Photo, Mark Allan
Friday, August 1, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
The good news is that Cliburn-winner Yunchan Lim, so soon into his feted career, has taken up Rachmaninov’s wonderful if ‘Cinderella’ Fourth Piano Concerto (in its final revision). Technically he plays the bejeebers out of it, but the bad news is that here his flamboyant virtuosity was rather empty, and the piano’s tone on the hard side for the lyrical/intimate writing, the performance not starting well with what should be foremost woodwinds barely audible (Rachmaninov’s orchestration is very sophisticated), Lim dominant (as broadcast), most of the first movement crudely speeded and primary-coloured, bereft of the depth that can be present and which can soar impassionedly. (Then came a break due to an alarm going off in the Hall – still it gave the R3 announcer an excuse to once-again remind about those listening options we keep being badgered about.) The slow movement didn’t really do much, and the Finale raced away, albeit some probing was evident before skittling to a curiously sober conclusion. If you want to know what this masterpiece is all about, there’s the composer’s recording (with Ormandy), Ashkenazy with Haitink (Decca) and Abbey Simon with Slatkin (Vox, below). Lim’s encore was something Korngoldian; quite nice although anything above forte was edgy in timbre. Maybe not in the Hall.
The concert opened with John Adams’s The Chairman Dances (derived from the opera Nixon in China), the terpsichorean boss being Mao Tse-tung, jiving with his mistress to an old gramophone record (replicated orchestrally), in an excellent performance of music that doesn’t stand up to repetition, because of its repetitions, and cut-and-paste design. Clever though. Clearly Kazuki Yamada and the CBSO have hit it off.
Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (Italian pronunciation) for eight amplified voices and large orchestra, was first-performed in 1968, the composer conducting, and recorded for Columbia.
When Sinfonia returned there, its dedicatee Leonard Bernstein now at the helm, Berio had added a fifth (final) movement to make the extended third the pivot, a “collage” based on the similarly-placed Scherzo of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, Berio borrowing Mahler’s marking of In ruhig fließender Bewegung, the movement a ground-plan for a cornucopia of quotations assembled by Berio, including from Bach, Beethoven, Berg, Berlioz, Boulez, Debussy, Hindemith, Ravel, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Stravinsky and Webern, oh, and Mahler, and a melange of various-language texts, including Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, sometimes syllabic. Yamada, the CBSO, and eight BBC Singers (the Swingle Singers originally) came together arrestingly, with panache, just about everything – tempos, balances, blends, dynamics, enunciation – perfectly judged in preparation and performance, the CBSO vibrant, for a music-theatre piece of and about its time – such as Martin Luther King’s assassination (April 4, 1968), second movement, and the Paris riots – still sitting pretty in 2025. Sinfonia is a survivor.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_three
Having experienced the wonderful Lim/Rach performances at the RAH in 2024 and in Lucerne in early 2025, this event was a disappointment on a number of counts. The long fire alarm issue after the first movement, the RAH limitation that there are only a proportion of decent listening positions (I had a good one in 2024 and a bad one in 2025), an audience some of whom seemed more interested in taking photos than listening, a poor choice of accompanying programme, and the Korean lady next to me who regularly used her fan during the music. Lim’s performance, or possibly the work, did not suit the venue. Regrettably a waste of time and money.