The Classical Review

The temperature of the Final Round of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition rose considerably on its second night, with spectacular solo performances in two of the three concertos presented Wednesday in Fort Worth’s Bass Performance Hall. Along the way, the competitors’ backup band, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop, displayed some heady virtuosity of its own.

It was a rare night for the Moderns at this competition named for one of the piano’s most beloved exponents of Romanticism. The in-your-face dissonances of Prokofiev and especially Bartók thrilled this 21^st-century audience. Even Franz Liszt’s experimental, one-movement Piano Concerto No. 2, completed in 1861, had some of that move-fast-and-break-things attitude.

It also had a masterful interpreter in Philipp Lynov, the 26-year-old competitor from Russia, whose range of touch and tone enabled him to switch from cushiony soft arpeggios to a craggy, aggressive theme in the blink of an eye. Though far from a piano banger, Lynov knew how to put a little edge on a forte note to make it stick. And the taut, flexible line of his soft solos made them even more arresting than his louder proclamations.

He also played well with others, dialoguing freely with a solo cello in a quiet moment, and later adjusting his crashing chords depending on whether brass or woodwinds were playing behind him. He ably steered that perilous Lisztian course between too tame and crass exhibitionism. One became aware that Liszt, the pioneer of the orchestral tone poem, had, after this work’s multiple revisions, ended up with a piece that was as much tone poem as piano concerto.

One bold Hungarian composer yielded to an even more daring one in Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 2, performed with blazing virtuosity by Vitaly Starikov, 30, of Israel and Russia. The work opened in a splendid rush of octaves and passagework and never looked back throughout the first movement. Lurching through constant changes of tempo and meter, the pianist delivered a scorching passage of double notes here, a witty duet with a triangle there, and a massive solo cadenza near the end.

After a pause in the middle for a scene of nocturnal near-silence and a dash of witty perpetual-motion scherzo, the magnificent mayhem resumed hotter than ever in the Allegro molto finale.

Just as exciting as Starikov’s playing was the athleticism of Alsop and the Fort Worth musicians, who, in the midst of preparing a dozen concertos for this finals week, somehow mastered the off-center entrances, blistering tempos and shifting rhythms of this aggressively modern piece, matching the pianist shout for shout and syncopation for syncopation. Amid the ovation at the end for the contestant Starikov, Alsop took the liberty of standing up the orchestra’s sections one by one to share in the bows.

A trifecta of concerto triumphs was perhaps too much to hope for in one concert, and in fact the closing performance of the program, Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2 in G minor by Carter Johnson, 28, of Canada and the United States, showed some of the weaknesses encountered earlier in this round, that is, limitations of tone color and projection, and an unclear conception of the work as a whole.

As Johnson conscientiously executed his part’s daunting demands, the whole exercise sounded remote and lacking in dynamic tension. His somewhat unfocused tone often had difficulty standing out from the orchestra, whether building a crescendo without much emotional impulse to back it up or trying to sing out a legato contrasting theme. 

The middle movements, a brief perpetual-motion scherzo and a lumbering bear dance, were at least accurately characterized, if monochromatic. The finale, meant to scintillate, just sounded fast, and the music went slack in the soft, slower episode. However, the movement’s closing pages, crescendo accelerando, asked for and got excited applause. For overcoming this concerto’s myriad difficulties, Johnson certainly deserved it.

On Friday, after a day for pianists to practice and listeners to rest their ears, Tuesday’s contestants will return to take a last swing at medals in concertos by Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and Brahms, and Romanticism will return to Fort Worth.

The Final Round of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition will continue with concerto programs 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday in the Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth. cliburn.org