A skilled musician can play pretty much anything. But notes on the page of a score are just a starting point. Beyond that, what makes an artist well suited to a specific sound or style? Age? Personality? Experience?
These are complicated, elusive questions that loomed over the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s recent appearances in New York. Earlier this month, he played a marathon of Ravel’s complete solo piano works at Carnegie Hall, and on Thursday he joined the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. (The program continues through Saturday.)
If these concerts share anything, it’s sheer athleticism. The Ravel survey makes for a three-hour evening of intense focus and finger work; the Prokofiev concerto probably crams the same amount of notes into about 35 minutes.
The similarities end there, though. And it’s in the differences that Cho revealed the state of his artistry at 30, a decade on from his career-making first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition.
There was a remarkable difference, too, between his readings of the Ravel works in concert and his recording of the same material, released on Deutsche Grammophon last month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. (A related album of his, of Ravel’s two piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, came out on Friday.) His interpretations of these wide-ranging pieces were freer and more expressive at Carnegie; it would be interesting to hear Cho revisit them again.
Cho is a pianist of extraordinary precision and shading. He almost never misses a note, and sounds as if he could assign a different weight to each finger. But in Ravel’s solo works, which across decades of composition contain both the evocative broad strokes of impressionism and the luminous specificity of pointillism, his approach can have mixed results.
At Carnegie, he sounded most comfortable in pieces that recall earlier styles: the Baroque-inspired suite “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” the mannered “Menuet Antique” and “Menuet sur le Nom d’Haydn.” His sensitive pedalwork also made for an atmospheric “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte,” which was melancholic yet stately, the melodic line of his right hand emerging from a haze of sustained sound in the left.
What escaped him were the works meant to conjure poetic images. They are meticulously notated but also call for a kind of studied looseness. Cho’s “Jeux d’Eau” had, for better and worse, the twinkle and mechanical accuracy of a music box. There was little nautical openness to his “Une Barque sur l’Océan,” from the suite “Miroirs,” nor was there much seductive liquidity to his overly rhythmical “Ondine,” from “Gaspard de la Nuit.”
With the Philharmonic on Thursday, Cho found more of a match in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, which entirely rewards his technique. It’s breathlessly dazzling but, with needle-in-a-haystack melodies, demands more than mere virtuosity. It’s also music for the young. Prokofiev began to write it early in his career, while still a brash conservatory student, to showcase herculean muscularity and a tirelessness that becomes harder to pull off with age.
Cho had a thrilling strength that cut through the orchestra with clarity, no matter its thickness. (The Philharmonic, under Santtu-Matias Rouvali, was a responsive, cooperative partner and elsewhere on the program offered superb, sometimes surprising and even chilling, accounts of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 and music from his operetta “Moscow, Cheryomushki.”)
But he also had skill to spare for a nuanced touch and a sense of perspective in the occasional rubato or accent. In the jaw-droppingly long and dense cadenza of the first movement, he successfully pulled the melody from the caky grime of notes surrounding it, and showed no signs of fatigue as it led directly into the sprint of the second movement.
Interestingly, he chose Ravel for an encore: “À la Manière de Borodine,” a wispy and wistful little waltz. Juxtaposed with the Prokofiev, it was like a declaration of Cho’s breadth, which, with the wider view of his two recent concerts, is still a work in progress. Lucky for him, and for listeners, he has plenty of time to figure it out.
