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Yoonie Han and two young up-and-comers presented piano concerti from three different eras to a packed house near Lincoln Center.

Music Review: Various Artists, Piano Concerti at NYCA Winners Evening, NYC, 5/19/2012

New York Concert Artists presented a jam-packed evening of piano-and-orchestra music the other night – packed with notes, and packed with a sold-out crowd at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church near Lincoln Center.yoonjung_han

Yoonie Han, an NYCA-affiliated pianist, was given the evening’s centerpiece slot for an inspired performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor. Having had several opportunities to see Ms. Han perform, I have observed that she is equally adept at the strictly classical repertoire and the romantic flowerings of Chopin and Liszt. Here she infused the popular concerto with both a knowing feel and a fresh energy, ably escorted by a modest-sized orchestra conducted by Vince Lee, who was very well attuned to Ms. Han’s conversational rubato readings of Chopin’s thunderclouds.

The concerto is a youthful composition representative of the blossoming of a young composer’s joyous imagination. The beautiful piano passage at the close of the first movement was one of the shining moments of this performance; others occurred in the innocent-sounding chord changes of the slow second movement, seductive elements that wouldn’t feel foreign to any composer of late 20th-century pop music.

Two young pianists previously unknown to me rounded out the program. Alexei Tartakovski, born in Moscow and raised in the U.S., won NYCA’s Second International Concerto Competition for Pianists last year. TartakovskiHis athletic performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major elicited spontaneous audience applause after the spectacularly splashy first movement, and this from a knowledgeable crowd aware that in these strait-laced modern times applause between movements is frowned upon in the classical world.

From the stately repeated chords of its opening, the movement exploded into a skyful of fireworks. The somewhat muffled acoustics of the church were less than kind to some of the faster piano passages, even in the cadenza – and Mr. Tartakovski took some of these passages at high speed indeed – but when all the rhythmic complexity and flash were said and done, only the most sour of critics could have faulted the audience for applauding prematurely. wael-faroukThe second movement with its soft-spoken motifs and extended trills unfolded in a lovely slow ripple of piano, enclosed in powerful unison orchestral figures; the third rang down the figurative curtain with declarative majesty.

The acoustics were harsher to the final piece on the program, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, played by Wael Farouk, another concerto competition winner. This towering piece has so much going on that with anything but crystalline clarity of sound, something is lost. Nevertheless Mr. Farouk played with bold spirit and merited an ovation of his own at the end, having made the challenging material look almost easy. His decisive performance provided a fitting cap to an evening that showed how three highly contrasting concerti from different eras can complement one another as well.

About Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Publisher and Executive Editor of Blogcritics as well as lead editor of the Culture & Society section. As a writer he contributes most often to Music, where he covers classical music (old and new) and other genres, and Culture, where he reviews NYC theater. Through Oren Hope Marketing and Copywriting at http://www.orenhope.com/ you can hire him to write or edit whatever marketing or journalistic materials your heart desires. Jon also writes the blog Park Odyssey at http://parkodyssey.blogspot.com/ where he is on a mission to visit every park in New York City. He has also been a part-time working musician, including as lead singer, songwriter, and bass player for Whisperado.

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