Munich Philharmonic – Valery Gergiev, music director; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano. April 2, 2017.

Prudential Hall at NJPAC.  Tier 1L (Seat D15, $42.50).

Program

Don Juan (1889) by Richard Strass (1864-1949).

Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1929-30) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937).

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (“Eroica”) by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).

The orchestra would perform twice in Carnegie Hall (different Symphony for the two evenings), one of those evening would be broadcast live on WQXR.  So it is a rather big deal, but not for folks in New Jersey, as discount tickets were offered on Goldstar, which probably helped to get a respectable audience for the evening.

Strauss’s ego was such that he wrote Ein Heldenleben when he was 34, with himself being the hero described in the tone poem.  While Don Juan was a tone poem based on the infamous seeker of pleasure, the Program Notes describes this as the first autobiographical hero in Strauss’s music, serving as a declaration of independence; Strauss was 24 at that time.

The music was pleasant enough, with quite a few dramatic passages that one can associate different events with.  I just wish there was a brief description of what Strauss wanted to take the audience through, as he had done with many of his tone poems.  He did use three quotations from the drama (by Nikolaus Lenau) to sum up the mood and the narrative of the music.  I will repeat the last one: “It was a beautiful storm that urged me on; it has spent its passion, and silence now remains … the fuel is all consumed and the hearth is cold and dark.”

Turns out I had heard this tone poem a couple of times before, performed by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Gilbert.  I panned one performance and said good things about the other.  Tonight’s performance certainly was in the good category.  I wished I had read my earlier reviews as they both referenced number of conquests by Don Juan.

This is a large orchestra, I counted 16 first violins, 10 cellos, and 8 basses.  As the staff set up the piano for the Ravel piece, I expected many musicians to leave the stage.  It is a piano concerto, for one hand only, after all.

To my surprise, most of the musicians stayed for the concerto.  Except for a few softer piano passages, the balance worked.  We had heard Aimard play once, a Mozart piano concerto.  This was certainly no Mozart.  The piece sounded like a virtuoso piece, and all the more amazing because it was done with only the left hand.  Our seats in Tier 1 offered a good view, but not a close-up one, of how the fingers flew over the keyboard, but what I saw was impressive enough.

Ravel wrote this concerto for the Austrian pianist Wittgenstein who lost his right arm during World War I.  During that same time he wrote his much better known Piano Concerto in G Major.  The two concertos certainly sounded very different.  The piece is nominally marked Lento – Allegro, but it sounded a lot more complicated than that.

Aimard and Gergiev after performance of Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

Aimard played a rather simple piece as the encore.

I am sure I either studied the Eroica in music theory class, or performed it with the Cornell Orchestra, as I was quite familiar with most of the music.  It was somewhat surprising that the familiarity ended with the third movement, and that the last movement sounded new to me.  One possible reason is the symphony is so long that I would fall asleep by the time the fourth movement came along.  I also commented that the fourth movement didn't sound familiar when I heard it a few years back.

The four movements of the Symphony are Allegro con brio; Marci funebre: Adagio assai; Scherzo: Allegro vivace; and Finale: Allegro molto.  They added up to close to an hour!  I thought the only long symphony Beethoven wrote was the ninth.

The orchestra certainly maintained the energy throughout the performance; better than I could concentrate, anyway.  I had seen Gergiev a few times, mostly as opera conductors.  Today his movements were not as exaggerated as I remembered them, yet the orchestra responded very well.  The orchestra was founded in 1893, and Gergiev has been the Music Director since 2015-16.

I found this review of a Carnegie Hall performance.  It was a different first half (e.g., Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G was performed).  The title “Chaos theory: Gergiev, Munich Philharmonic unsettled yet inspired at Carnegie Hall” may sound ambivalent, but the review is all positive.

Our tickets actually cost $53 each as there is a $10.5 charge per ticket.  And for today parking was $20, higher than the usual $16 we have been paying.  I was glad to be able to attend the event, though.