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Three Young Performers, Showing Their Skills
The estimable Young Concert Artists series has been providing talented young musicians with the chance to perform on notable stages since 1961, when it was founded by the energetic Susan Wadsworth. The association has a gilded track record, having promoted artists like Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Emanuel Ax, Richard Goode and Dawn Upshaw. Many more recent discoveries have also proved worthy.
On Tuesday in the Rose Theater the organization concluded its New York season with the annual Irene Diamond gala concert. It featured three recent winners performing concertos (without intermission) with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, ably conducted by Michael Stern.
The best performance of the evening came last, when the Russian pianist Alexandre Pirojenko played Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Prokofiev wrote it in 1911 at the age of 20, and when he performed the piece (his first mature work) at the annual Anton Rubinstein competition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1914, as he wrote later, he thought the jurors would be so confounded by its novelty that “they simply would not be able to judge whether I was playing it well or not!” (He won the competition.)
Mr. Pirojenko, a winner of the 2004 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, captured the work’s exuberant character and playful outbursts and comfortably surmounted the innumerable technical demands. There were a few precarious moments (but no derailments) in the cat-and-mouse dialogue between orchestra and soloist at the end, and the tension added to the excitement. The patrons awarded him the heartiest applause of the evening.
The program began with a less memorable rendition of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, performed by Wonny Song, a South Korean pianist who grew up in Montreal and who won the 2005 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. Mr. Song performed competently, but it was at times rather bangy Beethoven, particularly short on elegance in the final movement. The orchestra sometimes sounded dutiful.
Next came Robert Belinic, a Croat who in 2002 became the first guitarist to win the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. He performed Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, named after the royal palace and grounds of that Spanish city, between Madrid and Toledo. Rodrigo, blind from the age of 3, aimed to evoke the sounds of nature, and his wife, Victoria Kamhi de Rodrigo, once said that the work was inspired by the couple’s honeymoon, “when we would walk through the parks of Aranjuez; at the same time it was a song of love.”
Mr. Belinic played well, although his performance was heavy with unnecessary swooning; at one point he appeared to collapse melodramatically over his guitar. Some of the loveliest moments in the work were the evocative English horn solos in the second movement, which Kelly Peral played beautifully.
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