APA Premiere Series reaches an end-of-year peak with Michael Davidman

 

Unaccustomed as I am to weighing in on competition outcomes, I made clear in 2021 how much I liked

Michael Davidman delivered on promise he showed in 2021.

Michael Davidman's playing and expected great things from him in the crowded firmament of young classical pianists.

Now after three years he's back to vie again for the top prize in the American Piano Awards. At the Indiana History Center Sunday afternoon he played his Premiere Series program. The format for all five 2025 finalists is one-half solo recital, one-half concerto performance with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra.

In the chamber-music segment of the 2021 competition, Davidman enchanted me with the way he played the Cesar Franck piano quintet with the Dover String Quartet. The centerpiece of his recital yesterday was Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, another masterpiece conspicuously indebted to the composer's mastery of the church organ, specifically Paris' Sainte-Clotilde, where Franck served for thirty years.

His "home" instrument was responsive to his creative muse, and in works like these two, he built upon that affinity in grand style. Davidman responded imaginatively to the blend of light and shade in the Prelude. His patrician touch suited the quasi-sacred atmosphere of the theme, and his deft hesitation before launching into the Chorale mimicked an organist's adjustment of registration between contrasting episodes. 

The delicacy with which he played sweeping ornamented figures against the chorale theme reminded me again of Davidman's apparent feeling for French pianism, which I cited three years ago, with its star proponents' "intense sensitivity and ample yet varied tone." After a transition to the Fugue, that section honored concentrated variations of mood and texture. 

The clarity of the layered voices was remarkable, and the heart-stirring climax of the stretto approach to the final chords thrilled. Davidman's was as fine a performance of this masterpiece as I ever hope to hear, moved as I was by this weekend's restoration of the grande dame of Parisian churches, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

Davidman opened the program with J.S. Bach's Toccata in D major, BWV 912. An air of spontaneity pervaded  the performance, and there was considerable freedom in the way Davidman conveyed changes of direction. In detail, the sequences that load the toccata's first section had a Vivaldian flair, all of them clearly defined and linked to their neighbors. It was as if Davidman orchestrated the fugal portions, with a question-and-answer manner that had the reciprocal richness of dialogue.

That feeling for a piece's inherent drama, properly proportioned, carried over to Camille Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre," in Franz Liszt's transcription arranged by Vladimir Horowitz. The crystalline melody, darkened by demonic energy, shone throughout. No matter how colored and complicated by adornment, its features remained clear. Davidman's technical adroitness had that deceptive appearance of naturalness you always get with virtuosity at its most assured. He drew down the energy toward the end, when it was easy to picture the subsiding of the collective menace as the spirits resume their period of inactivity.

After intermission, Matthew Kraemer conducted the ICO in a trim performance of the Overture to Joseph Haydn's "Il Mondo della Luna," a work that keeps company in obscurity with Haydn's other operas, which seldom approach the dramatic insight and flair of the compositions in that genre by the Austrian's younger contemporary, Wolfgang Mozart.

The same holds true of Mozart's piano concertos, the most beloved of which Davidman played Sunday in close fellow-feeling with the orchestra. It was known and successfully marketed by the nickname "Elvira Madigan" decades ago, because its sublime slow movement is essential to the soundtrack of a Swedish film of that name. The music of the concerto as a whole is upbeat and rather grand in the outer movements. You can hardly help that in C major, can you? The film, however, ends in the central figures' murder-suicide.

Brightness rules in the concerto as a whole. The orchestral tutti had majesty before the piano's entrance in the first movement. Davidman showed off a lovely trill, which was hardly a surprise. His solo cadenza was fascinating, and the shorter times unaccompanied, those "holds" or fermata in the third movement, were cute.  I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. They were just a precious part of the effervescence of the performance.

Where does this concerto's appropriateness for a romantic tragedy come from? Well, the magic of that second movement covers at first the blissfulness of fulfilling love, the kind of feeling that "it doesn't get any better than this, does it?" But Mozart's genius produces a second theme that says "Wait a minute! What makes you think this will last?" I thought of a nameless purveyor of Indian classical music who said in a gentle critique to a Western colleague: "All your music is about loss." Prime example: this Andante.

Imagine how poignant it was minutes later when Davidman offered his encore, announcing only that it was the work of a composer who died a century ago this year. Then he played a transcription of "Vissi d'arte" from "Tosca," the title character's second-act aria that's all about loss, to the brink of self-pity, but out of justifiable desperation at the impending evil of a powerful predator (the sort of man represented in our President-elect's Cabinet picks). I was as moved by how Davidman played the aria,  especially after reflecting on that Mozart middle movement, as I was two years ago by Angela Brown's performance of the original in Indianapolis Opera's stunning production of "Tosca".

"Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore" Living for art, living for love — who expressed it better than Giacomo Puccini? And who can represent it as well as artists of Michael Davidman's caliber?