Piano soloist masterfully pounds out Liszt works

Soloist Markus Groh produced a storm of piano virtuosity for Friday’s Spokane Symphony audience at the Opera House. The concert, conducted by Morihiko Nakahara, featured not just one, but two of Franz Liszt’s alarmingly difficult works for piano and orchestra. And the resulting keyboard tempest was awesome and, yes, a little frightening.

Nakahara opened the concert with Bela Bartok’s Dance Suite, a neat foil to the Liszt works which followed. Like Liszt, Bartok was Hungarian. Like Liszt, Bartok was interested in Hungarian folk music. And again like Liszt, Bartok was an inventive orchestral colorist.

There the similarities stop. Liszt was unabashedly romantic, Bartok was very much a 20th century modernist who used folk music roots to create a new world of sound.

Nakahara and the orchestra delivered Bartok’s pungent harmonies and tricky rhythms with the level of excitement and enthusiasm that matched the composer’s mastery. They brought to the Dance Suite the zest of irregular accents and jolt of melodic twists that still pack a punch after the more than 80 years that have passed since the work’s composition.

Groh showed that even something as familiar as Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 can produce a jolt. Seldom has the Opera House audience heard a pianist with such a huge range of sound. The fortissimo passages – and they abound in Liszt – were bone-rattlingly loud. I was fearful for the well-being of the symphony’s Steinway. It survived Groh’s thunderous assault in the concerto’s demonic chords and his hail of fast octaves and chordal passages. The piano did, however, require the piano tuner’s attention during intermission.

Groh brought a sensitivity and beauty of tone to the concerto’s nocturne-like Adagio and a delicious delicacy to the shimmer of the softer passages in the works of several solo cadenzas.

If the Piano Concerto No. 1 is one of Liszt’s most famous works, the “Totentanz” is one of the composer’s less frequently performed pieces. Groh brought full realization to the unfolding drama of his series of variations on the plainchant melody “Dies irae.”

What stood out was not the power and speed of his playing – though there was plenty of that – but the careful way he connected the variations. When Liszt writes a pause on a note, it can mean a long pause or a short one.

Only a fine musician can make the exact length meaningful. Groh never failed. And Nakahara and the orchestra provided a splendid partnership.

The excerpts from Richard Wagner’s “Meistersinger” provided a warmly resonant close to Friday’s concert. Wagner is a test of a conductor’s mettle in giving balance and clarity to his dense orchestral textures.

Nakahara’s light touch reminded us that “Die Meistersinger” is, after all, a comedy. The serious moments, such as the meditative Prelude to Act III, were thoughtful and rich. But the rustic gaiety of the Dance of the Apprentices, and the web of counterpoint in the Prelude to Act I had a freshness that was, well, really refreshing.