Word: perahia
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...Murray Perahia's stock is rising. A Sony CD set commemorating 25 years of concertizing has sold especially well, and recent releases of Bach English Suites are also going fast. If he used to be on the short list of pianists, he is now on the short-short list. Last Wednesday the BankBoston Celebrity Series did well to host him at Symphony Hall where his foolproof program of old Austro-German masters brought the house down. Perahia opened with a lesser-known Bach English Suite, the fifth, in E minor, S. 810. The Prelude was full of crisp slides...
Next of the program was the Beethoven F major Sonata from Op. 10--in my opinion, Perahia's strongest performance of the night. This piece has enormous innate appeal, but certainly does not play itself and Perahia made it dazzling. Perahia imparted to the main theme of the allegretto middle movement the proper sense of graceful ghostliness, and played the living daylights out of the trio, but the real jawdropper here was the presto rondo finale. In an interview with WHRB, Perahia revealed that, studying under Miecyslaw Horszowski, he practiced his Leschetisky method like a good little boy. Nowhere...
There followed a "Moonlight" Sonata that sounded, in the honest estimation of one concertgoer, like Perahia "had to go to the bathroom." This rendition was hasty and short on detail, but Perahia wisely observed the printed note values for the dotted first theme, which these days tends to degenerate into rubato soup. The capital offenses were in the finale, where often his left hand growled indistinctly or pounded an ostinato where it should have been a more sensitive accompanist, and once he even wandered into a thicket of wrong notes. It made one grateful and Perahia did not have access...
...third movements he performed with a romanticism that was almost Chopin-esque in its style. But this particular interpretation of Mozart lost none of its charm. The woodwinds tended to rush in the excitement of the third movement, but in all the orchestra did an excellent job of accompanying Perahia...
...second part of the program made for a strange coincidence: that same evening, the BSO performed both the overture to The Magic Flute and a Mozart piano concerto. But if you missed hearing Freshman Concerto Competition winner Andrew Park '01 because you were at Symphony Hall for Murray Perahia, you may have missed...