Lucerne, KKL: PADEREWSKI, February 9, 2023

Created by Kaspar Sannemann, February 9, 2023

Ignacy Jan Paderewski: Piano Concerto in A minor, op.17 |

Premiere: August 1, 1889 in Vienna under thedirection of Hans Richter

Criticism:

When a keyboard lioness and piano legend present in the audience (Martha Argerich, who had shone with Schumann's piano concerto the evening before) rises to give a standing ovation to a very young pianist, you can justifiably say that you have witnessed an event.

Yoav Levanon is the name of the 19-year-old pianist from Israel, who had his first public performance at the age of four, appeared in New York's Carnegie Hall a year later and has now internalized the most difficult works of piano literature in his repertoire and performs them with outstanding performance Interpreted with maturity and brilliant technology.

Yesterday evening in Lucerne he dedicated himself to Paderewski's wonderful Piano Concerto in A minor, a late romantic, captivating and technically extremely demanding work that is unfortunately performed far too rarely. We were all the more grateful that the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of its chief conductor Michael Sanderling, committed itself with verve and audible passion to the composition of the highly interesting Pole.

After the orchestra's pithy, powerful opening chords, the oboe, flute and strings began with the main theme, and Yoav Levanon on the piano soon took over this theme in wonderfully softly intoned

cantabile and turned into brilliant runs, appegiaturas, solo passages with crossed hands, confronted you Question and answer dialogue with the lavish orchestra. The first movement ends with a powerful solo cadenza characterized by outstanding virtuosity and a movement finale together with the orchestra, which fell on the listeners like a hammer blow.

A beautifully cleanly intoned horn call woke up the oboe, which intoned a dreamy cantilena at the beginning of the second movement, a romance. Yoav Levanon filled this romance with an almost inverted, delicately felt playfulness, blended into exhilarating dialogues with the concertmaster's solo violin and the cello, rising to an emphasis that was uplifting to melt away, before molto vivace was turned into the lively dance of the final movement . Stupendous, long-held trills, broad, almost hymn-like, solemn passages were surrounded by rapid runs, and the movement bubbled along with an astonishing precision.

The Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and the soloist attacked and played with great precision and mutual complementarity, creating a musical pull that made Paderewski's sound language addictive.

The ear demanded more, more and more intricate passages and Levanon delivered - even in the encores.

Only with an etude by Rachmaninov, in which he almost circus-like got everything out of the grand piano that was only possible dynamically and tonally, racing from fff to ppp and back again.

The second encore was the work of another keyboard lion -Franz Liszt's La Campanella, this etude based on a theme from Paganini's second violin concerto and riddled with immeasurable difficulties.

But Yoav Levanon plays it with a pianistic intoxication that seems to come from out of this world.