“Improvisation has been making its way back onto the classical music landscape over the past few decades … and created extra sparkle in an already-notable Beethoven program by Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia on Sunday at the Kimmel Center,” writes David Patrick Stearns in Sunday’s (11/5) Philadelphia Inquirer. “Charlie Albright was both soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and played an extended improvisation on the same composer’s familiar ‘Für Elise’ … as if Beethoven suddenly skipped a generation into Chopin, then Liszt, and then turned Russian with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff…. [In] Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 … he improvised the first-movement cadenza as Beethoven himself might have…. The other big discovery was guest conductor Sarah Ioannides … who has been working with regional orchestras from El Paso to Tacoma…. The playing in this longish Beethoven program was vigorous, solid, and with an unusually vibrant sonority.… She programmed a lot of early Beethoven … such as the Rondo for piano and orchestra, as well as unfinished Beethoven, in an assemblage of his borderline-chaotic Symphony No. 10.… That last piece … is music with no real performance tradition, though you wouldn’t have known that from what was heard on Sunday.”
Posted November 7, 2017
