Playing with guest conductor Paavo Järvi and the LA Phil, the South Korean pianist, was a marvel, balancing precision with joy as he took on Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G.
By John Lavitt
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 02-19-2025
Using the rhythms of American jazz and blues music, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G is challenging for any classical pianist trained in more traditional forms and traditions. Influenced by George Gershwin’ss Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and Concerto in F Major (1925), the jazzy rhythmic patterns feel like they just jumped off the keys of Cotton Club players and into a new arena of music.
At the same time, broken into three parts, Ravel considered the slow movement of the middle adagio to be one of the most complex pieces in his oeuvre. Composing that section two measures at a time, he was inspired by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (K. 581) and Frédéric Chopin’ss Nocturnes.
Taking on such a piece could be challenging for a young pianist like Seong-Jin Cho, who still looks like a teenager despite being thirty years old. However, the hallmark of his playing is an expressive virtuosity that radiates poetry and panache. Given such talents, he took on Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with precision and joy. The pianist brought out the best in Ravel’s respected work with a youthful grin and lightning fingers. From the first note to the last, he was in perfect control while never losing the improvisational flavor of the American musical roots.
As Seong-Jin Cho played, Estonian-American conductor Paavo Järvi and the LA Phil expertly supported him in the program. The chief conductor of Zurich’ss Tonhalle since 2020, Järvi is a generous conductor who enjoys optimizing the musicians” performances. It is apparent that the Grammy Award-winning conductor loves his work, and he once expressed this love in an interview with Euro News:
“Conducting is such a combination of everything… We are lucky, us conductors, because we wake up in the morning and after a cup of coffee, our so-called job is to deal with the greatest geniuses that have ever lived: Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven… so, that’s not a bad job, actually.”
In the second half of the program, leading the LA Phil in an orchestrated version of Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Paavo Järvi contributes to the ongoing celebration of ArnoldSchoenberg’ss a century and a half ago, Schoenberg at 150. How do you honor Schoenberg by playing Brahms?
Well, Schoenberg orchestrated the version of Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, which was designed to be performed without a piano. Indeed, he took a masterful work and adapted it for the whole orchestra. The result is nothing less than impressive: One more example of the composer’s genius.
