Prizewinning pianist helps animate ISO program featuring two warhorses

A son of the venerated East German maestro Kurt Sanderling, Michael Sanderling now lives in Florida.

 The only Scandinavian country missing from this weekend's Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra repertoire

is Denmark, as guest conductor Michael Sanderling pointed out in remarks to Friday's audience as the stage was being prepared for a Steinway piano to be moved front and center at Hilbert Circle Theatre.

Sanderling hinted that the other guest artist, Kenny Broberg, might choose a Danish composer if the audience applauded heartily enough for an encore. As it happened, Broberg followed his dazzling performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto with Nicolai Medtner's Fairy Tale in F minor, op. 26, no. 3. The hint of Danish representation came only by implication, in the droll tone and deadpan delivery of some of what the German conductor had to say.

He noted that the audience was getting the benefit of "a spectacle" as stagehands moved orchestra chairs out of the way to get the piano from the wings to its proper concerto position. He added an observation of the gradually returning ISO members, and told them, "Thanks for coming back." I thought immediately of the Danish-American pianist-comedian Victor Borge. 

Scandinavia makes its initial appearance in the curtain-raiser, "Branningar (Breaking Waves)," by Helena Munktell (1852-1919). The Swedish composer enjoyed a brief vogue in France, earning the support of the powerful late-Romantic Frenchman Vincent d'Indy, according to the program note. "Breaking Waves" is a product of her brief heyday, and Sanderling offered gratitude to the ISO's office of artistic planning for letting him know of its existence. The composer as well was unfamiliar to him, as was undoubtedly the case for everyone present Friday evening.

It's a turbulent seascape quite at odds in reflectiveness from Debussy's "La Mer," which the ISO played last month in a saltwater-drenched program. It's more compact, and shows little influence from France as far as I can detect, although its ensemble heft and nature-centered outreach recalled d'Indy to me. Obviously composers inspired by nature take different impressions away from it. 

That Debussyan reflectiveness is generally distant from Munktell's inspiration. Her vision of the sea emphasizes its treacherousness and volatility, with the latter quality barely suggestive of sunlight and the interplay of light, wind, and water that  Debussy captured. Munktell's tragic tone poem is far from a masterpiece, but was well worth hearing among the roster of works by female composers the ISO has recently featured.

The orchestra is doing marvelous things these days, and it continued to do them when accompanying

Kenny Broberg brought his own light to shine upon Grieg

Broberg, who won the top prize here in the 2021 American Pianists Awards. The concerto he played, an international favorite practically from the moment it was new, got an electrifying performance Friday. 

As Broberg showed nearly three years ago here, the individualized poetry with which he infuses tender moments was consistently exhibited. But he has a mastery of thick-textured passages as well, not necessarily because they are also loud, but  rather in the balanced voicing of chord-dominated passages. This is a skill that also makes him effective in Medtner, the Russian composer of German extraction whom he has made familiar here to local audiences, as recently as last January in a University of Indianapolis recital. 

In the slow movement, his sweetness of tone built upon the velvet sonority of the ISO strings. And the jeweled figuration in some passages was an additional delight. The finale is almost the only refutation needed to the argument that Grieg was essentially a miniaturist, not inclined to leave the most salient impression over the long haul. That was a view that he indeed encouraged and stood by, especially as he defended such a focus in retrospect, the concerto having given him difficulties.

But how well he surmounted them, and how brilliantly evident that success was in Friday's performance. The "structural integrity" mentioned in Words on Music animated the first movement, with its unforgettable main theme. It easily becomes an "ear worm" for any listener who calls up the associated mnemonic device, an imaginary lyric to the recurrent first phrase that runs: "Here's a concerto; it's by Edvard Grieg." 

But the structural integrity is even more masterly in the finale, with its infectious Norwegian dance informing the main theme, contrasted with a lovely melody introduced by the flute. That eventually becomes a brass chorale at the movement's climax. Both the dance and that contrasting tune go from being a song of innocence to a song of experience; the recapitulation is far from a matter of "rinse and repeat." No wonder the concerto was so much admired by Liszt and Rachmaninoff. It's one of the best of its kind from the romantic era. Broberg was much like a ringmaster at every center of this well-organized circus, working as such in twinned fashion with Sanderling and the orchestra.

After intermission came a hit symphony introduced to the public at the dawn of the 20th century. Sibelius  Symphony No. 2 in D major stands as tall in its genre as the Grieg A minor does in its large niche. The insightful, prickly music critic Virgil Thomson, at the start in 1940 of a 14-year run with the New York Herald Tribune, pushed back against its popularity with the radio and concert-going public  by dismissing Sibelius in general and this piece in particular. "Vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description," he called it, perhaps smarting from his own provincial roots in Kansas City.

Mick Jagger in full cry on tour

Friday's performance had many ways of winning this listener over, though I've never been as categorical in my disdain as Thomson was. With his much different style, another ISO guest conductor, Robert Spano, began accustoming me to this symphony's overall excellence in 2019. Sanderling's generosity of gesture and vigorous ways of defining space and pace from the podium suited the music. At the climax of the movement, he thrust both arms wide and high, pointing to imaginable heavens, oddly resembling Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones' current "Hackney Diamonds" tour. 

George Price's creepy vision

I was with Sanderling  in spirit, even though my mischievous sense of humor still finds the endless recurrence of thematic and accompanying material bringing to mind a New Yorker cartoon by George Price. 

"Here it comes again," I say to myself, and I feel like embattled homeowner Fred, though I still succumb to the music's overlay of triumph. The "wow" I heard from a patron to my left Friday night was well earned when the Sibelian vine had stopped creeping toward glory.  

The repetitiveness had been transmuted into a feeling of awe, and much of the tedious feeling of "here it comes again" was mitigated by Sanderling's canny pauses and other ways of pointing up the variety of design that is surely in the score, though sometimes obscured by the composer's determination to make a big point. All of a sudden any hint that the piece might be vulgar and self-indulgent disappeared.