Mikhail Pletnev is a pianist of brilliance and insight, so why wasn't this concert - the second in a two-part retrospective of Tchaikovsky's works for piano and orchestra - the overwhelming experience one had expected? The evening's main focus was on the atrociously difficult Second Piano Concerto and the fragmentary Third. The latter is roughly contemporaneous with the Pathétique Symphony, and both Pletnev and his conductor, the Romanian Vladimir Conta, are anxious to stress the similarities: the baleful instrumentation, full of sardonic woodwind; the frenzied nervousness of its scherzando utterances. Pletnev adopts a dark tone, cumulatively weighting it through the cadenza so that the end of the concerto's single movement has a dense ferocity.
The Second Concerto was characterised by an unusual transparency and translucence. Conceived on a colossal scale, it's bravura stuff, requiring incredible technique and stamina. Most performers go at it hell-for-leather, as if they want to batter the piano into the floor. Pletnev's playing here is almost shocking in its delicacy, though he loses nothing in panache.
Conta zooms through it, avoiding the grandiosity which some bring to the work. He is unable to disguise the jolting transitions of the first movement - but the flaw here is Tchaikovsky's, not his.
However, Conta's conducting has a curious hit-and-miss quality. Capriccio Italien plodded in places where it should be buoyant; and Francesca da Rimini, though finely played, was a very uneven affair. Equating sex with damnation, it's a painful projection of Tchaikovsky's guilt complex about being gay, and it should be terrifying, erotic and excruciating by turns. Conta does some interesting things with the central love scene - opening in a mood of tremulous naivety and gradually building the pressure, rather than being explicitly sexy from the off - but the outer sections, depicting the lovers' hellish torment, misfire. The opening should freeze your marrow, and here it made little impact. The inferno that followed was the stuff of Gothic melodrama rather than genuine anguish.
Pletnev's genius remained untarnished by the evening, but Conta has a long way to go before he joins the ranks of the great.
