Concert review: Jae-Hyuck Cho’s game attempt on Rachmaninov’s piano concerto No. 3

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto 3 and Symphony 3

Jae-Hyuck Cho with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra under Hans Graf
Esplanade Concert Hall
Jan 18, 7.30pm

Pity the pianist who must perform Rachmaninov’s titanic third piano concerto a week after American pianist Garrick Ohlsson’s magnificent take on the more approachable second piano concerto in the same hall with the same orchestra.

South Korean pianist Jae-Hyuck Cho made a game attempt, delivering almost all the notes Rachmaninov wrote, mostly in the right order. Any pianist with the guts to tackle this large, loose, baggy monster of a work deserves applause, and Cho clearly had some original ideas.

But his performance felt fitful and impetuous, not always in a good way.

The extravagant fatalism at the heart of the concerto requires soloists to marshal their resources carefully to avoid sounding like an aimless rampage through a gloomy forest of notes. Although Cho leapt into the abyss with commendable abandon, it was not clear that he had thought deeply about which of those many notes mattered most.

For all his good intentions, this was a performance of sentimentality rather than sentiment. Melodies were frequently distended out of shape, or lost among the thickets of the piano part.

His eagerness to belabour every passing phrase meant that important moments lost their intended force. And his penchant for certain pianistic mannerisms – such as rolling large chords – did no favours for a work already perched on the border between drama and melodrama.

Cho often seemed physically tense, producing a brittle sound that came dangerously close to breaking at climactic moments, such as the avalanche of chords concluding the first movement’s cadenza. His tendency to rush difficult passages also resulted in several missteps with the orchestra, particularly in the third movement.

Rachmaninov’s third symphony, which comprised the concert’s second half, has never quite achieved the acclaim it deserves. Despite some moments of bombast, it is a taut, enigmatic work that seems to have one foot in the 19th century and one in the 20th without fully inhabiting either.

As with their excellent performance of the second symphony last week, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) under Hans Graf showed their world-class credentials in this repertoire.

They played as a single organism, producing a rich but never cloying sound in the darkly moving first movement, and delivering shattering chords and manic fugal passages with irresistible momentum in the third.

One would love to hear Graf and the SSO do more late-Romantic repertoire. Time for a Mahler cycle perhaps?