Russian Roulette

It must have been warhorse night over at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Last weekend, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra under Albert-George Schram devoted much of its program to two of the most well-worn blockbusters in the repertoire: Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony. Both works were splendidly—though not always subtly—performed.

Russian-born pianist Olga Kern was on hand for the Beethoven, and not surprisingly she brought her usual bombs-away style. But she also brought a degree of warmth, sophistication and lyricism that was, at least for this pianist, both welcome and surprising.

Kern certainly has an interesting story. A decade ago, she arrived at the 10th quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition as a rather ordinary-looking brunette named Olga Pushechnikova, and because of her unfocused playing she never advanced beyond the preliminary round. Fast-forward to 2001 and the 11th Cliburn Competition. The pianist has a new name (Kern), a new look (a blond in a hot red dress) and a new approach to piano playing (basically bombastic). She took no prisoners in her bracing account of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 during the final round and won the gold.

In the years since, Kern has understandably developed the reputation of a piano-pounding daredevil, yet in Nashville last week she also revealed polish and poetry. Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto is itself a remarkable synthesis of the heroic and the poetic, and Kern gave both qualities their due. There was plenty of sparkle and dazzle in her performance of the concerto’s outer movements, but there was also considerable grace—she played trills and ornaments with rice-paper-like delicacy, and she approached the slow movement with the immediacy of a love song. Schram and the NSO, likewise, played down the regal pomp in the “Emperor” and instead performed with heartfelt exuberance.

Kern saved the fireworks for her two solo encores. The first, a Rachmaninoff arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Hopak, was played with muscle and athleticism. Her performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee (another Rachmaninoff arrangement), on the other hand, was played at such a blistering speed that it was almost unrecognizable. It was breathtaking to be sure. But it wasn’t very musical.

Schram and the NSO opened last week’s concert with American composer Russell Peck’s Gabriel. Lasting all of six minutes, this concert overture shows the archangel in three different guises—as the messenger who told Mary that she would give birth to the Savior Jesus; as the angel who gave the Koran to Mohammed; and as the trumpeter who would herald the end of the world.

On a superficial level, Peck’s score certainly seemed to suggest all of these scenarios, from the sweetness and light of the Annunciation to the minor-key darkness of the apocalypse. All the same, the music was so short, so sweet and so predictable (in his program notes the composer likens his score to a movie soundtrack) that you had to wonder: would one of God’s mightiest preternatural creations really march to the beat of a musical bonbon?

There was little subtlety in the NSO’s reading of the Tchaikovsky “Pathétique” Symphony, in large part because the orchestra’s resident conductor Albert-George Schram seemed to know only two conducting gestures—give me a big sound, and give me a really big sound. (At one point, Schram may have been attempting a third gesture of give me a really, REALLY big sound when he lost his grip on the baton, which went flying toward the first violin section.)

The musicians, for their collective part, made the most of Schram’s conducting style, and in the process delivered a “Pathétique” Symphony that sounded intensely Russian—their passion was more febrile, their melancholy was darker and their climaxes were edgier. The hyperemotional Tchaikovsky no doubt would have approved.