The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra unearthed a musical time capsule to fete its 85th birthday.
Music Director Christopher Seaman and his players reprised the RPO's opening concert - a heart-on-sleeve program faithfully reflecting its first audience's tastes. All the folksy, lyrical and nakedly emotional ingredients that made late 19th-century Romanticism so irresistible were put on display. And that occasion's excitement was rekindled Thursday in soloist Louis Lortie's superb performance of Grieg's Piano Concerto.
True confession time: This writer would have been thrilled to go 30 years without hearing Grieg's overperformed Piano Concerto. But Lortie's incandescent playing was a reminder why this warhorse is still trotting after 140 years.
Lortie, a Montreal native, delivered its quirky lyricism and thundering heroics with authority. He could turn on a dime from crashing chords to transparent, light-handed solos that hung in the Eastman Theatre like mist off the Norwegian fjords. He brought a hint of playfulness to the technical hi-jinks, giving the finale's aggressive theme a wayward lilt.
Stuart Low, Democrat Chronicle, March 2008
Louis Lortie and the Quebec symphony orchestra performed an outstanding concert last evening at the Grand Theatre. The performance, which took shape on stage, surpassed the simple technical perfection. In front of the obvious beauty of the scene the audience escaped the daily worries. To sum it up, it has been a great evening.
This first concert of the Beethoven Spring was fervently applauded. The enthusiastic audience that packed the hall gave a long standing ovation to the hero who brightly played the double part of conductor and soloist, and demonstrated a sincere gratitude towards the orchestra that he supported with such eloquence.
From the beginning of the concert with Coriolan, the OSQ played with full intensity. Lortie, who didn't play the piano in this piece obtained a striking accuracy and acuity from the orchestra.
The concert had already started for fifteen minutes, when the pianist played on his instrument for the first time. The conductor, suddenly changed into a soloist, managed to integrate into the music without any fuss, as simply as any member of the orchestra. The way he entered in this music, with lightness and softness, was absolutely delightful. Real velvet !
When he conducts, the intensity of his personality and the nobility of his ideas fully balance his technical limits. Anyway, he was perfectly assisted by the orchestra leader, Darren Lowe.
With the absence of a "conductor", the orchestra and the soloist managed to create a dialogue and to work as a genuine duo. In the second concerto's adagio, the musical exchanges, particularly with the oboist, were outstanding.
The half-hour-pre-concert talk was an interesting overture to the following performance. The musicologist René Benjamin placed Beethoven's music in an historical perspective and Louis Lortie delivered his own perception of the performed works and played some extracts on his piano.
Richard Boisvert, Le Soleil, April 2007
By his musicality, his mental strength and his obvious endless energy, Louis Lortie is astonishing. Yesterday evening, for the second of the three concerts dedicated to Beethoven, the pianist played and conducted the first and the third Piano Concertos after leading the OSQ in a bold and contrasted interpretation of the Egmont Overture. The whole was performed without using a score. We have to admit that his concentration power commands respect.
One hour before the beginning of the concert, the orchestra's guest accepted to take part in the usual pre-concert lecture with the musicologist, Benjamin René. With a relaxed attitude, he illustrated his remarks by playing some extracts on the piano.
All this could have given some complexes to the ordinary people we are. But I have noticed that the feeling unanimously shared by the concert audience was that of a deep pride. That Louis Lortie who divinely plays the piano, giving you the feeling to be seated in the most beautiful concert-hall of Paris, London or Berlin, definitely belongs to our folks.
More concretely and to come back to our first subject, Beethoven's music, I've found amazing and fascinating the way Louis Lortie had to give a direction to the movement by an alternation of rests and surges measured with delicacy and relevance. He gave ample breath to his interpretation and each musical phrase had its own surge, constantly renewing the musical expression.
The convincing results obtained by the pianist are due to the strict discipline and respect of the score he demands from everyone. For him, a pianissimo must be played pianissimo and thus the softest parts often have more impact than powerful fortissimos.
However, this strictness is not restrictive. In the First Concerto's largo, in which the woodwind instruments managed to create a real dialogue with the soloist, we could feel that the musical space belonged to everyone.
One couldn't miss the end of the Third Concerto's first movement with the piano cadenza's famous conclusion with timpani and strings retained creating a breathtaking mystery effect. It could hardly be more beautiful.
