Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto stands as one of the most formidable in the repertoire, its technical demands and symphonic scope matched by only a few other works for keyboard and orchestra (among them Brahms’ First Piano Concerto, Beethoven’s “Emperor” and, of course, the Busoni Concerto).
It’s a piece that has humbled even some of the better soloists, which made Peter Serkin’s often profound reading of the work Saturday evening at the Ravinia Festival all the more impressive.
Serkin approached the piece with utmost seriousness and attention to detail, as if oblivious to the outdoor setting. If his meticulous reading occasionally lacked the sonic power required for Ravinia’s wide-open environment, the performance had a degree of precision and an intellectual rigor one sooner expects to encounter in a concert hall than in an under-the-stars summer music festival.
From the outset, Serkin established the vocabulary of his interpretation: clean lines, impeccable voicing, deliberate tempos and a beautifully weighted tone. He never pushed tempos to achieve glib dramatic effects, he never sacrificed clarity of line in even the most thickly written passages.
There was no doubt, in other words, that he is his father’s son. As pianist Rudolf Serkin used to do, Peter Serkin took pains to bring out the structural details and the subtlest inner workings of the score. There was a Germanic sobriety, a respect for classical proportions that defines the work of both the father and the son.
Peter Serkin has been criticized for being a bit too cold and rational for some of the music he plays. But judging by his Ravinia performance, he appears to have warmed up a few degrees over the years. He still prefers to serve the composer’s interests rather than his own, but the stern objectivity of the past seems to have given way to something more personal and revealing.
Thus his slow and expansive treatment of the concerto’s opening passages, his bold statement of the initial theme of the second movement and his ravishing tone in the cadenzas of the third movement represented genuinely individualistic readings of this music.
Conductor Christoph Eschenbach proved an intriguing collaborator, leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a bold accompaniment that didn’t defer to the soloist, but matched him decibel for decibel. Though Eschenbach took the andante third movement too quickly for this listener’s taste, the impetuousness of his accompaniment gave the rest of the concerto irresistible sweep and power.
Eschenbach’s account of Schumann’s Second Symphony, which opened the program, was drawn on a heroic scale.
