Thibaudet’s artistry illuminates Ravel with Palm Beach Symphony

Jean-Yves Thibaudet performed Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major Monday night with the Palm Beach Symphony. Photo: Andrew Eccles
More than 50 years ago, an 11-year-old pianist named Jean-Yves Thibaudet made his orchestral debut in Paris with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G.
His teacher, despite having studied with Ravel and owning scores with the composer’s own markings in blue ink, had urged him to play a Mozart concerto instead, but the young pianist insisted.
In the ensuing years, as Thibaudet established himself as one of the world’s major concert pianists, he earned a reputation as a specialist in French music and Ravel especially, recording the composer’s complete works and playing his concertos with orchestras around the world.
Thibaudet came to the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach Monday night to give a terrific performance of the Ravel concerto with the Palm Beach Symphony.
In a work he has played steadily for more than half a century, he could have given a creditable account with his eyes closed and his mind on his dinner plans. But his engagement with the music and the orchestra was clear throughout, as he leaned in toward the orchestra or cast an attentive eye on the movements of conductor Gerard Schwarz.
His performance of the fizzy outer movements was a model of energetic precision in passages that some pianists turn into blurs of notes. His tone was spiky one minute, light and crisp the next, allowing rhapsodic passages in the piano to soar, seemingly effortlessly, over the notes of the orchestra, which played the jazzy phrases with gusto.
The heart of the work is the central Adagio, in which the piano engages in extended dialogues with wind instruments. Thibaudet played the long lines of melody with a hypnotic intensity, allowing the music to speak for itself. At moments, he took center stage with the melody, then softened his tone to a rustle to accompany a wind instrument the next moment, for a compelling performance of one of Ravel’s most memorable creations.
Introducing his encore, Thibaudet noted that he lived in Los Angeles and said he wanted to play something for those who had lost their homes—or their lives—in the city’s fires. He played Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess, bringing out the melody with a delicacy and a sense of forward motion that allowed the emotion to come through unforced.
The concert opened with blue cathedral by the contemporary American composer Jennifer Higdon, written in memory of her younger brother Andrew Blue Higdon.
The work, given its world premiere in 2000, features passages for solo clarinet and solo flute, her brother’s instrument and her own, respectively. Soloists on both instruments played with full, rounded tones and a lively sense of phrasing that allowed these passages to come off as free of the rhythmic grid of the orchestra.
The work contains a climactic series of dissonant chords that were marred by a lack of precision in the violins in their upper reaches, costing the passage the clarity it needed for the dissonances to come through with intensity. But the performance achieved the vast sense of sonic space implied by the title, the orchestra playing with clarity and unity, expressing the work’s energy and serenity.
The second half was devoted to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, in a mixed performance that showed both the current strengths and flaws of the Palm Beach ensemble.
At times, the orchestra sounded great, in passages such as the grim, bassoon-dominated opening, the surging, agitated, contrapuntal music that follows a fortissimo chord in the first movement, or the lively cello melody that opens the waltz-like second movement. At other times, the orchestra sounded less professional, with fast passages in violins and violas marred by intonation or precision issues, or when key melodies in winds and strings struggled to be heard over the brass.
But in the third movement, balances were better, with the brass weighty and resonant without overpowering the rest of the orchestra. This movement sounds so much like a finale that its noisy, triumphant conclusion inevitably generates a burst of applause from audience members who think the symphony is over.
Schwarz didn’t wait for the applause to fade before launching the orchestra into the tragic, sighing theme of the concluding Adagio. In the equally sad second theme, the orchestra played with restraint, giving the music ample room to grow in expressive power. There was a fierce edge of intensity to the string playing, refined brass in the choir-like passage toward the end, and a well-paced procession through the work’s somber, fading-away coda.
The Palm Beach Symphony’s next concert will take place 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6. The program includes Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Gil Shaham and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. palmbeachsymphony.org
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Tue Jan 14, 2025
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