LINCOLN CENTER
New York Philharmonic
Lang Lang Plays Beethoven
Ligeti - Mysteries of the Macabre, for Trumpet and Orchestra
Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 4
Bartók - Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
Alan Gilbert - Conductor
Lang Lang - Piano
Christopher Martin - Trumpet
Please, watch and listen as Lang Lang brings the music beyond the notes...
The full Concerto No. 4 by Lang Lang from 10 years ago...
A bonus! Piano Candy from Chopin...
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Lang Lang (“the hottest artist on the classical music planet” — The New York Times) brings “playing so raptly beautiful that one was afraid to breathe for fear of missing anything” (Chicago Tribune) to Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Philharmonic. Alan Gilbert also conducts Bartók’s stunning tour de force, which calls for the full virtuosity of a great orchestra.
Review: The Philharmonic Revisits an Early Triumph of Its Director
By JAMES R. OESTREICH•OCT. 10, 2016
Lang Lang, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 on Friday with the New York Philharmonic, led by Alan Gilbert. Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times Alan Gilbert, approaching the end of his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, briefly revisited an early triumph last week in the orchestra’s subscription concerts at David Geffen Hall. In 2010, Mr. Gilbert collaborated with the director Doug Fitch on an innovative staging of Gyorgy Ligeti’s satirical opera “Le Grand Macabre” (1978), an absurdist take on nothing less than the end of the world.
Among other revelations, the production served as a showcase for the rising, now soaring, Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan. Ms. Hannigan, a contemporary music specialist, has since made a calling card of a sequence of soprano arias from the opera under the title “Mysteries of the Macabre.”
“Mysteries” had an absurd start of its own. In 1987, Elgar Howarth, who had conducted the opera’s premiere in 1978, led a concert performance in Vienna, substituting a trumpeter for an ailing soprano at the last minute, text — nonsensical as it was — be damned.
With Ligeti’s approval, Mr. Howarth later extracted the arias and published them in a version for soprano or trumpet. With the arrival of Christopher Martin, the Philharmonic’s brilliant new principal trumpeter, Mr. Gilbert obviously sensed an opportunity.
So there “Mysteries of the Macabre” was on Friday evening, in all its nine-minute glory. As humorists, Mr. Martin and Mr. Gilbert were both a bit heavy-handed in their byplay, but as musicians they were impeccable. The performance will hardly eclipse in memory Ms. Hannigan’s, as she sang “Mysteries” at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland in 2014 while — now also an aspiring maestro — doubling as conductor. But it was a nice nod to Mr. Gilbert’s achievements in New York.
Happily, it was heard by a full house, since that foolproof audience draw Lang Lang took the stage next in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. By his own showy standards, Mr. Lang was on good behavior, as well he should have been in this elegant, probing work.
No one can sweep the keyboard more flamboyantly or powerfully than he, and he did so here with relative dispatch. But he was in some ways even more impressive in understated pianissimo passages, ravishing, even touching if you could get past the mugging of emotion that accompanied them.
Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta rounded out the evening, creating a nice symmetry opposite the Ligeti. And that there were few defectors for this modest Modernist challenge after intermission suggests that Mr. Gilbert has developed a certain trust with Philharmonic audiences.
The many who stayed were treated to an excellent performance, achingly sustained in the opening Andante, vibrantly taut and energetic in the Allegros, featuring virtuoso soloists from the orchestra. And the listeners responded with a raucous ovation worthy of, say, a Tchaikovsky symphony.
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