SA Symphony with pianist Benedetto Lupo
In Chopin concerto, a human voice
February 27, 2010What does the world need now? Love, sweet love, of course, but also more intelligence, more emotional depth, more grace, more intimacy, more freedom, more color, more unpretentious beauty, more power turned to humane ends.
That is to say, the world needs more Benedetto Lupo, the guest pianist on the San Antonio Symphony’s concert of Feb. 26, under resident conductor Ken-David Masur. Lupo’s vehicle was Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor. The concert opened with Johannes Brahms’s “Academic Festival” Overture and closed with César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor.
This was, to my knowledge, only Lupo’s second appearance in San Antonio. The first was a recital for the Tuesday Musical Club in 1993, four years after taking the bronze medal in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The gap is scandalous.
As before, Lupo impressed with musicality and sensitivity rather than with technical brilliance. (Other pianists can play more notes per millisecond, with greater machine-tooled precision -- an observation that is appropriately relegated to parentheses.) There was throughout his performance a complete fidelity to the style and the inner life of Chopin’s music. Lupo’s rhythms were incisive and decisive, his lines beautifully extended, his tempos flexible, his phrasing poetic and free but never contrived. His command of color was astonishing: In a short passage near the end of the second movement, he somehow made the Steinway sound like a celeste. He had power in abundance, but he maintained a beautiful tone even in the loudest passages -- and a full, round tone in the quietest. Above all, one had the sense that Lupo was a human being speaking compellingly and lovingly to his fellow human beings about something deeply important.
In Brahms and Franck, Masur leaned to crisp diction, fleet tempos, a wide dynamic range and quite a good sense of line. The transitions in the Brahms overture were neatly rendered. Both works suffered from occasional lapses in ensemble and from a want of clarity in their thicker textures. In the middle movement of the Franck symphony, it was not the least bit surprising -- but it was nonetheless gratifying -- to hear elegant solo work from Stephanie Shapiro on English horn (which is neither English nor a horn) and Jeff Garza on horn (which is a horn).
Mike
Greenberg
