San Antonio Symphony, Ryo Yanagitani
The pianist as raconteur
November 6, 2010Canadian pianist Ryo Yanagitani was immensely likable in his début with the San Antonio Symphony, Nov. 5 in the Majestic Theater.
The gold medalist in the 10th San Antonio International Piano Competition delivered highly personal and stylish accounts of two landmark works from the decades between the two world wars -- Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Guest conductor Tito Muñoz, also making his San Antonio début, opened the concert with Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in C and closed with Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.”
Yanagitani reminded me a little of another Canadian pianist, Jon Kimura Parker, in that both come across as being entirely unaffected, personable and even playful while commanding impressive technical resources.
Yanagitani is a raconteur, musically speaking. The expert story-teller’s gift for pacing and pregnant pauses was especially evident in his highly flexible shaping of the unaccompanied passages of “Rhapsody in Blue” -- music that just about everyone knows from back to front, made newly fresh and meaningful. And, yes, it sounded like jazz.
The pianist had ample stamina, dexterity and power to sail above the formidable demands of Ravel’s darkly lyrical concerto. As in Gershwin, Yanagitani did not play this music as a mere abstraction, but as a human testament.
Stravinsky wielded huge influence on composers of the 20th century and beyond, but his own music isn’t often heard at these concerts. The Symphony in C is an engaging, spirited piece in high neoclassical style. It doesn’t, however, reveal all of its charms immediately. It may take a while to relish the lively complexity of the counterpoint and the pungency of the harmonies.
The performance, alas, was fairly bland. Muñoz favored slightly slow tempi and a plush sound. The counterpoint wasn’t clearly enough defined, and rhythms and accents wanted bite.
“An American in Paris” fared much better. A native New Yorker, Muñoz conducted this music with a nice balance of streetwise moxie and supper-club elegance.
The orchestra’s principals delivered top-drawer solo work throughout the evening. Sweet, pearly tone seemed the order of the day, with gorgeous examples coming from concertmaster Ertan Torgul, bassoonist Sharon Kuster, trombonist Anthony Wise and oboist Mark Ackerman. Clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg did a terrific job with the bluesy inflections in the Gershwin Rhapsody.
Mike
Greenberg
