Bulgarian piano sensation Evgeni Bozhanov and young Polish conductor Marzena Diakun (stepping in for an indisposed Juraj Valčuha) both marked their Liverpool debuts on Thursday with the RLPO, in a programme where virtuosity was ostensibly the main theme. But if there was another, more poignant thread running through the three works, it was in the deeply personal nature of their composition: Beethoven emerging from out of Mozart's shadow with the Third Piano Concerto, Bartók rising from the depths of despair and illness in his Concerto for Orchestra, and a triumphant Richard Strauss cocking a fiercely defiant snook at his critics in the orchestral showpiece, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks.
Strauss is here at the height of his powers, exhibiting true modernism with some of his most imaginative and virtuosic orchestration and, as if in cahoots with his eponymous prankster, he veritably leaps from one instrumental group to another whilst exploiting dissonance to an almost cartoonish level, and all carried off in classical rondo form. For music of such angular and rhythmic athleticism, Diakun's conducting style may have appeared too sweeping and fluid, but the orchestra responded to her direction with immediacy, and despite being driven too relentlessly at times, it was a performance which lost none of the bombastic swagger of Till's adventures.
“The likes of us will never be able to do anything like that.” So remarked an awestruck Beethoven to his pupil, of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 24 in C minor, the catalyst for his own concerto in the same key, Op.37. Beethoven may well have been in Mozart's thrall – and there are indeed notable acts of homage in this concerto – but despite the influential precedent, the vision was very much his own, one in which the ushering-in of the Romantic period elides with the bowing-out of the Classical, not least in the virtuosic treatment and the opportunities for exhibiting pianistic display. Bozhanov's particular style of pianism is viscerally expressive without seeming at all industrious, his trademark low and unusually static position at the piano somehow adding to the impression of the notes emerging organically as an extension of himself. And yet it seemed almost counter-intuitive that the low-sprung hand weight could allow such colouristic possibilities: the quietest imaginable sotto voce at the beginning of the Largo, a disarmingly sonorous cantilena later in the movement and powerful forte playing which cut through the tuttis without percussive edge. There is nothing routine about Bozhanov's playing: it's technically and intellectually rigorous yet also capricious and whimsical, the occasional rhythmic precipitousness and unpredictable moment (deftly caught here by Diakun and the orchestra) only adding to the over-arching sense of a true musical poet with an essential playfulness which runs counter to the somewhat imperious façade.