At the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s season-ending concerts this weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall, “Yuja Wang brilliantly completed her first cycle of the three Bartók piano concertos,” writes Mark Swed in Sunday’s (6/4) Los Angeles Times. “Gustavo Dudamel surrounded the concertos with alluringly eerie accounts of Stravinsky’s ‘Symphonies of Wind Instruments’ and spectacular ones of Janácek’s brassy Sinfonietta. The orchestra’s season officially ends June 13 with … Lou Harrison’s neglected opera ‘Young Caesar.’ … Inside Disney, the mood was excitable, especially in the rapturous response Wang got from full houses that demanded encore after encore from her.… [In Bartók’s] Third Concerto … Wang strove … for utter clarity as a device for warding off any trace of morbidity…. Dudamel [brought] a rare majesty to Stravinsky’s piquant ‘Symphonies for Wind Instruments,’ a 1920 memorial for Debussy. Meanwhile, rather than relying on Janácek’s striking, razor-sharp tonal colors in Sinfonietta, Dudamel sought a thickly luscious ensemble sound, where the strings and brass blended into something larger than the sum of the score’s parts. Thus, the celebratory Sinfonietta, which required 13 extra brass standing behind the orchestra on the chorus benches, was Dudamel’s bracingly optimistic way to end an important season.”
Posted June 5, 2017
