Mitsuko Uchida is at the stage in her career where the fewer appearances she makes, the more in-demand she is. The much-admired pianist, who will turn 70 in December, apparently had not played in Walt Disney Concert Hall in 13 years, and when she finally made her return over the past weekend, her fan base was ready.
They packed the house Sunday afternoon (May 20) for the last of four performances of the Schumann Piano Concerto, part of the kickoff weekend for Gustavo Dudamel’s “Schumann Focus” festival that will occupy the remainder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2017-2018 season. They packed the house Thursday night (May 17), too, giving Uchida a hero’s welcome before she even played a note.
For a less star-struck but nevertheless respectful observer who attended both performances, it would be illuminating to see if anything had changed over the span of four days. And yes, although the basic interpretation was set, some things were different on Sunday afternoon.
The musical bond between Uchida and Dudamel had grown audibly tighter, and as a result, they seemed to feel free to go for broke on the final day. The ethereal ruminating passages in the first movement — already on the slower side — broadened into near-dream state crawls. Uchida was freer and more expressive with her rubatos than before. Dudamel could indulge in more rhapsodic sweeping orchestral rhetoric, and his feeling for the rhythms was more pronounced. Still in place was Uchida’s butterfly-like touch, with plenty of muscular energy for the more extroverted passages. It was altogether a more absorbing, more daring performance Sunday — and her encore, the songlike, extremely brief “Aveu” from Schumann’s Carnaval, was the same as on Thursday.
For Dudamel, this concentration upon one composer is just the latest in a succession of cycles that he has been undertaking since becoming music director here in 2009. Already, he has run through the completed symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, and in one recklessly memorable 24-day stretch in 2012, Mahler. By comparison, a cycle of four Schumann symphonies felt almost like an encore.
While Dudamel reduced the LA Phil to the size of a chamber orchestra for the piano concerto, he used a larger group for the Symphony No. 2 on Sunday, expanding the strings while staying with one instrument to a part in the winds and brasses. His Schumann 2 was a high-energy Beethovenian blitz with a lot of verve and mobility, with the notorious difficulties of balancing the choirs of winds, brasses, and strings helped out by Disney Hall’s clarifying acoustics. The days of bloated, thick-set Schumann are long gone as performances with a light, fleet touch are now quite common (chamber orchestras playing Schumann have become the rage lately on recordings), and Dudamel’s showing can be filed among them.
Early birds to Sunday’s concert got a special treat of hearing Dr. Richard Kogan — who leads a dual life as a practicing psychiatrist and concert pianist — discuss Schumann’s bipolar affliction and perform extended excerpts from Carnaval as an illustration of the composer’s wildly shifting moods. Dare I suggest that Uchida had some unexpectedly formidable competition?
Having taken care of the first two Schumann symphonies over the past weekend, Dudamel moves on to lead the Symphony No. 3, “Rhenish” May 24-25 and the Symphony No. 4 May 26-27, with the Genoveva Overture and cellist Sol Gabetta playing the Cello Concerto on all four programs. The rarely-performed oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri, as staged by Peter Sellars, closes the “Schumann Focus” festival June 1-3.
