REVIEW: FABIO BIDINI/TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

posted by James Reel

    Fabio Bidini, as a finalist (but not a medalist) in the 1993 Van Cliburn competition, is expected to play a certain kind of repertory: big, beefy, Romantic Russian piano concertos. And so he does, among other things. Yet last night with the Tucson Symphony, Bidini didn’t play Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in the manner of so many other competition laureates—big, beefy, swooning, exhibitionist, rich enough to clog an artery. No, Bidini was a Rachmaninov classicist, with remarkable clarity of articulation, precise dynamic control and passagework that breathed gently. His playing was not tremendously emotive, though it was by no means uninflected, and Bidini developed a hard, brittle tone in chordal passages, which had more to do with his instrument than his own choice. So it wasn’t everyone’s ideal of Rachmaninov, but it was highly effective nonetheless, and the soloist was capable of summoning all the requisite power when necessary.
    It was the Chopin encore, though, that showed Bidini at his most effective. His playing here was elegant, poised, subtly expressive and delicately colored. A solo concert by Bidini of Chopin and Debussy would be something to hear.
    Conductor George Hanson and the orchestra lent Bidini excellent support, with Jeremy Reynolds offering an especially lovely clarinet solo at the beginning of the second movement. The orchestra didn’t produce a burnished, truly Russian sound, but it was sufficiently full-bodied to put the music across, and thankfully Hanson and company weren’t too polite to submerge Bidini in the orchestral texture when Rachmaninov threw the main material to the orchestra.
    Excessive politeness had been a problem in the concert opener, a little suite of dances from Anton Rubinstein’s opera The Demon. Like Edward Elgar, Rubinstein was a bloated bore in long-form works, but he was a fine miniaturist, and the Demon dances should have been a modest delight. Unfortunately, the playing was fatally underpowered; all the notes were in place, but they weren’t projected with any confidence or life.
    The second half was something else entirely: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, performed with all the crackling intensity one could wish. Well, almost. The slow first half of the first movement always needs a little extra edge imposed on it, but Hanson was content to take the score at face value. To his credit, he didn’t let the movement’s second half run away from him, yet he did allow the score its full measure of storm and stress. The second movement was a bit too stiff to be truly sardonic, but concertmaster Steven Moeckel had the right idea in his solo. The third movement was exceptionally well shaped, structurally as well as emotionally, and Hanson and the orchestra got the final movement just right: full of properly shrill controlled hysteria, not the fashionably lugubrious self-pity slathered over it by musicians trying too hard to present this as an anti-Soviet protest symphony.