Classical Concert Reviews Cinci

@uc_ccm’s Philharmonia continued its slate of performances for spring semester 2025 with an adventurous and thought-provoking program titled Northern Lights, pairing two somewhat lesser-known concertos by Sergei Prokofiev and Alexander Scriabin with two rarely-heard early masterworks by Jean Sibelius.
Qi Liang, the newest winner of CCM’s Piano Concerro Competition and student of Michael Chertock, opened with a graceful, agile; gorgeously-phrased performance of Scriabin’s Piano Concerto. Completed in 1896, when Scriabin was only 24, it displays many stylistic hallmarks of Chopin and early Raxhmaninoff in its use of piano and orchestra as a musical coupling, relying more on intensity than sheer virtuosity. Laing brought these in spades to her playing, while the orchestra’s support felt decidedly intimate in many places, rare for a concerto of this era.
Violinist Sarah Ma, winner of the CCM Violin Concerto Competition and student of Kristin Lee, was joined by doctoral assistant conductor Moyue Zhou in a sensational performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Filled with expansive, chilly melodies set against a spare, equally dark orchestration, it was wonderful to see conductor and soloist engage so died you with each other, making sure their shaping of each phrase was perfectly matched. This felt truest in the first and third movements, aided immeasurably by Zhoy’s more understated direction of the orchestra on its own.
Jean Sibelius’s En Saga (1891-92) is one of his most powerful orchestral works that somehow never gets performed as much as it should. The Philharmonia’s performance of it this evening was on par with the finest orchestras in Finland and the wider Baltic region, no doubt thanks to wonderful solo themes for oboe, viola, clarinet and flute punctuated by the hefty sound of brass and bass drum throughout. Lemminkäinen’s Return, the last movement of Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite, functioned as a spirited postscript to En Saga, being played with no break in between. Possessing sheer happiness and outward vigor reminiscent of Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila Overture, this work was a spectacular end to a chilly evening of music in Cincinnati.