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P R O K O F I E VPiano Concerto No.2
Xixi ZhouNew England Conservatory PhilharmoniaYan Pascal TortelierOctober 12, 2011Jordan HallBoston320 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)
A student orchestra (albeit a good one), with a completely unknown pianist, conducted by a well-known but not stellar conductor. That's the kind of concerts I love to hear. Most of them turn out to be mediocre for a variety of reasons, but occasionally the performance hits with the impact of a large caliber bullet. The shock of surprise is all the more rewarding for being unanticipated.
For me, the above recording captured one of such performances. The soloist handles the technical demands of Prokofiev's athletic piano part with effortless confidence, and with piano tone that remains rounded and full in passages where many pianists tend to sound brittle. The playing has just the right amount of detached coolness, and the orchestra plays with technical security I'd be glad to hear from professional 2-nd tier American orchestras. (E.g., I've heard numerous live recordings by the Indianapolis and the Columbus symphony orchestras, conducted by well-known maestros, which sounded downright amateurish by comparison). When such excellent playing is wrapped in a spectacularly engineered recording (whoever does the recording work for NEC deserves a medal), the effect is little short of overwhelming.
But don't take my word for it. There are in circulation fairly recent live recordings of this piano concerto by the much admired Prokofiev specialist Yefim Bronfman (with the Berlin Philharmonic, and also with the New York Philharmonic recorded in Cologne on their 2010 European tour). Despite their stellar cast, the performances are either unbearably soporific (Berlin) or played so carefully by all concerned (Cologne) that I had to wonder if the musicians were promised to have one of their fingers cut off for each wrong or missed note. (To make matter worse, the recorded sound of these European performances - even with BPO's much touted HD quality of their Digital Concert Hall webcasts - strikes me as murky, congested, and compressed/processed when compared to the intoxicatingly natural sound from NEC's Jordan Hall.)
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