Benjamin Hochman | Pianist

 Read PDF

As the VSO’s current season winds down, one of the year’s most intriguing programs sees Conductor Laureate Kazuyoshi Akiyama lead his old band at the Orpheum in works by Mozart and Prokofiev.

The program gets off to a cheeky, incisive start with Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon Overture, both a curtain raiser and a sample of the high Soviet idiom more extensively explored later in the evening.

Young pianist Benjamin Hochman makes his VSO debut in Mozart’s “Jeunehomme” Concerto, K. 271, an early work but one of very considerable interest.

Any Mozart provides an infallible test of an emerging pianist’s real musical prowess. Hochman’s interpretation is stylish and lucid, with patrician authority and touches of elegant wit where context allows.

This is brainy music-making as well: Hochman’s pacing in the troubled central Andantino has depth and a measure of darkness that complements the surrounding light — but definitely not lightweight — outer movements.

Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony completes the agenda, a product of that composers’ final period as a selfdeclared Soviet composer, when he was charged with toeing the Party line about sturdy tunes and uplifting sentiments.

The symphony is rich in the sort of soaring themes that have made the ballet music from Romeo and Juliet almost overfamiliar, but it ratchets up the stakes several notches by using symphonic structure to create a musical epic for the time — that time being the last years of the Second World War.

It’s perfect material for Akiyama. Holding to a firm idea of the work’s overall thrust, despite the occasionally discursive nature of the music, Akiyama conducts with all the sang froid needed to cope with Prokofiev’s sometimes unruly detailing and frankly freakish orchestral effects. He displays an emphatic understanding of the great, glorious ideas that struggle to be brought forth, with no shirking of their occasional ambiguities.

If the extraordinary coda that ends the first movement can be read as celebrating “the glory of the human spirit,” the manic conclusion reminds us of Prokofiev’s irrepressible, anarchic individualism.

VSO fans who remember the Akiyama years fondly will find much to enjoy in this program: his energy and enthusiasm, not to mention his inimitable way with the orchestra’s winds and brass, make this a concert to savour.