The TPO Plays Light and Heavy

College of Music. Mahidol Salaya Campus. Nakhonpathom, Thailand. August 18, 2012. Thailand has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of very talented young pianists, and when you match one of them up with a teacher as good as Mahidol's Eri Nakagawa, herself a magnificent performer, you have an unbeatable combination.
20-yearold Kwanchanok Pongpairoj ripped through Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the assurance of a seasoned professional. Her playing was fluid, even, expressive and entirely appropriate to the lightness and fast pace of this work. It takes nothing short of courage to perform this concerto; one slip and the entire edifice can come tumbling down. But, no one need worry about Kwanchanok: her technique and musicality captured Mendelssohn perfectly.

Let's face it---Bruckner is heavy. His symphonies are also very long, the 5^th being one hour and seven minutes in the Furtwangler recording that I own. And yes, Anton Bruckner's nine symphonies can sound alike. The old quip is that Bruckner composed one symphony nine times. What this means is that listening to Bruckner takes some effort on the part of the audience.

I had never heard Bruckner's 5^th Symphony before and in preparation for the Thailand Philharmonic's performance at Mahidol Salaya on August 18, I downloaded the score and a recording, and went through it three times before the live performance. It was well worth this pleasurable effort because the structure of the work and its variety became familiar to me, and I quickly liked the 5^th as much as I like the several other Bruckner symphonies I know, my current favorite being the 8^th. 

Over the years, the TPO's 90 musicians from 15 countries have shown time and time again, that no challenge is too daunting. Still, I wondered how the orchestra would handle the demands of a gargantuan Germanic symphony like Bruckner's symphony No. 5. Fortunately, in Swiss-born conductor Claude Villaret, the TPO had a strong leader for this first performance of the 5^th (my assumption) in Thailand. Villaret was clearly in charge and even an amateur observer like myself, could see that he expertly guided the orchestra through frequent tempo changes, signature changes, difficult rhythms (4/4 against 6/4), ever changing dynamics, fugues, and ensembles that required balancing to blend into a musical whole. The orchestra responded to Villaret with its very best playing. I wouldn't call this performance intense or exciting, but it was spacious and solid. The audience cheered.