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Chicago Tribune
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: In Hershey Felder's 'Rachmaninoff and the Tsar,' the composer is in conversation with his past
Sometimes, a melody is worth 1,000 words — or, in the case of a theater review, about 800. To really get a feel for the tone of 'Rachmaninoff and the Tsar,' the latest addition to Hershey Felder's series of biographical plays about famous composers, I'd suggest listening to the slow middle movement ('Adagio sostenuto') of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. Quietly elegiac and lushly romantic, this beloved piece captures the play's contemplative pace and the sense of grief and yearning that runs throughout. No wonder Felder makes it a centerpiece of his new show, which weaves together one man's loss of his family with another's loss of his home and musical voice. As part of its world premiere season, 'Rachmaninoff and the Tsar' is now in its Midwest premiere at Writers Theatre. A regular presence on Chicago stages, the Montreal-born Felder is best known for his portrayals of composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Frédéric Chopin, George Gershwin and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Doing triple duty as writer, actor and pianist, Felder usually has only two scene partners — a Steinway piano and an audience — as he intersperses vignettes of his subject's personal history with live performances of that composer's music. Now, for the first time, another cast member joins him onstage, with British Italian actor Jonathan Silvestri playing the role of Tsar Nicholas II. As Felder explained during a post-show Q&A session on opening night, he feels the story simply doesn't work without the character of Nicholas II, the last reigning emperor of Russia and patriarch of the Romanov royals who were infamously executed by Bolsheviks in 1918. Felder's Rachmaninoff — dying of melanoma in his adopted home of Beverly Hills, California, in 1943 — conjures up the long-dead tsar with the help of his prescribed morphine in order to rehash their shared past. (Yes, the show is essentially one extended drug trip.) Directed by Trevor Hay, the play has two main throughlines, which are clearly related but don't always mesh well. Rachmaninoff feels deeply homesick for pre-revolutionary Russia, and he recounts the long compositional dry spell that he experienced after fleeing his home in 1918. This theme can be summed up in a quote often attributed to Rachmaninoff: 'I left behind my desire to compose: losing my country, I lost myself also.' In the play, the composer blames the tsar for unleashing the violent revolution and thus causing his own devastating displacement. A different kind of grief haunts Nicholas as he recalls his close relationship with his youngest daughter, Anastasia, and mourns the deaths of his wife and children. (The speculative nature of the script comes into play here; in reality, the family members were killed together.) The Romanovs appear in black-and-white video flashbacks, designed by Stefano DeCarli and featuring Silvestri's actual wife and daughter. The royal family's backstory and the popular myth of Anastasia's possible survival later play an intriguing role in Rachmaninoff's life in America, an actual chapter of the composer's history that I hadn't heard about until seeing this play. Felder's Rachmaninoff struggles to reconcile his anger at the tsar with his nostalgia for the old Russia, which involves an enduring loyalty to the Romanovs. The rapid shifts of tone in his conversations with Nicholas can be disorienting, veering from sharp political criticism to sentimental memories of visiting the Winter Palace. Of course, humans are more than capable of holding conflicting feelings at once, but it seems like Felder, as writer and actor, hasn't quite worked out how to navigate these two extremes. Felder the musician, however, gives crowd-pleasing performances of Rachmaninoff's greatest hits, including the Prelude in C-sharp minor, a piece that he composed at age 19 and grew to hate because of its undying popularity. (With a droll sneer, he confesses that he simply refers to the piece as 'it.') Felder takes a heavy-handed, percussive approach to the composer's signature leaping chords, thus losing some nuance in the voicing, but he brings an expressive touch to the more delicate, bell-like passages. And certainly, it's no small feat to underscore his own dialogue, as well as Silvestri's, with live piano music. Of the two men portrayed in this play, Rachmaninoff certainly comes across as the more sympathetic. Though born into an aristocratic family, he has imbibed ideas of meritocracy from his adopted country; he believes nobility comes from what's in the soul, rather than an accident of birth. Nicholas, on the other hand, is an imperial relic who repeatedly proclaims his divine right to power, making him a difficult character to relate to. Still, I suspect that any parents in the audience will be moved by Silvestri's speeches about fatherly love and grief, while emigrees — and anyone who feels disconnected from their home — will be touched by Rachmaninoff's emotional 'Rachmaninoff and the Tsar ' (3 stars) When: Through September 21 Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Tickets: $35-$95 at
