Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto 2 and Symphony 2

Garrick Ohlsson, piano, Hans Graf, conductor, Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Esplanade Concert Hall
Jan 12, 7.30pm

Once every few years in the life of a concertgoer comes a performance of a well-loved work so compelling that it forces the listener to re-evaluate his or her relationship with the work at hand.

Garrick Ohlsson’s performance of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto at the Esplanade on Jan 12 was a triumphant example of this, and yet it was a performance that eschewed theatricality for understatement and a profound naturalness of utterance.

The brooding intensity of the concerto, and the athleticism required to render all its notes in order, often invites well-meaning pianists to batter the keys with declamatory angst or to overwhelm listeners with their virtuosity.

Ohlsson gave audiences something much subtler and more difficult to achieve: a performance of this most archly Romantic of piano concertos that seemed to efface the interpreter’s ego entirely.

Not for Ohlsson the mere flamboyance of more fashionable keyboard superstars. He played the piano part as a rational, classicising counterpoint to the orchestra’s lushness, with an intimacy inaccessible to more excitable performers.

His mastery was breathtakingly apparent from the very first chords.

The first movement was taken at a very Moderato pace indeed, far slower than Rachmaninov’s own recording, but delivered with complete technical command (it is often harder to play Rachmaninov’s passagework slowly than quickly). It also had a cumulative power that perfectly embodied Ohlsson’s mentor Claudio Arrau’s dictum about speed being the enemy of passion.

Nothing felt forced: internal voices were registered with surpassing subtlety, transitions were masterfully judged and the most devilish technical challenges were dispatched with an ease that shames many younger pianists. Ohlsson is 75 this year.

Although Ohlsson found extraordinary nuances of phrasing and tone in otherwise familiar melodies, the music unfolded in the most inevitable manner, as if it had always existed in some alternate eternity.

Ohlsson was admirably matched by conductor Hans Graf and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO), who were equal partners rather than accompanists. The concerto is sometimes regarded as a vehicle for soloists, but it is the orchestra that introduces all the big tunes.

Graf and the SSO came into their own in the second half with an outstanding performance of Rachmaninov’s rambling, opulent second symphony that conveyed the Romantic exuberance of the work without losing a sense of structural coherence.

Other Rachmaninov performances may deliver the notes with greater immediate rhetorical force, but it is Ohlsson, Graf and the SSO’s thoughtfulness that linger most powerfully in the memory.