A STUNNING ORCHESTRAL DEBUT
                        And a Quasi-Percussion Concerto for Piano 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Nov. 16-23, 2009
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 38
            STANFORD---History repeats itself: The star soloist has a late cancellation. He sends a young Russian student of his to take his place and perform one of the technically most difficult of concerti. And the student triumphs, bringing down the house.
            Such was the happy outcome to a troublesome beginning here on Nov. 14. Piano   virtuoso Alexander Toradze had to cancel because of knee surgery. It could not have come at a worse time, at the focal concert of a Prokofiev festival on campus, with a variety of lectures and events to celebrate, à propos de rien, the formidable and persecuted Russian pianist-composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953).
            So striding onto center stage at Dinkelspiel Auditorium was the unknown Nikita Abrosimov, 21, from the city of Nizhniy Novgorod (formerly called Gorky), currently from Indiana University, making his US orchestral debut. You could almost hear the groans from disappointed fans. 
            Toradze however had called him “electrifying, overwhelming.” Skeptics waited and watched.
               Abrosimov, a slender, good-looking young man with a generous flow of brown hair, was confronted by the almost unplayable Second Piano Concerto---a piece requiring so many jabs, chordal collisions, and rapid accents that you could call it a percussion concerto for the piano. The right-hand chords were punctuated by booming bass notes, as if coming from giant, deafening  cathedral bells. The percussive strokes only abated in the Scherzo, where there are lightning runs up and down scale like a Russian blizzard. And bringing it off is no feat if you recall that the 1913 premiere played by Prokofiev got a violently negative reaction from the Russian audience in St. Petersburg.
            Playing with the (amateur) Stanford Symphony  on Nov. 14, Abrosimov  carried it off by memory, all 37 minutes, a tour de force flawlessly executed, without histrionics. He blended comfortably with conductor Jindong Cai, who had clearly worked long and hard to get his student orchestra essentially up to speed in challenging material. Ovations from the audience ensued, the keystone of the festival (called “The Prokofiev Project”) was saved, and a fiasco averted.
            Just as with borscht, samovars, vodka and caviar, Russia appears to have a bottomless export supply of fire-eating pianists. Nikita, welcome to the clan!
            We now look forward to Abrosimov’s entering American piano competitions and being evaluated on mainline concerto repertoire mandatory for a solo career. Already working on his behalf is a very good command of English---and the boosts from virtuoso Toradze who teaches him in Bloomington.
            The concert also featured an unknown bit of Prokofiev: the (discarded) happy ending to the immensely popular ballet “Romeo and Juliet,” recently made available from Russian archives. The harsh Soviet-Communist era had mandated such emendations of tragedies, ranging from “Swan Lake” to Shakespeare. The Soviets used such a ludicrous version of “R&J” until cooler heads prevailed. Five sections of that ending were played by the orchestra as part of a lengthy “R&J” suite. These reuse much of the familiar material, but with more sweet, sugary music that I found dramatically ineffective.The most striking departure was (Friar) Laurence striking a gong to summon help, after which R&J dance off happily into the sunset. In the Stalinistic days of the USSR, everything had to have an inspiring happy end. Rose-colored glasses were passed out with regularity.
            The 49-minute suite was accompanied by a pantomime of willowy eight-foot-high puppets by Robin Walsh, playing out some of the drama in colorful but unsophisticated fashion. Walsh’s crew of four never learned the timeless lesson from Japan: To be effective, the puppeteers on stage need to make themselves nearly invisible.
            Despite his formidable talents, Prokofiev never got his due in the USSR, either as pianist or composer. He was brought back to Russia from America under false pretenses---the biggest mistake he ever made. He was officially censured more than once, seemingly just inches away from some gulag interment. And when he died, the Soviet press printed no obituaries, since it was on the same day as Stalin, that much feared paranoid despot, who garnered slavish encomiums.
            Stanford Symphony with pianist Nikita Abrosimov at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Nov. 14. For info on future Lively Arts events: (650) 725-2787 or go online.
        ©Paul Hertelendy 2009
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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