Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 and Symphony No. 2 concert. Performed 2022 at the Concert Hall of KKL Luzern as part of the Lucerne Festival. Riccardo Chailly conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Features pianist Mao Fujita. The full program is as follows:
Piano Concerto No. 2
Rachmaninoff arrangement of Gavotte from Partita No. 3 for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach (encore)
Symphony No. 2
Directed for TV by Ute Feudel; produced by Paul Smaczny; Director of Photography was Nyika Jancsó. Released 2022, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: A for the piano concerto and B for the symphony.
Fujtia, about 24 at the time, is excruciatingly polite and self-effacing. He opened this show before a festival audience with a lot of empty seats. When he first appeared I wondered: can he really do this? But when he plays, he has both brilliant skill and a magnetic personality: half imp of the perverse and half kid in a kandy store. You become convinced that what you are seeing is the greatest thing that ever happened to him. The audience slurped him up and rewarded him with an instant standing ovation. Probably none of this would come across from a CD—hurry for Blu-ray!
In the symphony performance it was fun to see my two favorite brass players sitting side by side (Reinhold Friedrich on trumpet and Jörgen van Rijen on trombone) among other familiar faces. Something else you can’t get from a CD.
But this performance of the symphony suffers from dvditis, that evil tendency to chop the video up into (1) too many short clips with too many closeups of the musicians and the conductor and (2) not enough long-range shots of sections and the whole orchestra.
The industry is still too bogged down with old DVD habits. But the time is coming when Blu-ray will finally take over the market and DVD will be recognized as obsolete. Then the industry will have to shoot all the orchestral classical canon over again for viewing with high-def TVs. So for dvditis I reduce the grade on the concerto from A+ to A and the grade on the symphony from A+ to B.
Here are a couple of videos:
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