Beethoven: Kahane at His Best

With Jeffrey Kahane conducting from the piano, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra reached a peak in its winter season in presenting the five piano concertos by Beethoven over consecutive nights this past weekend. The achievement goes beyond a feat or an anthology: It represents pianist Kahane and the ensemble at the top of their form in accomplishment and command.

Long before he began to pursue conducting, Kahane was one of the more promising young pianists--an international prize winner of serious bent, versatile in styles, superior in technique, unlimited in horizons.

As shown again, Saturday night at the Alex Theatre in Glendale--when he played the Concerto Nos. 2, 3 and 4--and Sunday in Royce Hall at UCLA in the First and “Emperor” concertos, his skills and musicality remain splendidly honed and alert.

His playing retains its honesty and accuracy, his fingers their agility and his mind its sharpness. At no place in these two generous evenings did Kahane falter or lose concentration. Finally, Sunday, in the last movement of the “Emperor,” he showed small signs of fatigue, but these were minor. In all five concertos, he gave full-out, virtually definitive performances.

In these most familiar of repertory pieces, that is saying a lot. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that Kahane’s probing readings of the concertos can be favorably compared to great performances heard in the decades going back to the 1940s, the recent heydays of great Beethoven playing.

Sunday, for instance, Kahane reestablished the vehemence, quirkiness and uniqueness of the ever-irresistible C-major concerto, which recent performances have turned into a plaything, a toy in the canon. Genuine Beethovenian rage exists here, alongside gruff humor; both were brought out incontrovertibly.

And the aristocratic, rather than the merely commanding, nature of No. 5 also came back to us Sunday, in tandem with the serious struggle between solo and orchestra. Rather than give us a laid-back “Emperor,” Kahane restored its serious urgency, the life-or-death aspect of its character.

In both pieces on Sunday, the orchestra became a full partner in all these important musical negotiations. Tightness and cohesiveness marked the playing, heard rather better in Royce than in the Alex; the Alex’s acoustics are good, but Royce’s approach perfection, and the sound of the full orchestra resonated beautifully in Westwood.

Yet, high achievement also marked the ensemble’s limning of its part in the second, third and fourth concertos. In particular, one noticed, among many other virtues, the apparently effortless way all those dangerous points where long, solo piano runs are linked to orchestral re-entrances, in Nos. 3 and 4, came together perfectly. Such things are never accidental.

Throughout the five concertos, one was reminded, through Kahane’s eloquent articulation, cherishable nuance and stretching of long musical lines, that beautiful piano playing is the medium through which this music comes alive. To make ringing sounds that resonate in the ear and also connect in the mind is all that the pianist need do--but of course that is extremely difficult. When done, it spreads joy, not just in the moment, but in memory.

Incidental intelligence: All of the cadenzas in these performances were those originally written by Beethoven. In the First Concerto, Kahane chose and handsomely brought to life the longest and least familiar of the three the composer wrote.