Hélène Grimaud tackles Brahms and Schumann with the Phila. Orchestra
Pianist Hélène Grimaud kept Philadelphia waiting for her Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2. She was scheduled to perform it here in 2014, but music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin had to cancel for health reasons - so, wishing to save Piano Concerto No. 2 for him, she switched at that time to an older friend, the Piano Concerto No. 1.
Pianist Hélène Grimaud kept Philadelphia waiting for her Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2. She was scheduled to perform it here in 2014, but music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin had to cancel for health reasons - so, wishing to save Piano Concerto No. 2 for him, she switched at that time to an older friend, the Piano Concerto No. 1.
When the moment of truth arrived on Thursday, you understood Grimaud's history of ambivalence with this grandest of all piano concertos. It's like some monumental Shakespearean role, with so many facets even the best pianists often won't encompass all elements in any one performance. The temptation is to tidy the piece into submission.
And in the overall performance, tidiness of the most expressive sort was in the right places - Jennifer Montone's opening horn solo and Hai-Ye Ni's third-movement cello solo.
But Grimaud and Nézet-Séguin often went the opposite direction, with results that might seem messy to some and truthful to others - suggesting the musicians were reaching beyond themselves, at the expense of piano/orchestra coordination and overall sense of ensemble. Notes were missed; the horn section had funky moments. The price of an absorbing performance?
In moments when Grimaud seemed not so convinced by the music's pretensions of nobility, Nézet-Séguin was.
Whether Grimaud was convinced or not, her sonority had the magnitude needed for the peaks of the second movement, and was devoid of the extraneous lushness that can keep the music from falling into any comfort zone. Her longer phrases took on an escalating gravitational pull as the harmonic resolution approached, so the tension can actually increase in places where others might find a few seconds of repose. Her kinetic left hand assured that even mere accompaniment figures didn't feel routine. So the Brahmsian equipment was there, no matter what.
Schumann's Symphony No. 1 ("Spring") occupied the second half - in a reading that moved exuberantly and impulsively, full of sex and uproarious humor but with an undercurrent of manic obsessiveness. The exuberant tempos of Nézet-Séguin's well-reviewed Schumann recordings with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe worked mostly well with the Philadelphia Orchestra. When Schumann wrote this symphony, his mental illness was a way off, but Nézet-Séguin's extreme, final-movement tempo shifts - implied by the music's gesture but not marked in my score - told you it was on the horizon.
Additional performance: 8 p.m. Saturday at the Kimmel Center, Broad and Spruce Streets. Tickets: $5-$152. Information: 215-893-1999 or www.philorch.org.