Ben Wolf, photo
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, New York City
While waiting for Deutsche Grammophon’s current release of Seong-Jin Cho’s complete Ravel piano music to arrive, this live relay from Carnegie Hall, with excellent sound and picture, more than whetted the appetite to audition the permanent recording. As a stepping-stone the opportunity to listen to Cho playing this superlative repertoire in a single sitting – all from memory and with unstinting focus and involvement – proved compelling and revealing, even into early-morning (New York being five hours behind London) for this recital was a refresher course as to the individuality and greatness of this music: its powers of description and capacity for poignancy, to spellbind and get inside one’s heart and soul. Suffice to say that Cho has an impeccable – and music-serving – technique; more than that he loves these scores and brought to them a precision and clarity to match the composer’s fastidiously notated and detailed pages; even more than that, whatever the dynamic, he brings a refinement and sensitivity to his Ravelian exploration that is beguiling yet never at the expense of the edgier/darker writing in, say, the five movements of Miroirs or the three of Gaspard de la nuit (fortissimos fully formed if avoiding harshness, dissonance not smoothed over, nor any lack of percussiveness, such as for the first number of Valses nobles et sentimentales). Shapely phrasing at all times, whether in the haunting Haydn tribute (affectionate, too) and even in ‘Scarbo’ (Gaspard) without undercutting the drama and despite the complexity. Cho ended with the six-movement Le tombeau de Couperin (four of them familiar from composer-orchestrations, as are other examples) to complete a three-hour concert, including two intervals, that was a composer-performer event of considerable artistic achievement. In passing, and rhetorically, might Cho have included the rare La valse (as arranged by Ravel himself for piano)? Being an original orchestral work, maybe that way round excludes it.
Exactly! Such precise playing could be a turn-off, but the passion and love shone through. I kept thinking how proud Ravel would be if he could hear his music so meticulously and caringly performed.