Review: Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra with Lang Lang

Despite the weather, a goodly audience showed up at Bass Hall Saturday night for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s annual gala concert.

The drawing card was one of today’s premier showmen of the keyboard, Lang Lang. His musical vehicle? Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, of course.

You’d think that this work would eventually wear out its welcome — how many times has it been played in Fort Worth? — but it seems to be the immortal Old Dependable of piano concertos.

It should be said right away that Lang Lang wowed the audience. In fact, he pulled off what may have been a first for Bass Hall: inspiring a Standing O, not at the end of the piece but in the middle of it — after the first movement, to be specific.

His interpretations may be eccentric — as Saturday night’s was — but he sure knows how to please an audience. He’s probably crying all the way to the bank at the wails of his detractors.

Some of his eccentricities: unusual punctuation through sudden emphases, exaggerated pauses, flamboyant gestures (at one point he played an “air trill” with his elevated left hand while playing a real one with his right hand) and a sometimes cavalier attitude about the composer’s intentions.

An example of that last was much of the first movement. Tchaikovsky instructed: Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso, which means “Fast but not too much, and very majestic.” Lang Lang pushed into troppo territory, and the movement rarely seemed maestoso.

On the positive side, the slow movement was lyrical and rather restrained, and Lang Lang certainly was on the mark with the finale. Tchaikovsky called for Allegro con fuoco, “Fast, with fire,” and the pianist delivered.

Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the orchestra delivered their own fire in the outer movements and there were lovely sounds in the show movement.

It was an all-Russian evening. Opening it was the overture to Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Ludmila, one of music’s finest works of its kind. Rounding the program out were Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise (some lovely string sounds here) and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet (beautifully played throughout).

This story was originally published February 28, 2015 at 9:49 PM with the headline "Review: Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra with Lang Lang."