Last weekend’s matinee concerts by Tokyo’s Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra featured two youthful guest artists whom I first encoutered as contestants in international competitions several years ago. I last saw London-born conductor Kerem Hasan when he was a finalist in the LSO's Donatella Flick Conducting Competition in 2016. It’s great to see him mature into a confident interpreter on the podium. Meanwhile, I first heard pianist Eric Lu, who probably needs no introduction now, when he won the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2018. We all know that success in a competition doesn’t guarantee a successful career, but happily these two have bloomed and each now has a thriving international career.
The popular programming of Tchaikovsky and Chopin ensured a large audience at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, a 2000-seater concert hall. Hasan and the orchestra opened with the introduction to Tchaikovsky’s opera Pique Dame, a dark and dramatic work that is rarely heard in the concert hall probably because of its brevity. Hasan quickly established the restless atmosphere and emotional turbulence of the opera, creating a mini drama anticipating the tragic story, and the orchestra responded with great dynamic and expressive range. It was a clever opener because when the music reached its hushed ending, it left you wanting to hear more Tchaikovsky... which was what we got in the second half of the concert.
In between, we heard Lu in Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto. Written a year before his more popular first, it is an elegant and melodious work, full of beautiful cascading passages. Lu is obviously well acquainted with Chopin’s lyrical language, and he performed the work with precision and clarity of touch. The sound travelled well and I could hear every note over the warm and attentive accompaniment of the orchestra.
Lu comes over as a very serious-minded, sensitive artist with expressive depth. However in this particular concerto, a work by a youthful Chopin before he left his homeland, his performance came over as a bit too earnest, perhaps too well thought out. Lu brought a strong sense of nostalgia and wistfulness, which certainly is in the music, but to me, there are more lighthearted sides to this work too. A spontaneous rubato here and there, some outward display of virtuosity in the coloratura-like passages in the second movement, and a little more rhythmic emphasis on the folk idiom in finale might have given a little more liveliness to the performance. Lu’s encore was Chopin’s Waltz Op.64 no.2, which was also played with earnestness and attention to detail.
Back to Tchaikovsky, we were treated to a scintillating performance of the Fifth Symphony. As I listened, I was reminded of an interesting conversation I had recently with a Russian-born conductor who said that all of Tchaikovsky’s late symphonies are essentially about “victory of life or victory of death” and that in the Fifth Symphony he is already leaning towards the latter. Yet in Hasan’s hands, the music felt more positive and generally free from such emotional angst.
Above all, he brought out the full potential of the Yomiuri orchestra, currently at the top of its game. There was richness and depth to the string sonority and expressive playing from the woodwinds in the first movement, top-notch horn solo (Shun Matsuzaka) and gorgeous playing from the cello section in the second, an elegantly swirling Waltz in the third, and glorious brass in the finale topped with an exhilarating coda. One could argue it lacked Russian heft or doggedness, but it was a fresh and animated performance.