Richard Boisvert, Le Soleil, June 2007
Beethoven's publishers were right when they gave the subtitle "Emperor" to the 5th concerto, even if it was against the composer's opinion. The majesty of this masterpiece commands recognition, particularly after Louis Lortie's interpretation yesterday evening with the OSQ at the Grand Theatre. This was the fully deserved crowning of an intense week.
In my view, the pianist from Quebec has received the longest, the most sincere and probably the most deserved standing ovation I've witnessed in the last years in the Grand Theatre. There wasn't just admiration in this cheering, there was exaltation. The orchestra players, who usually just shake their bows in the air, were not less enthusiastic. They applauded their guest, crying out with enthusiasm. Unheard-of! We will never forget the image of the huge impetus of collective pride.
The ending of this second Beethoven Spring evidenced the long way the musicians have gone in the last few days, particularly regarding their relationship with the conductor. Observing the way he had to let the time smoothly drift by beating time as little as possible (e.g. giving two beats instead of four), one could notice that Louis Lortie was giving more and more liberty to the OSQ. Although some not-in-place chords can sometimes arise, this musical approach has many advantages. At the beginning of the Emperor concerto, for example, the beats had an amazing width and depth and creating this kind of impact is much more difficult than having a perfect accuracy.
One could also compliment on his pianissimo effects as heard in the second theme of the first movement's recapitulation. It will remain one of the most magical moment of the festival.
Darren Lowe, the OSQ leader, has been a brilliant support for the conductor-pianist's musical direction. He was even there to remind him to wave up some of the outstanding musicians of the orchestra such as Geoff Thompson, the trumpet player, for his brilliant solo part in Leonore III overture.
In contrast with the very solemn overture and concerto, Louis Lortie has inserted in the concert programme the entertaining Athens Ruins, seldom performed in concert as well as a Fantaisie by Liszt composed on the Ruins motives, in which one can hear the astonishing effects of a music box. It was both an amusing and innocent piece of recreation.
During my first meeting with Louis, eight years ago, I asked him if he could have any interest in orchestral conduction. He answered me that he totally excluded such a scheme, he didn't have enough time and preferred to focus on his career as a pianist. To sum it up, one could never see him as a conductor. But everyone can change with time. Fortunately the musician has finally discovered the way to reconcile what seemed incompatible, for our greatest pleasure and for the benefit of his personal achievement. From now on, we wish him to continue his conducting career while pursuing his career as a pianist.
Richard Boisvert, Le Soleil, June 2007
...the Canadian pianist Louis Lortie offered two works by Liszt: the seldom-heard "Fantasy on Motifs from Beethoven's 'Ruins of Athens' " and the more familiar "Totentanz." A nimble and imaginative soloist, Mr. Lortie tossed off both works with a satisfying combination of thunder and insouciance.
Jeremy Eichler, The New York Times, 2006
"One last salute to Mozart before saying farewell to 2006," is how Louis Lortie described his recital in a programme note. The salute was unusual, however, in that Lortie elected to view Mozart through Romantic eyes, flanking his music with works by Chopin and Liszt that were Mozart tributes in their turn.
Don Giovanni, with its mix of sensual insistence and existential defiance, mapped on to the Byronic imagination of the 19th century. Chopin's Variations on La Ci Darem la Mano and Liszt's Reminiscences de Don Juan take it as their starting point, re-imagining Mozart as dreamer and poseur respectively.
Lortie was electrifying in both. Chopin's Variations, written when the composer was 17, mark his burgeoning compositional maturity. Lortie's treatment of the introduction, fluid and glimmering, brought with it intimations of the later Nocturnes, while the closing polonaise was all fiery dexterity and hauteur.
The Liszt, meanwhile, was staggering. The piece trades on the composer's reputation as both seducer and Faustian virtuoso, with the Commendatore's hellish pronouncements harrying the extravagant transformations of the Don's music at every turn. Lortie played like one possessed, as the audience gawped, gasped, and called for more.
Lortie's Mozart, in contrast, is austere, though toughness and revelations of harmonic disturbance lurk beneath its surface. The plunging cadenza of the D minor Fantasia K397 tore apart the fragile 18th-century apparatus of the rest of the work, while the slide into dissonance at the centre of the B flat Sonata K333 seemed like a prophecy of the harmonic experiments that dominated music for a century to come.
