One of the joys of living in a metropolis like LA is being able to impulsively spring for a sudden weekend adventure, like a last-minute sprint to the Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown to buy tickets for one of the LA Philharmonic's last performances with principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. This is the Finnish conductor's final season as music director and PC with the Phil, after which he'll devote more time to composing. So the audiences for him are big (the Disney hall was filled for the 2 pm concert), and the ovations are thunderous.
Today's concert featured two works by Stravinsky (the short "Fireworks for Orchestra" and the really long complete "Firebird" ballet) and Tchaikovsky's magnificent Piano Concerto No. 1. The Stravinsky pieces were top notch, but it was the concerto that really made the concert for me. It's one of those pieces that you hear over and over again on classical music stations (the sole surviving LA classical broadcasting station, KUSC, had the intro to the concerto as its bumper music for some time), but there is no substitute for seeing and hearing it live. The pianist was Russian-turned-Isreali-turned-American virtuoso Yefim Bronfman, a bear of a man who seemed to slam his hands deep into the keyboard and yank each note out of the bottom of the grand piano by the roots. You could seek the works of the piano flex and vibrate as he channeled his passion into it. The performance triggered a huge standing ovation, with multiple bows for both Salonen and Bronfman (who playfully pointed to each other in a "You're the man, no, you're the man" routine). The LA Times had a similar opinion of the performance.
The review notes that, surprisingly, this is the first time Salonen has conducted the concerto in 15 years; and that Bronfman added the piece to his repertoire only five years ago.
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