New York Times
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Two Concerts Reveal the Limits of a Pianist's Broad Repertoire
A skilled musician can play pretty much anything. But notes on the page of a score are just a starting point. Beyond that, what makes an artist well suited to a specific sound or style? Age? Personality? Experience? These are complicated, elusive questions that loomed over the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho's recent appearances in New York. Earlier this month, he played a marathon of Ravel's complete solo piano works at Carnegie Hall, and on Thursday he joined the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall as the soloist in Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto. (The program continues through Saturday.) If these concerts share anything, it's sheer athleticism. The Ravel survey makes for a three-hour evening of intense focus and finger work; the Prokofiev concerto probably crams the same amount of notes into about 35 minutes. The similarities end there, though. And it's in the differences that Cho revealed the state of his artistry at 30, a decade on from his career-making first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition. There was a remarkable difference, too, between his readings of the Ravel works in concert and his recording of the same material, released on Deutsche Grammophon last month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth. (A related album of his, of Ravel's two piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, came out on Friday.) His interpretations of these wide-ranging pieces were freer and more expressive at Carnegie; it would be interesting to hear Cho revisit them again. Cho is a pianist of extraordinary precision and shading. He almost never misses a note, and sounds as if he could assign a different weight to each finger. But in Ravel's solo works, which across decades of composition contain both the evocative broad strokes of impressionism and the luminous specificity of pointillism, his approach can have mixed results. At Carnegie, he sounded most comfortable in pieces that recall earlier styles: the Baroque-inspired suite 'Le Tombeau de Couperin,' the mannered 'Menuet Antique' and 'Menuet sur le Nom d'Haydn.' His sensitive pedalwork also made for an atmospheric 'Pavane pour une Infante Défunte,' which was melancholic yet stately, the melodic line of his right hand emerging from a haze of sustained sound in the left. What escaped him were the works meant to conjure poetic images. They are meticulously notated but also call for a kind of studied looseness. Cho's 'Jeux d'Eau' had, for better and worse, the twinkle and mechanical accuracy of a music box. There was little nautical openness to his 'Une Barque sur l'Océan,' from the suite 'Miroirs,' nor was there much seductive liquidity to his overly rhythmical 'Ondine,' from 'Gaspard de la Nuit.' With the Philharmonic on Thursday, Cho found more of a match in Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, which entirely rewards his technique. It's breathlessly dazzling but, with needle-in-a-haystack melodies, demands more than mere virtuosity. It's also music for the young. Prokofiev began to write it early in his career, while still a brash conservatory student, to showcase herculean muscularity and a tirelessness that becomes harder to pull off with age. Cho had a thrilling strength that cut through the orchestra with clarity, no matter its thickness. (The Philharmonic, under Santtu-Matias Rouvali, was a responsive, cooperative partner and elsewhere on the program offered superb, sometimes surprising and even chilling, accounts of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15 and music from his operetta 'Moscow, Cheryomushki.') But he also had skill to spare for a nuanced touch and a sense of perspective in the occasional rubato or accent. In the jaw-droppingly long and dense cadenza of the first movement, he successfully pulled the melody from the caky grime of notes surrounding it, and showed no signs of fatigue as it led directly into the sprint of the second movement. Interestingly, he chose Ravel for an encore: 'À la Manière de Borodine,' a wispy and wistful little waltz. Juxtaposed with the Prokofiev, it was like a declaration of Cho's breadth, which, with the wider view of his two recent concerts, is still a work in progress. Lucky for him, and for listeners, he has plenty of time to figure it out.
