A Memorable OC Visit by UK Orchestra and Korean Piano Phenom
/By Truman C. Wang
2/22/2025
Photo credit: Philharmonic Society of Orange County/Drew A. Kelley
With this week’s visit by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County continued its 70-year winning streak of presenting “national and international performances of the highest quality and provides dynamic and innovative music education programs for individuals of all ages.” (from their press release) Apparently their endeavor has paid handsome dividends. Compared to L.A., where I attend most concerts, the O.C. audiences show greater cultural sophistication by refraining from applauding in between movements, and in general behaving better during a concert – no dropping of cell phones, rustling of programs, minimal coughs and noises.
The concert was completely sold out. The Segersrom’s 1,700-seat hall is similar in size, if not in shape, to the LSO’s home base at London’s Barbican Centre. The acoustics is warm, intimate, with good clarity, immediacy and balance of sounds whether your seat is in the stalls or the gallery. Not so in the cavernous halls in most of the U.S., where the higher you sit, the better the sound. This is important especially in a piano concerto, where the sound from the piano’s open lid and the orchestra’s more diffused sounds are harder to balance, and the seating location is more critical in a larger hall. (The 2,000-seat Meyerston Hall in Dallas is another with near-perfect acoustics.) From my seat in orchestra row Q, the sound balance was ideal. Both the piano and orchestra rang out beautifully and stirringly.
Stirring it was, by all accounts, the performance of Rachmaninoff Second Concerto by the Korean piano phenom Yunchan Lim. Lim, who is 20, brought remarkable maturity to the music-making, tackling its technical demands with apparent ease while finding fresh nuances in this familiar work. The famous opening c-minor chords were measured and resonant rather than merely thunderous. The second movement's intimate dialog between piano and clarinet was sublime, its delicate filigree not overwhelmed by the orchestra thanks to the hall’s ideal acoustics. In contrast to other pianists, notably Lang Lang whom I reviewed in the same concerto last October, Lim’s keyboard manner is quietly unassuming, without exaggerated hand gestures or facial expressions, or wild flailing of arms (his arms seldom raised above the shoulders.) He was content to let the music speak for itself. Famed pianist Alfred Brendel, in an essay, cautioned young pianists about the “circus of concert-giving”, where “the interpreter puts himself on display: a juggler, tightrope-walker and trapeze-artist of piano-playing…rather than the communication of musical essentials.” In the Rach 2 and in the encore (Liszt’s Petrarch’s Sonnet 104 from his Années de pèlerinage collection), Lim displayed keen musical intelligence and maturity far beyond his years.
After the intermission, Antonio Pappano (Chief Conductor of the LSO and Music Director of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden) gave a probing and lyrical account of Mahler’s First Symphony, without being overenthusiastic or overemotional like many conductors, wearing Mahler’s heart on his sleeve, or whipping up excitement in his players in an unseemly way. The big, ‘Titanic’ moments were all there, of course: the fierce climax in the first movement with the full power of Niagara Falls, the apocalyptic storms in the fourth movement and the eye-catching standing horns in the finale (a practice sanctioned by Mahler but frowned upon by conductors such as Sir Adrian Boult and Karl Böhm.) For me, however, it was the softer passages that stuck to the mind: the warm ray of horn sound that lights the path into the dark clouds after the storm, the soft singing of the strings in a flowery Alpine meadow of the second movement, the brooding but (sardonically) smiling "Frère Jacques" funeral procession.
The performance was operatic on a grand scale. (Mahler was the Director of Vienna Court Opera and the stormy apocalypse could have come from the act four storm of Rigoletto.) Unlike most young conductors today, such as Gustavo Dudamel and Klaus Mäkelä, who are eagerly snapped up by hungry agents for big orchestra jobs, Pappano came from a long line of old-timers (Muti, Thielemann, et al.) who started out in opera houses as a young pianist/repetiteur coaching singers before graduating to conducting. In Pappano’s conducting, there is a singing quality in the strings, in the winds and brass, and in ensemble playing that’s exceedingly rare among today’s symphony orchestras.
The packed hall at the Segerstrom saw a large Korean contingent. They cheered wildly in an extended standing ovation, drawing three curtain calls apiece from Lim and Pappano. It was an exceptional evening of music-making in Orange County. Upcoming concerts include the Vienna Philharmonic (3/9, 3/11) and Israel Philharmonic (3/26)
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.