Lupo Continues String Of Excellent Pianists
Spokane Symphony and pianist Benedetto Lupo Opera House, Friday evening
The Spokane Symphony has played host to an extraordinary series of pianists recently. Lee Luvisi’s magisterial authority in Beethoven, Arnaldo Cohen’s sure-fingered virtuosity in Rachmaninoff and Andre Watts’ charismatic vitality in Brahms - each was stunning in a distinctly personal way.
Benedetto Lupo, Friday’s soloist with the symphony, gave a captivating account of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a marvel of subtlety. He did it despite some annoying interference.
Just as Lupo and conductor Fabio Mechetti were set to begin the concerto, a cellular phone rang. The musicians were startled. The audience tittered and squirmed.
Throughout the evening, Friday’s Opera House audience seemed unusually talkative and coughprone, the symphony’s free cough drops notwithstanding.
During the concerto, there was a little disturbance when something was dropped on stage - a violin bow, perhaps. Margaret Wilds, the orchestra’s nearly infallible principal horn, made a fluff in the notoriously exposed horn solo near the end of the concerto. The woodwinds’ intonation was unruly, as is too often the case these days.
Through it all, Lupo remained the unruffled advocate of his beautiful, if unconventional, concept of Chopin’s concerto. Unafraid to play very softly, Lupo spun out Chopin’s lacelike filigree as though he were in the quiet of his living room.
His was an elegant, improvisatory style aided by Mechetti’s subdued accompaniment.
At the end, there was respectful rather than enthusiastic applause. Attentive piano connoisseurs, I think, might have given Lupo a standing ovation. His splendid playing and deeply felt interpretation deserved no less.
The concert began with William Schuman’s “American Festival Overture.” Sassy and swift, it owes a lot to those “open spaces” sonorities of Schuman’s teacher Roy Harris, to the energetic rhythms of Gershwin-era Broadway musicals and to Schuman’s early experience as a jazz player and composer of pop songs. The performance sounded full of fun, with that special brand of nervous energy associated with American music of the 1930s.
The second half of the program was devoted to Wagner. Mechetti’s sense of pacing and some excellent orchestral playing allowed the yearning in the Prelude to “Tristan” to become almost painful before it resolved in the sweeping climax of the “Liebestod.”
Mechetti allowed the somber Prelude to Act III of “Die Meistersinger” to continue the dark mood of the “Tristan” excerpts before giving way to the jollity of the Dances of the Apprentices and the majestic conclusion made by the Prelude to Act I.
Mechetti grew up in the opera house where his father conducted. His grasp of this music’s dramatic values showed, even in these brief excerpts.
, DataTimes