From Tchaikovsky to Weinberg with Gabriela Montero and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla in Rome

Imagine the scene: a conductor sitting in front of the orchestra, the soloist improvising at the piano, the astonished faced of the musicians that surround her. To understand Gabriela Montero, it is perhaps necessary to start from the end of this concert, when she dazzled the audience by improvising on Figaro's famous aria “Non più andrai” – hummed just a few seconds before by a bold volunteer – inventively dissolving it into tonalities and rhythms with extreme and playful bravura. 

Called in as a last-minute replacement for an indisposed Yuja Wang, the Venezuelan pianist made her vivacious touch and improvisatory skill the stylistic signature of her performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no.1 in B flat major with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Montero displayed an incredible technical cleanness, performing the concerto in an almost Lisztian manner, with a fiery character that did not shift away from expressiveness or using a gentler touch when needed, as in the case of the slow tempos. Nevertheless, despite the clear direction that Montero and the orchestra inaugurated from the famous opening chords, the unity between the parts shone especially in the last two movements, where the orchestra seemed to have adapted to the pianist's explosive power.  

Montero was reunited with a long-time friend, conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. In her debut with the orchestra, Gražinytė-Tyla chose to bring an entirely new work to the Roman public, the Italian premiere of the Symphony no. 3 in B minor by Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg. An obscure work, it is filled with thematic inventions. Its language develops in short phrases and fleeting humour, even though still forming a compact whole. The Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia was perfect: the woodwind and percussion solos were precise and fluent, and the emotional expression of the four movements – which never explode, but murmur like a majestic, calm sea – was conducted by Gražinytė-Tyla with a grace and expertise that really impressed.  

This performance of the Third Symphony was truly a discovery, from the grey presence of Weinberg's time – the Nazi persecution and Stalinist totalitarianism that suffocated the composer for years – to the almost Mahlerian derivation dissolving into film music. 

Beethoven's Leonore Overture no. 3 was chosen to open the evening, a slightly timid performance considering the potential of a conductor with such refined and expert taste and touch as Gražinytė-Tyla.