By Lawrence Toppman
I felt both sad and glad to see music director Kwamé Ryan on the Knight Theater podium Friday night, leading the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra.
Sad because the coming snowstorm would almost certainly keep him from getting to Los Angeles in time for the 2026 Grammy Awards; the conductor shared a best opera recording nomination with composer Jake Heggie and a raft of producers for “Intelligence.” (Luckily, he managed to get a plane to Los Angeles early Saturday and won his first Grammy.)
Glad because I’ve come to admire his interpretations and was happy to see him, even in a program that was half spellbinding and half … Schumann.
Except for the Third Symphony, known as the Rhenish, Robert Schumann’s symphonies seldom speak to me; the Second strikes me as the least distinctive or memorable of the four. Ryan led a dynamic, well-proportioned reading, made agreeably eccentric by a Mendelssohn-on-speed scherzo, and that’s all that needs to be said about Schumann today.
The evening began with Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” where Ryan and the orchestra put across Ives’ cloudy textures intriguingly. The continuously quiet strings represent “the silence of the Druids who know, see and hear nothing” (as Ives put it), while the querulous trumpet poses “the perennial question of existence” – which cannot, of course, be answered. Ives wrote this piece 120 years ago, and it’s as strangely fresh as anything written yesterday.
Yet the work that made the ticket price worthwhile – or works, if you count the encore – was Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, written 15 years after the Ives in a different universe.
Israeli-American pianist Ran Dank won third prize at the 2008 Sydney International Piano Competition with this concerto, and he has made it his own. Prokofiev wrote it for himself to play – he was a formidable smiter of keyboards – and left a recording I treasure. Yet Dank’s more nuanced approach paid extra dividends. He roared when necessary, but he also played with delicacy and puckish humor where appropriate, offering a satisfyingly full palette of colors.
The music holds echoes at times of the mechanistic ballets Prokofiev wrote to satisfy Soviet bureaucrats, yet it also has a scampering playfulness and moments of wistful beauty. Conductor and soloist were one throughout; Ryan turned around after the especially successful andantino to give Dank a “Heck yeah!” grin, before they plunged into the surging third movement.
Dank played with such commitment that he wobbled slightly when he rose from the piano bench to face a genuine standing ovation. (Charlotte Symphony audiences give both types.) Yet he had enough energy for a gentle encore of George Gershwin’s “Embraceable You,” which began with Debussy-style flourishes and migrated charmingly to Erroll Garner territory. I suspect we still haven’t heard everything Dank can do, so I hope the CSO invites him back.