Hearing a radio report of the death of famed Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on the way to Ravinia on Friday night, one’s first thought was that the music world had suffered an irreplaceable loss. Two hours later, after hearing Andre Watts’ remarkable performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Christoph Eschenbach, one realizes that, at least as far as the Russian concerto repertoire is concerned, the future is in excellent hands.
Rachmaninoff’s lush and impassioned music has always suited Watts’ romantic sensibility like a glove, and so it proved again Friday night. Even with a little gray now at the temples, the 51-year-old musician proved once again that for lyrical fervor, powerhouse technique and the sheer edge-of-the-seat excitement he brings to a live concert setting, Watts still has few peers.
One of Watts’ great gifts is his amazing ability to turn the most familiar phrase with a sense of discovery and poetic freshness that can make even this musical warhorse sound newly minted. Yet as impressive as his filigree phrasing is in lyrical moments, it is Watts’s iron-fingered passagework and boldly virtuosic playing that continues to amaze.
Eschenbach is no potted palm himself, and with massively committed playing by the Chicago Symphony, the final movement had a crackling electricity and barely controlled abandon that gave the race to the coda a nearly physical sense of exhilaration.
In a somewhat more unorthodox fashion, actor-director Nicholas Rudall’s turn in the solo spotlight in Tobias Picker’s “The Encantadas,” was almost as much of a tour de force. Inspired by the Melville short story of the same name, Picker’s work is, as he put it in pre-performance remarks, “a concerto for speaker and orchestra,” wherein the speaker’s reading of Melville’s richly picturesque prose acts as a kind of concertante foil to Picker’s evocative music.
Picker’s imaginative work is surprisingly effective, especially given the kind of theatrical yet nuanced reading Rudall provided. Eschenbach has long been an advocate of Picker’s brand of semi-exotic neo-Romanticism and this performance brought out all the exotic shades, tone-colors and tropical mystery of this music, the nostalgic glow of the final section beautifully played.
The concert began with a somewhat overdriven performance of Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture, which, while taut and dramatic, failed to convey the sense of mystery and rising mists in the opening section.
