpceski, Petrenko, and Liverpool. Like others who play the second, Trpceski takes the opening piano chords as an opportunity to point what he thinks the composer is doing as the bell-like changes are rung. What Trpceski manages is so expert, yet so subtle, that I find my ears tingling, Unhackneyed pointing, indeed. Bravo from these first notes in the second concerto. Trpceski distinguishes the shifting path, highlighting the one note in the shifting chords that seems to show a way forward into motion; but he does not need to hammer to be convincing. The impression right off is power and finesse, with a bucket load of intelligence to back up technical savvy. Thus the first movement of the second concerto is conjured into abundant musical being with drama, beauty, and flow ... always an organic whole, capable of entirely subtle yet marvelous moments.



If you like your second concertos to be big-boned, ringing with nothing but bell sonorities, and constantly on fire, sizzling with mainly extrovert high heats - Trpceski is probably not your man. What he and Petrenko do serve up is unanimity of musical attention; the sort of deeply intelligent musical partnership that helped make Kissin with Gergiev so memorable. The slow middle movement is sung, deeply and confidently, in nearly one immense, long-breathed, heartfelt, open-throated melody, chapter after chapter, verse by verse by verse. The third movement runs just about as long as the middle movement, longer than the opening volleys. This may be way too long for some, but not me. I can sink into the reading along with these players, reveling, relishing the composer's sound world, all wrapped up to happy ends. If Rachmaninoff doesn't do that to you, stick with others?



I note that other discerning listeners have found this approach a bit too careful, too serious by far. What keeps this second concerto reading from going over my own edges of tolerance is simply the profoundly apt partnering that Petrenko and the band realize, together with Trpceski. Uncontained, or badly contained, Trpceski would be out on that proverbial musical limb, all by himself. Partnered as he is here, I really cannot hear problems - not even a lack of dazzle. My ears hear oodles of what I suppose we might call, alternative dazzle, flowing right out from the highly effective musical partnering, flowing right out from the palpable colors of easeful-confident music-making, flowing right out from the composer's Slavic heart to the open listener's heart. I suppose all that risks making too much of the composer as such - if one believes that Rachmaninoff is a kind of nostalgic-atavistic throwback to a Russian Imperial Golden Era of great noble estates in the countryside, forever lost to revolution and change. The dazzle that lifts me up and carries me along in this reading is rather like the expert pacing of the Kissin-Gergiev second. I'm a fan, no holds barred. The fires of this reading do burn and fascinate a willing ear, even if players are not burning the stubbled fields down, period.



Come the third concerto, I find I'm still a fan.



My stumbling block in the third is the composer's intensified, busy keyboard figurations, not always amplified for the better to my ears by his even more dense paragraphing musical habits. The concerto begins simply enough, only to risk getting lost in the overgrown brambles and thorns, nearly throughout the rest of the work. It takes some doing to master this third concerto. The piano writing is famously difficult, so that even the composer himself quickly wrote a simplified cadenza, thinking his original too difficult for the average virtuoso pianist in 1909. Josef Hoffman, the dedicatee, never actually dared to try to play it. Later, Vladimir Horowitz came along, sweeping all talk of difficulties aside, though admittedly Horowitz never made the utterly perfect recording of this third concerto, either. My take is that Horowitz never really found a partnership of players to match his virtuoso rise up this particular mountain.



Petrenko and the RLPO are those sort, and the third reading at hand shows it. Nobody plays through as if seeking a high dazzle that would substitute for a quick editing of the sheer size and breadth of gesture that Rachmaninoff seems to have written into this concerto. Mahler rehearsed an early reading of it so intensely that the time ran over by an hour or so; and if deep attentions were good enough for Mahler as world-class New York conductor, I guess something similar is good enough for me as listener. (I relish Bruckner, after all, no rushing.) When figurations and tempos pick up in the first movement, we are still exploring, unfurling, inflecting ... journeying. What such an approach allows is an open musical door to the nature mysticisms that were flying all around the place in the era in which this concerto was written. Think, Scriabin. Rachmaninoff never goes whole hog into it, as Scriabin so fiercely did; but the colors, the connotations, the sense of a triumph of invisible, intangible size is there, still. The trick is whether the players can master the ebb and flow of this realm, transcendent. As in the mastery these musician show for the second, so with this third concerto. Ooops, no more space. Five Stars."