A Tanglewood Diary 2025 – Seong-Jin Cho plays both Ravel Piano Concertos and Andris Nelsons conducts orchestral works by Debussy

This BSO concert in the Shed featured four upbeat works, two by Debussy bookending Ravel’s two piano concertos, offered as part of the ‘Maurice Ravel at 150’ celebration. To begin, Andris Nelsons led a sumptuous performance of Debussy’s Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun, which evoked recollections of the dancing of Vaslav Nijinsky and, more recently, Edward Villella to Jerome Robbins’s choreography. Lorna McGhee’s opening flute solo, along with contributions from Robert Sheena on cor anglais, Jessica Zhou on harp and Richard Sebring on horn, established the languorous atmosphere of the eponymous faun’s dreaming. 

The whipcrack that begins Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G sent Seong-Jin Cho off to the races with rapid-fire piano figurations. When these gave way to a slower, darker mood, Cho and the orchestral winds combined to create a jazzy aura reminiscent of Gershwin’s piano music. The predominant feature of the opening movement is a trill-laden cadenza that Cho navigated deftly before resuming the breakneck pace of the opening measures, leading to a climactic ending. In the Adagio, Cho’s piano sang out dreamily with a melody later taken up beautifully by Sheena’s cor anglais. The Presto finale is even more of a sprint than the opening movement, with Cho’s bouncy passagework taken at dazzling speed – incredibly matched at one point by Josh Baker’s bassoon – with the orchestra again providing jazzy interjections right up to the explosive final chords and drumbeat. 

After intermission, Cho returned to the piano for Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, written by Ravel for pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I. Throughout the concerto, Cho kept his right hand firmly on top of the piano, well above the keyboard, as if to prove that he was not cheating! This single-movement work begins in a darker mood than the G-major concerto, with Samuel Watson’s contrabassoon intoning a rising melody taken up by the full orchestra before the piano’s unaccompanied entrance at the low end of the keyboard. Cho dashed off rapid passagework with acrobatic skill before taking up and elaborating on the opening theme. Later, a jaunty march competed with a bluesy theme introduced by Richard Svoboda’s bassoon, after which Cho joined the orchestra in a reprise of the theme that began the concerto and then launched a cadenza that was suddenly interrupted by the potent final chords. Cho’s encore was Ravel’s À la manière de Borodine.

The concert ended with an exciting performance of Debussy’s La Mer, with the BSO in top form creating a spectacular array of instrumental colorations to depict the light, winds and waves of the sea.