The guest soloist for this month’s Madison Symphony Orchestra program is pianist Marc-André Hamelin. He is an extraordinarily virtuosic player, which contrasts the more with his self-contained playing manner.
Not content with one vehicle, he brought two. The first is a most unusual choice, the Burleske by Richard Strauss. This was a product of the composer's youthful apprenticeship. One does not associate Strauss with the concerto form (though he also wrote a violin concerto, and later ones for winds), and his ambivalence is suggested in the title he eventually chose.
What is a burlesque but a spoof or a parody? By pitting a hugely demanding piano part against a timpanist (who has the first and last notes), Strauss is all but mocking the idea of an all-dominant soloist. The timpanist teases and jabs the pianist, as if stealing the show, in the equivalent of a concerto first movement that runs a good 20 minutes. Well, Hamelin does put up a glorious fight.
The other vehicle, after the intermission, is Maurice Ravel’s Concerto in G. Relatively compact, it packages a dreamy middle movement between two brash ones. Those represent Ravel’s very personal assimilation of African-American jazz and blues, which were all the rage among French musicians in the 1920s. Again, Hamelin’s playing is simply dazzling.
Hamelin is clearly one of the great pianists of our day.
In further generosity, he also plays an encore — on Friday evening it was Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G-sharp minor.
At either end of the program, the orchestra has its own opportunities to shine. Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 in D (KV 504) generally languishes in the shadows of Nos. 39, 40 and 41, regarded as the plateau of greatness. But No. 38 belongs with them, as perhaps the most unconventional and innovative of his mature symphonies. Known as the “Prague Symphony,” it was named after his favorite city, where his operas were great hits. Appropriately, operatic qualities bubble over here, too.
And, at the end there is Claude Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea). Forget about the clichés of “Impressionism”— a term the composers and painters labeled with it rightly detested. By evoking the sea, which had a lifelong fascination for him, Debussy was initiating Modern Music, with its restrictions on thematic material in favor of rhythms and colors. Conductor John DeMain and his players give their all for rousing sonority.
The program is repeated Saturday evening April 13 at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday April 14 at 2 p.m.
