Santa Rosa Symphony offers up stars of the keyboard

The Santa Rosa Symphony led by Music Director Bruno Ferrandis offered up a colorful trio of works by three, virtuoso pianists Saturday night at the Green Music Center’s Weill Hall, including the rarely heard and devilishly difficult Bartok Piano Concerto No. 2 performed by American pianist Orion Weiss.

Weiss, who will turn 35 on Tuesday, was named after the most visible constellation in the Northern hemisphere’s winter sky. A graduate of Juilliard who studied with pianist Emanuel Ax, Weiss brought plenty of star power to bear on the Bartok, which is so challenging that some flatly refuse to play it. British pianist Andras Schiff once called it a “finger-buster,” and Israeli-American pianist Yefim Bronfman injured himself a few times on its thornier passages.

With Weill Hall lit up ominously in red and pre-concert lecturer Kayleen Asbo warning us to “look out for the bloody keyboard,” it was a relief when Weiss managed to survive the rhythmic complexity and relentless brutality of the 28-minute concerto, written by the famous Hungarian composer in 1931.

Weiss played the keyboard work brilliantly, with machine-gun clarity. Amazingly, he also performed it from memory. Under Ferrandis’ baton, the orchestra matched him beat by angular beat, rhythm by fractured rhythm, marching through the controlled chaos of the first and third movements with clear-eyed precision.

But the intensity of the music, while underlining the percussive power of the piano, did not always transcend the notes and emerge with the exuberance and joy one would expect.

Part of the problem, at least from my seat, was that the piano was often difficult to hear, especially in the first movement, a Stravinsky-like romp punctuated by racing octave scales and a crazed cadenza. There are just so many notes - the pianist has only 23 measures of rest - that you hardly notice the strings are just sitting silently, while the rest of the orchestra provides the accompaniment.

The elegiac adagio, written in the spirit of Bartok’s eerie night music, brought a mesmerizing reprieve from the motoric energy of the first movement, with the strings adding a lush, hushed, nearly transparent sound.

The concerto concluded with another restless folk dance, tossing up recycled themes from the first movement and interjecting pointed dialogue between piano, brass and percussion. The complex rondo, driven to a climactic conclusion, brought the audience immediately to its feet.

While the Bartok was intellectually provocative, the other two works eclipsed it in terms of sheer emotion. They also provided a handy vehicle for the orchestra’s musicians to shine with nuanced playing and solos.

The program opened with Hungarian composer Franz Lizst’s “Les Préludes,” a symphonic poem completed in 1854 as a paean to nature. Lizst created the new musical form to reconcile poetry with music, and this particular example - full of far-off horn calls, mournful woodwinds and swirling strings - evokes the serenity of the countryside, broken only by a nerve-tingling storm that rises and falls in intensity, thanks to evocative orchestration for timpani and brass.

Ferrandis rounded out the program with another literary composer, Robert Schumann, whose father was a bookseller. Schumann’s Symphony No. 2, written in 1846, took the audience on an uplifting journey, from the solemn brass fanfare of the first movement, reminiscent of a Bach chorale, to the triumphant finale, with its nod to Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

Written in the sunny key of C major, the work also includes a spirited scherzo of perpetual motion, pulled off with amazing accuracy and endurance by the strings. The slow movement took a soulful dip into C minor, spinning out sublime melodies full of yearning and colorful solos executed by woodwinds and horns.

The clouds parted in the final movement, with the ensemble carefully building to the joyful conclusion, executing clear, dotted rhythms and triplets along with nicely nuanced dynamics. It was a memorable trip from darkness to light, worth every finger-numbing note.

The Santa Rosa Symphony will repeat the Saturday program at 8 p.m. today at the Green Music Center’s Weill Hall at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park. Tickets: $20-$80. santarosasymphony.com.