Rachmaninoff, Sergei. Piano Concerto No. 2 in C-Minor, Op. 18.
Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14.
Ruth Laredo, Pianist.
The San Antonio Symphony Orchestra, Eduardo Garcia Barrios, Conductor.
Majestic Theater, San Antonio, Texas, 16 October 1997.
Ruth Laredo's rendering of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto was excellent, and as this was the first time I heard it live, I was glad that it was she who was playing it.
Although her reading of the score was a bit more formal than, say, a Rubinstein or Bolet, Laredo has this quality not much unlike Alexis Weissenberg does in the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto recording he made with Georges Pretre and the Chiacago Symphony in 1968. Her performance evokes in the listener a tenderness of feeling, especially in the second movement, that is not apparent in most performances. Most play this as though it is a musical cliche. Laredo, on the other hand, strikes every note as though each were a precious drop of a rare wine flowing from her fingertips, very sensuous and very dolcissimo. She plays the concerto with that quality of care few others even imagine possible - she can read the notes between the lines that elude other pianists. Further, she masterfully builds towards the climax in the third movement very forcefully, yet not pedantically; for her, this is no one-dimensional piece.
I am a big fan of Laredo (she was the first to record Rachmaninoff's complete works for solo piano in the 1970s). While I prefer Horowitz (to everyone else), I find Laredo's interpretations sincere, yet full of life, bravura; very compelling. Unlike Horowitz, she has a way of "understating the obvious," which is something few can do with Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto (note here that the only Rachmaninoff concerto recorded by Horowitz was the Third). It is hard to look at so popular a work in a new light, as though performing it for the first time, but I believe she was able to do just that. It was a beautiful performance, and I hope to find a recording of hers of the piece.
As for the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra, they were actually first rate, which was quite a surprise. They executed their parts brilliantly and didn't play over the soloist.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the conductor, Eduardo Garcia Barrios. While he rendered a competent "Vocalise" earlier in the program, he conducted the concerto very unsympathetically, not allowing Laredo to play in free tempo where she wished, which resulted in her getting ahead of or falling behind the orchestra a few times (she kept craning her neck towards him, trying to signal to him ). Like Leonard Bernstein, he was too self-absorbed in his baton-less hands fluttering about like soaring birds to realize that the conductor is the accompianist and the pianist is the soloist. I thought him to be a second-rate talent, and unworthy of Laredo. He's listed by the San Antonio Symphony as the "Hispanic Artist Fellowship Conductor" (the politics of San Antonio being you've got to always include Hispanics in the blueprints for everything). Personally, I think that Barrios is an insult to the Hispanic people.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed Ruth Laredo's (who can stand on her own two feet; she doesn't need to be billed as "Hispanic Guest Artist") performance and the orchestra's rendering of the dynamics, if not the conductor's horrible pacing, of the work.
