Review | Weekending with Ludwig

This could be one for the Santa Barbara history books. Has there ever been a single weekend in town when a sum total of seven major Beethoven works have been performed by major local classical music groups? I’m thinking not, although I’m open to corrections. What I can confidently report is that after taking in two Beethoven piano sonatas at Friday’s Camerata Pacifica concert and all piano concertos presented in marathon fashion by the Santa Barbara Symphony, the love affair with this great German visionary is still intact.

Both projects represent ambitious and refreshingly outside-the-box concepts at work. In the Camerata’s case, the long arc idea is to make a complete sweep of the 32 piano sonatas over three seasons, as played by the compelling and obviously Beethoven-fluent Gilles Vonsattel. The Symphony’s agenda, imaginatively cooked up by maestro Nir Kabaretti, amounted to a complete sweep in a concentrated dose, with five concertos performed on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, by five different, young and invariably impressive pianists.

And vive la différence. Those of us 500-something listeners who caught both concerts were inevitably drawn into a comparison game, of both the varied pieces and musical characters from different eras of Beethoven’s furiously creative life, and between the pianist’s divergent approaches — sometimes subtly divergent, and sometimes not. 

Meanwhile, on the sonata front, Vonsattel followed a fairly intimate, subdued course with the lean two-movement works, Opus 90 and 49, in sharp contrast with the opening blast of Beethoven’s infamous Hammerklavier sonata opening the series with a bang last fall.

On both pieces, Vonsattel brought a depth of understanding and sensitivity to the profound body/world of music, refraining from grandstanding or indulging personal idiosyncrasies. He errs on the side of burrowing into Beethoven’s sonata spirit, allowing the music’s powers to emerge cleanly. The program’s companion pieces, featuring eloquent violist Che-yen Chen, provided a perfect contextual framework, between Schubert’s Sonata for Viola and Piano in A minor and Schumann’s Marchenbilder, closing the concert with a sedate calming effect, like a benediction.

At The Granada Theatre, the Symphony kicked off its Beethoven spectacular with the Overture to Egmont, a bit of grand drama in a nutshell. Then came the onset of the parade of pianists arriving with an assortment of competition awards and other laurels to their names — Min Joo Yi, Evren Ozel, Dmitry Shishkin, Angie Zhang, and Jonathan Mamora. Yi was first on deck, diving into the Concerto No. 3 with a commanding facility and precision-geared adherence to the score. For the well-known Concerto No. 4, a more lyrical episode in the series, Ozel entered gently, on the solo piano introduction, and fanned out into the score’s mercurial turns. Clearly virtuosic, Ozel brought fluidity to his interpretation, with dramatic wave-like ebbs and flows in dynamics, rather than sharpening dynamic delineations. 

As a crowd-pleasing bonbon of a bonus, he offered up an encore which swerved slyly from classical manners into jazz and stride asides. It was the weekend’s rare 20th-century detour from things Beethovenian.

Sunday’s three-piece program spanned Beethoven’s career from 1795-ish to 1809, from No. 1 (actually written after No. 2), No. 2 and the climactic No. 5 as a strategic closer. Shishkin — winner of the Geneva International Music Competition and silver medalist at the International Tchaikovsky Competition — held forth on the twentysomething Beethoven’s No. 1, a lighter piece in the set, with essences of Haydn and Mozart in the mix. Shishkin kept a cool and clean-burning attention to the score, in sync with the score’s relatively stately late classical period demeanor. 

Mamora had the honors of taking the Fifth. He readily met the challenges — technically and interpretively — and summoned the proper majestic and muscular goods on Beethoven’s heroic, so-called Emperor Concerto. 

By the end of the marathon, lined along the way with luminous and sympathetic orchestral playing led by Kabaretti, listeners may have felt a certain dual response. We were immersed in the musical powers at hand and trained by nature into what music juries are regularly faced with — rating and comparing successive players all in a row. 

And the winner was … (not that there are any winners or losers here) Angie Zhang, who nuanced herself into these ears and this heart more deeply than the others. Zhang’s list of awards includes a win of the Grand Prize in the Music Academy of the West’s Innovation Institute Competition, a pinch of local-ish pride to add to the purely musical pleasure of her alluringly graceful take on the Piano Concerto No. 2.

In the final rub, hearing six impressive pianists thriving in the land of Beethoven over a weekend ultimately proved enlightening, not exhausting. We’re primed for more.