This article was originally published on Cleveland.com
By Peter Feher
CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio — The Cleveland Orchestra went into Saturday’s concert at Blossom Music Center with more than a few unknowns. It’s not every week that this ensemble tackles a pair of new pieces, welcomes both a debuting conductor and soloist, and even takes a risk with the order of the evening’s program.
Still, for all the novelty, the Orchestra’s performance on Aug. 19 followed the same satisfying arc of any conventional symphonic concert. In classical music, the formula for success — and one surefire way to get a crowd on its feet — is to save the best for last.
On Saturday, that was pianist Mao Fujita, who ended the evening with a rousing yet refined rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. A solo work — even one as monumental and involved for the entire ensemble as Tchaikovsky’s — rarely concludes an orchestral program, not least because the pressure of a perfect finish shouldn’t all come down on a single player.
Fortunately, Fujita is no stranger to high-stakes settings for this concerto. The 24-year-old pianist made his name, in part, with a silver-medal-winning performance of the piece at the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition. At Blossom, he sounded every bit the sensitive showman, bringing polish and a light touch to a work that, in other interpretations, can be bogged down by bombastic technique.
After the big, blocky chords of the introduction, Fujita handled much of the first movement delicately, approaching each new variation on the melodic line with playfulness and curiosity. Of course, there were plenty of pianistic fireworks throughout, even in the Andantino, which begins and ends “semplice.” But he reserved his boldest moments for the finale, such as a thundering passage in octaves that seemed to shake the keyboard. It was the climax toward which the whole evening had been building — and more than worth the wait.
And the virtuosity didn’t vanish right away. Fujita tossed off his own bluesy variations on Niccolò Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 as an encore.
To open the program, guest conductor Ryan Bancroft led the first Cleveland Orchestra performances of two pieces that some listeners might have sworn they recognized. Both works invite a feeling of familiarity (and have also been popping up on concert programs everywhere in the past couple of years).
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