Superstars Midori and Yunchan at the Bowl
/By Truman C. Wang
8/31/2024
On Tuesday night, August 20, the L.A. Philharmonic, conducted by German guest maestro Christian Reif, gave a pleasing all-Dvořák concert at the Hollywood Bowl. It began happily with the Carnival Overture in a brilliant, energetic reading. The Violin Concerto followed. Midori, in a gleaming gold summer dress, gave an extraordinary poetic and passionate performance, showing her mastery of romantic style from the start, shaping the triplets of the main theme eloquently in a velvet legato line. Elsewhere, Midori was like a ball of fire, setting ablaze every note and phrase that she touched. It was full-on passion with a touch of wispy reticence in the adagio that was most endearing. Even her intense manner of playing, at times crouching down into a fetal position, appeared like she was ready to pounce at any given moment, and she often did. Midori’s heart-on-sleeve account was matched by the orchestra in the turbulent emotion and plush sound. Reif is a polished conductor of the romantic repertory; the cellos duetting lovingly with the soloist in the adagio, the flute’s heavenly Mozartian tune in E-major and the oboe’s A-major answer were two memorable details among many. After intermission, we heard the Symphony No. 7. It was a vibrant, deep-toned romantic reading that would have sounded a lot better indoors than in the open acoustics and speakers of the Bowl where much instrumental detail and harmonic subtleties got lost the farther away you sit from the stage.
The following Thursday, August 29, Yunchan Lim, the twenty-year-old piano phenom from South Korea returned to the Bowl, not to wow us with his showmanship as in last summer’s Rach 3 – which I reviewed rather harshly – but to impress us with his intellectual maturity in the classics. To be sure, although the chosen work, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, has the excitingly brilliant cadenzas and passagework for a great virtuoso pianist to strut his stuff, it also has a deeply philosophical and poetic adagio to measure the pianist’s emotional quotient. I am happy to report that Yunchan’s playing on this occasion struck a fine balance between romantic and cerebral, neither too emotional nor clinical (a similar trait that I find in Wilhelm Kempff’s Beethoven.) There were many beautiful things to savor in Yunchan’s performance: charming tone, warm singing lines, delightful filigrees of sixteenth notes, lightness and ripple in quick figurations, and ethereal beauty of sound in the hushed trilling that gradually crescendoed into a burst of ecstasy (in the first movement, before the recapitulation of the opening cadenza). The audience, with an unusually large Korean contingent, went berserk in a long thunderous ovation that would not be quelled until Yunchan sat down to play an encore – Bach's Siciliano BWV 1031 transcribed in 1931 by Wilhelm Kempff – in a quietly serene and thoughtful reading.
L.A. Philharmonic’s music director Gustavo Dudamel conducted the orchestra with exemplary flair and achieved perfect rapport with his soloist – not an easy feat with only one rehearsal. After intermission, the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5, featuring David Cooper’s haunting horn solo in the andante, was a thrilling spectacle of heartfelt sentiments and sonic splendors in equal measure.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.