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27 March 2010 - Elgar, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky
WELCOME
A handbill for this concert can be downloaded here. Why not print off a few to give or email to friends?
Soloist -
Ching-Yun Hu (Piano)
Conductor: Brian Wright
Elgar – Overture, Cockaigne
Beethoven – Piano Concerto No.1
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No.6 “Pathétique”
Born in Taiwan and educated in the USA, Ching-Yun Hu won the top prize at the 2008 Arthur Rubinstein Competition, and for us she plays the finest of Beethoven’s earlier concertos. Surrounding are Elgar’s portrait of Edwardian London, his overture Cockaigne, and Tchaikovsky’s ever-popular, heart-wrenching Pathétique Symphony.
For more information see her website.
Click here to read the Kent Messenger review.
Review by Don Goodsell
THE TRIUMPH OF YOUTH
I creep in because I am a little late. Rows of attentive faces hang on the words of Steve Migden, who is revealing the secrets of the brass. Acoustic theory comes to life with a length a plastic tube and a conical funnel like you might use to fill your petrol mower. He plugs funnel into tube and then plays it. Thus, when the band eventually strike up with the Cockaigne Overture of Edwardian extrovert Elgar the audience know the intimate physics of what is happening – well, those who arrived early do. But how can one follow rowdy, up-beat Edwardiana with early Beethoven?
Many of us, I suspect, see the First Piano Concerto as a precursor to the Emperor, or the great works of Beethoven’s maturity – a début piece for an up-and-coming pianist. How wrong can we be! Early Beethoven has qualities that say - ‘Here is a master in the making’. Even the Op 1 piano trios tell us this.
Dangerous as it is to pigeon-hole, there are three distinct Beethovens – with ‘bridge-passages’ in between. Of these, early Beethoven has its own definitive world, embracing the qualities of youth, its exuberance as well as a gentleness distinct from the Emperor Concerto and Pastoral Symphony of his full maturity, and from the profundities of the late sonatas and quartets.
It was as if Taiwanese pianist Ching-Yun Hu took us by the hand and led us to the top of the slope to reveal what promise lay before us in Beethoven’s transient world of youth, before deafness isolated him.
One of the joys of MSO concerts is that they so often spotlight youth. Youth in performance. Youth in composition too. In recent months we have seen and heard young performers on the trombone and the violin, and now the piano. Let us pray that Miss Hu doesn’t fall victim to the ‘mature’ world of glitz, glamour and fame - the unseen crevasse awaiting every climber. The early Beethoven concerto came as a refreshing breath of innocence after Elgar’s picture of a city already ripe with excess.
Here, it seemed, we could share the joy of a performer still young enough to be on Beethoven’s wavelength. Disparity of culture and history pale to insignificance. Was it mere coincidence that Ching-Yun Hu was about the age of Beethoven when the concerto was composed?
After such a gift, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth seemed out of place to me. I knew that this able orchestra and its conductor would make a fine job of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, but also knew I would have preferred something positive, something life-affirming, such as the Hindemith masterpiece, the symphony from his opera Mathis der Maler. However, judging by the very large audience and the rapturous applause following the Tchaikovsky, I was very much in the minority!
Don Goodsell
and welcome to our website.
Born in Taipei, Taiwan. Ms. Hu moved to the US at the age of 14 to continue her music studies at The Juilliard School in New York, studying piano performing with Herbert Stessin and Oxana Yablonskaya, chamber music with Timothy Eddy, Joseph Kalichstein, and Seymour Lipkin. In addition, she has worked in master classes with Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, Murray Perahia. Presently, she resides in London where she continues her work with Sergei Babayan and Christopher Elton.