Strictly business

For some unknown reason, the big international competitions have a better track record of picking pianists who will actually go on to have major careers than they do string players. Of the latter, there are many, many laureates of the Tchaikovsky or Queen Elizabeth competitions whom you’ve never heard of. But a large swath of the most celebrated names in piano, with long careers at the very top of the profession, first made their mark on the competition circuit, including Ashkenazy, Pollini, Fleisher, Argerich, Perahia, Ax, Pletnev, Zimmerman, and (potentially) Trifonov.   

I say all of this because Seong-Jin Cho, who won the Chopin International Competition five years ago, gave an account of himself yesterday at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater that strongly suggests he may one day be mentioned in a list like the one above. In a fairly narrow program – four works spanning just over a half-century – Cho dug deeply into the music, invoking connections and allusions that one only expects from artists thrice his age.  

Since there is no tone-production per se on a piano, you often see players trying to coax a mood or color through facial expression, and it is so refreshing when someone comes along who understands the futility of this. Cho is all business, focused on producing the clearest musical product possible. His body-language is tightly controlled, most of his energy channeled directly into the instrument; so on the rare occasions when a climactic moment elicited some physical emphasis, it was doubly powerful. And this economy allowed his scintillating technique to make its fullest effect; lightning-fast octaves in the Liszt Sonata, singing, perfectly-even trills in the Brahms Romance in F, and bouquets of arpeggios surrounding every theme in the Franck Prélude, Chorale, and Fugue.   

In Brahms’s penultimate set of piano works, Op. 118, Cho’s range of expression was fairly austere, befitting the autumnal nature of the music, but where things got heated (such as the Intermezzo in E-flat minor), he rose up in magisterial style. The next three works – the Franck, Liszt, and Berg’s Sonata Op. 1 – despite their obvious differences, were all constructed on similar principles of continuous cyclical development of their opening material. Cho highlighted this connection somewhat impishly, beginning the Liszt before the air had even cleared from the Berg (for all their chromaticism, both works are in B minor). Listeners unfamiliar with the music would never have been able to tell when one piece ended and the other began.  

But Cho had everything in hand, giving each of the three works a feeling of overarching narrative. In the Franck, themes are heard in many guises and combinations; the piece can come off as a kaleidoscope (patterns just re-arranging themselves in space) or a journey (themes striving for some far-off synthesis), and Cho certainly gave the feeling of the latter.  

I have always subscribed to Alfred Brendel’s theory of the Liszt Sonata (shared by many others) as a musical depiction of the Faust legend. Though the composer never stated anything of the sort, the music makes rhetorical sense and hangs together in that framework. This is of course completely subjective and a great masterpiece, as the Sonata unquestionably is, can stand any number of interpretations. Worst of all would be for me to assume Cho was hearing it as I do, and praise him for his sharp characterization of Mephistopheles’s cunning or Gretchen’s yearning. All I can say is that music was rendered with startling clarity, fidelity to the printed score, blazing virtuosity when called for, and the most meltingly tender lyric episodes, everything given the time and space needed.  

Presented by Washington Performing Arts (the Hayes Piano Series), this was one of the best performances I’ve heard this season.