Poised, Olympian Beethoven P Ctos from Derek Han, BerlinSO,
Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 06/04/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Derek Han is a Julliard graduate of Chinese American legacy, who won both First Prize and the Gold Medal at the Athens International Piano Competition of 1977. Yawn. So what. Each year or two or three brings us a new crop of competition prize winners from somewhere. Each medallist gets the mandatory fifteen minutes of Andy Warhol fame, and then fades into the background blur of having to make a living as a working professional musician.
Except. This Derek Han still has quite a lot to offer. His way with the piano reminds me of famous forebears like Dinu Lipatti, Clara Haskil, and the French pianist, Robert Casadesus. Han's tone is always limpid and absolutely without any hardness or fuzz. A keyboard run always strings together a set of well-matched tonal pearls, fast or slow or in-between. This all sounds so effortless and easy that it cannot in fact be just that effortless and easy. The piano is, as Bartok taught us, as likely to sound like a pitched percussion instrument as not, unless you bend the physical mechanism of it to some other heart or will or musical spirit. By all historical accounts, this ability to make the piano do music, instead of letting music just do the piano - is near to the heart of what actually hearing Mozart or Beethoven play might have been. In that sense Derek Han is a born Mozartian, and of course here we are talking about Beethoven. Yet Mr. Han can dig into his keys when he needs to produce a real sforzando punctuation without losing his fundamentally physicality. Think gymnastics, particularly on the rings, not weight lifting. Mr. Han remains lithe and cool-headed and perfectly balanced in each and every musical movement. His sound is ever crystalline and refreshing. Think mineral spring water with natural carbonation.
Both concertos were recorded live in concert at the renowned Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. Presumably the Berlin Symphony was visiting Amsterdam, with Paul Freeman conducting, and Derek Han as featured soloist. Lucky for us that these concert recordings were produced by engineer Judith Sherman. She does here what she always did do, which is to capture a real musical performance in a real venue with great presence, balance, and assurance in the recorded sound. There is nothing at all flashy or grandstanding in her way with a recording and its sound stage; but the more you listen, the more you will probably appreciate that she lets nothing happen that gets in the way of the music on any account.
The attentive audience in these live concerts was magically free of colds or influenzas. They allow themselves to be sonically invisible, except for a certain retrospective sense of rapt concentration that suddenly contributes to all that one has just heard, the moment their applause breaks. But remember that things were live. To create and convey all of this high-level musical performance, right on the wing of the many moments where something goes wrong with the tapes running, simply could not have been easy. It is so good, so self-assured you will be tempted to take it quite for granted. Don't.
The members of the Berlin Symphony offer us a golden, darker-woods burnished, mellow aural personality that has real historic, old-world European glow. Over time their grasp of Beethoven's orchestral narrative, integral to the five piano concertos, wears very well in all departments of the orchestra, indeed. The more one listens, the better one appreciates that nobody is anywhere near to getting in Beethoven's way. The Berlin Symphony may be making a daily living, but they sound like they are still playing for love of the music.
Paul Freeman helms all of these musical talents by pulling his best musical transparency out of the performance hat. He knows every measure, and all the expressive indications, but he never lets anything come apart into separate pieces or get so wayward that it starts blinking like a roadside neon sign in the darkened night's classical chiascuro. Freeman's way with Beethoven always calls attention to Beethoven, not to Freeman.
These technical and musical raw materials transmute into real gold when it comes to both the readings of the second (composed first) and the first (composed second) piano concertos. We get Han's fabulous touch, nothing blurred or distorted. We can revel in the gravitas and glow of the Berlin Symphony. We can later look back admiringly at the way that Freeman joined the band, letting his skill and personality merge into the music instead of otherwise. What remains is the almost physical joy of being young and alive that Beethoven wrote into these two early works. Quite sensibly, they are placed in historical order.
Now I have to confess that I often do not care all that much for the second concerto. Compared to the later four, I often hear it as too much still in the process of being musically formed. It is the special and the most plain of the five, though nothing specifically wrong can be whispered about it. In Han's way, however, I find it as compelling and interesting as I have ever heard it. It manages to sound its genuinely Mozart-tutored song, equally with its young Beethoven vigor and alert diffidence. For once I am not thinking to myself, well I wish we could just start with the second concerto.
When we get to the second concerto, these magic spells continue to be conjured aplenty.
Somehow the song and refreshingly clear simplicity that we associate with Mozart at his best are not getting in the way of this young fellow Beethoven introducing himself to us. Thus do keyboard geniuses of heartfelt poise come to mind, like Dinu Lipatti and Clara Haskil. Lipatti seems not to have recorded all that much Beethoven in his all too brief period with us, but one imagine that if he were in this audience, he would be applauding Derek Han.
Highly recommended. Check out the rest of the Beethoven piano concertos. Stars."
