In an impressive NY Philharmonic debut, the charismatic conductor Kazuki Yamada – music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo – led a crowd-pleasing program featuring a US premiere and two works from the Romantic and late Romantic era. The concert opener was Dai Fujikura’s tone poem Entwine. Written in 2020-21 in response to the pandemic when the composer was under lockdown in London with his family, the work was commissioned by the WDR Symphony. The brief work aims to express the yearning for human connection and to affirm our willingness to accept the unknowable. Under Yamada’s baton, the work came across as a highly listenable, eerily atmospheric work where the musicians pass a series of fluttering sounds from one instrument, or group of instruments, to another and finally come together.
Next came Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto, labeled No. 2, though it was written before the composer’s E minor concerto. At the keyboard, 18 months after his dazzling NY Philharmonic debut playing Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, the work with which he became – at 18 – the youngest winner of the Cliburn Competition, was Yunchan Lim. Although the South Korean pianist made his early mark interpreting Rachmaninov, this year he has been performing more Chopin, including an astonishing account of all 27 of the composer’s études at Carnegie Hall last February, and on a recent recording for Decca.
On this occasion, he proved himself to be a splendid interpreter of Chopin, whose music demands great sensitivity and technical skill along with the ability to convey an array of complex emotions. With extraordinary poise, calmness and refinement, Lim gave a performance that was an object lesson in tastefully conveying the wide-ranging lyricism of Chopin’s music. In the fantasy-like Maestoso first movement his phrasing was expressive and flexible without ever losing a sense of the pulse, but his delicately graceful playing was its most magical in the central Larghetto, its tracery well-shaped, its lyricism light and airy. The Allegro vivace finale, free of gratuitous virtuosity, was wonderfully sparkling and energetic. Yamada and the orchestra provided splendidly responsive accompaniment throughout, with associate principal Julian Gonzalez’s bassoon emitting mellifluous tone in his gracefully winding solos. In response to the vociferous ovation, Lim offered more Chopin: a poignant rendering of his Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. posth.
After intermission came a carefully considered rendition of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony, clear, forthright and flowing. In the first movement, Yamada’s gracefully balletic conducting style drew especially animated playing in the impassioned climax, and Ryan Robert’s English horn solo was remarkably graceful. Four richly toned horns in perfect unison introduced the main theme of the second movement, where the violins sounded splendidly buoyant. At the opening of the nostalgic Adagio, principal Anthony McGill’s long and tender clarinet solo conveyed a deeply felt sense of longing. Rachmaninov’s spirited finale was played with great gusto, with the cymbals, bass drum and timpani in the gloriously triumphant ending.
