★★★✩✩
The opener was full of promise. A performance of Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus that was taut as a circus tightrope. The start of his Second Piano Concerto boded well too, with generous yet precise playing from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, sensitively shaped by the conductor Karina Canellakis. And when the soloist Jonathan Biss began, drawing a beautiful sound with his long, expressive fingers from the gleaming Steinway, all felt right with the world.
There were many fine moments. Certainly not an ugly note, nor an unpolished phrase. Biss knows his Beethoven. He’s recorded all 32 of the Piano Sonatas, commissioned companion pieces for the five Piano Concertos, and written and taught about Beethoven’s music. His playing is articulate, intelligent and musical. The Mozartian spirit of this expansive early piece, a showcase for Beethoven at the piano in the 1790s, shone through. The Adagio sailed by while Biss brought a light, deft touch to the Rondo. Yet the performance never quite gripped or compelled — that spark of Promethean fire was lacking. Still, in the lovely encore — the slow movement from the Pathétique Sonata — he made the piano sing.
A different problem arose in Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony of 1943, in which the shocking noise of war meets the numb stillness of trauma. Here, Canellakis found plenty of firepower to let rip in the terrifying percussive cataclysms, but didn’t consistently plumb the music’s emotional depths. It was a performance led by the head, not the heart. And despite some wonderful playing from the LPO –— a particularly moving cor anglais solo over hushed tremolo strings, and the jabs of eerie flutter-tongued flute spring to mind — Canellakis didn’t unerringly grasp the sheer existential terror, the fight for survival, traced by the five movements.
The unease of the vast opening movement, with its evocation of lonely voices in the dark, didn’t chill the soul as it should. Nor did the frozen lament of the fourth movement evoke the bleakness it can. So when we reached the symphony’s end, the impact of the possible hope it offered was muted.
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