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 2006
Anyone who has come across Thomas Adès as a performer knows what an unusually good pianist he is. Louis Lortie played two pieces by Mr. Adès, a British composer, as part of his Carnegie Hall recital on Saturday. Liszt and Chopin occupied the rest of the evening.
What compels us toward Mr. Adès's music is an oldness and a newness that seem part of the same thing. "Darknesse Visible" revisits John Dowland at the beginning of the 17th century in a song setting of John Milton at his most melancholy.
This is not old music to be scrambled and deconstructed by new hands. The living composer lays down quiet, shuddering, repeated notes and trills, adds sharp attacks at the top and bottom of the keyboard, and then summons the original music itself. You hear its stateliness of movement, even Dowland's harmony, both filtered through a patina gathered over 400 years.
Mr. Adès's "Traced Overhead" recalled the Chopin of the "Études," though reborn as something delicate and diffuse. I don't think it an accident that Mr. Lortie placed Chopin's own strange and discursive Nocturne in B directly afterward. The Nocturne kept reminding us of the Adès, just as the Adès seemed to prepare us for the Nocturne.
Mr. Lortie, with his splendid technique and thoughtful soul, put Liszt's transcription of Wagner's "Tannhäuser" Overture first on the program, perhaps just to get its fierce and threatening complications over with. Liszt is a remarkably true transcriber in his way, all those scales and thundering octaves acting as metaphors for the bigness of Wagner's orchestra. If a note or two were dropped, there were plenty left over for everyone.
The other Liszt was the "Vallée d'Obermann," music that makes melancholy as grand as the Adès/Dowland had made it intimate. Using his inspired minor-major shift halfway through as a kind of pivot, Liszt creates a sense of physical space as vast as Bruckner's in the opening of his Seventh Symphony.
Mr. Lortie's ability to play octaves at the speed he does is impressive, yet the danger in Liszt is that music may slip from the musically powerful into mere piano playing. A little slower might have maintained the mood so admirably set earlier in the piece.
The Chopin Sonata in B minor came at the end. Pretty much everything to be said about this piece has been said by a thousand pianists already, and Mr. Lortie, with unusual taste and restraint, told us what we already know quite well.
Bernard Holland, The New York Times, 2007
Only weeks now until the Mozart anniversary year ends, and it seemed as if it was all going to fade quietly away. But then, last Monday came Louis Lortie's wonderful recital, which made sure that it ended with a flourish. Mozart's own piano music could hardly do such a thing, of course - it's too small-voiced and refined for that - so the barnstorming rhetorical fireworks were here provided by Chopin and Liszt. Lortie had the neat idea of book-ending his concert with their tumultuously virtuoso homages to Mozart, while in between he gave us a clutch of little-known works by Mozart himself.
This meant that he had to plunge straight into the finger-twisting decorative skirls of Chopin's Variations on Là ci darem la mano. He did this with amazing sang-froid and surmounted every challenge with what looked like nonchalant ease, even the wrist-breaking, Schumann-like second variation. But it was the dreamy, veiled poetry he brought to the long introduction that was most impressive. The Fazioli piano had an uncomfortably hard and shiny sound, and it's a tribute to Lortie's amazingly subtle touch that despite this he so often produced a tone of pearly delicacy. Here and there, he used that old-fashioned device of anticipating the melody in the left hand, but so subtly that you could never be sure it was really there.
After that Romantic illusionism, the simple accompaniments and thin texture of Mozart might have seemed a bit milk-and-water. But the Mozart pieces weren't given the dry treatment they often get from "authentic instrument'' pianists. Instead, Lortie took advantage of the modern instrument, using just enough pedal to show that the late, stern D minor Fantasia and even the earlier B-flat sonata K333 give little glimpses of the Romanticism that was to come. Lortie has a distinctive way of shaping a melody, which has something to do with stretching the last beat in a bar. But only something - he never slips into repeatable formulas.
To end with, Lortie gave us another, very different Romantic take on Mozart. Where Chopin found an excuse for dreaminess, Liszt in his Réminiscences de Don Juan gives us fire and brimstone, expressed in thunderous octaves, vertiginous hand-crossing, and a general sense of difficulty building to a frenzy. Lortie seemed the last pianist to warm to such a piece of blatant grandstanding, but he brought it off with irresistible élan.
Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph, 2006
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