Once your food coma is over on Saturday night and your desire for culture kicks in, there’s a great concert by the LA Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Gustavo Dudamel leads the orchestra in a performance of music by Rachmaninoff & Stravinsky. The concerts take place on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.
Opening the concert is one of the best known piano concertos: The Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #2. The soloist for these two concerts is Korean Seong-Jin Cho.
This 25-year-old pianist rose to prominence when he won the Gold Medal at Warsaw’s Chopin International Competition in 2015. His recital debut in Los Angeles in 2018 earned a rave review from Rick Schultz in the Los Angeles Times.
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2 is a big, romantic and challenging piece for any soloist. Given that Seong-jin Cho won the same award once given to Martha Argerich, it will be interesting to see how this young pianist tackles this work.
The second half of the program has a piece of music that seems to be a go-to work for the orchestra: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Dudamel has lead the orchestra several times in this work as did his predecessor Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Leonard Bernstein said of Stravinsky’s ground-breaking composition: “it’s also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name.” In other words, this is a very complicated and complex work.
If you don’t often find yourself in the concert hall, but do like Disney animation, you’ll know this work from Fantasia.
As wonderful as that film is, nothing beats seeing a world-class orchestra play The Rite of Spring. There aren’t a lot of new cultural offerings this week due to the holiday on Thursday. This is a concert that you should not miss.
For tickets on Saturday go here.
For tickets on Sunday go here.
Photo of Seong-Jin Cho by Holger Hage/Courtesy of Solea Artist Management
