Jorge Federico Osorio Review

Jorge Federico Osorio
Chicago Symphony Center
May 5, 2013. 3:00pm

Soler
•Sonata in G minor
•Sonata in D major
•Sonata in D flat major

Manuel Ponce
•Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Handel

Brahms
•Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel

Intermission

Albéniz
•Mallorca, Barcarolle in F sharp Major, Op. 202

Castro
•Barcarolle No. 2, Op. 30, No. 2

Tchaikovsky
•Barcarolle, June from "The Seasons", Op. 37a

Mussorgsky
•Pictures from an Exhibition

I almost didn't attend this concert because the program had too many unfamiliar hispanic sounding names on it, but I decided at the last minute that's the perfect reason to go.

Looking at the roster of pianists for this season and the 2013-2014 season, and their repertoire, without getting too pessimistic, one might get the impression that, in the entire history of western art music, no Hispanic composers ever wrote anything for the piano worth hearing. For much of recorded piano performance history, German, French and Russian repertoire constituted the heavy bulk of what people learned and performed in the world of the piano. I love a lot of that repertoire, but somewhere when I was in college I stopped, stepped back and looked at a map and wondered, where's the music from everywhere else?

Bach: German
Brahms: German
Beethoven: German
Chopin: Polish/French
Fauré: French
Grieg: Norwegian
Haydn: Austrian
Liszt: Hungarian/French
Mendelssohn: German
Mozart: Austrian
Schubert: Austrian
Rachmaninoff: Russian
Scarlatti: Italian
Scriabin: Russian
Schumann: German
Tchaikovsky: Russian

It's easy to make the erroneous supposition that Hispanic music (or Nordic for that matter) isn't as well represented in the piano canon as, say, French, German or Russian, because it simply wasn't as good. I think an investigation into why this music isn't heard as often is beyond the scope of this review, but the issue of under-representation wasn't ignored by Mr. Osorio, and in the 2012-2013 lineup, I think he stands alone as the pianist most willing to take the bold stance of choosing and performing compelling works from parts of the world less heard, by names unfamiliar.

Before the house lights went down, I scanned the crowd and saw that Mr. Osorio was not playing to a sold out room. Far, far from it. He had about 1/3 of the seats filled, and I suspect that his daring program choice may have had something to do with it. There were huge, classic numbers on the program–in western piano repertoire, the Brahms and the Mussorgsky are as white bread as they come–but the inclusion of four (4!) unfamiliar names on the program might have been too much for some people. Granted, Albéniz is not a second tier name among minor western composers, but still, he's not a name that people might find easy to pronounce. I think that might be the secret. Americans want to see names on a program that are foreign-ish (The last half of the twentieth century taught us to be wary of american composers since American composers were often trained to be avant-garde) but that they can pronounce. So, I suspect a composer with a last name like Jackson or Walker wouldn't go over too well with an audience, but a tamer foreign name like Mottishaw, Avaulée, or Simokat might have more success. Gupta and Guzik are too "ethnic sounding", but Slavova might pass because we've been conditioned to know what to expect out of slavic sounding named composers. (I have no idea what might be the expected reaction from a program rife with Eastern names like Ho, Shan or Tsui, or Ng. Who knows, this might fly in the face of my theory because those names are all one syllable–easy to pronounce!)

Anyway, the program was perfectly balanced in terms of length and order. I think he wanted the Albeniz, Castro and Tchaikovsky to be played as a group, without interruption, as an exploration of the barcarolle. That was an excellent idea, but the person writing the program wouldn't let him get away with it. They were separated by line breaks in the program when I think they should have been grouped, because while Osorio acknowledged applause between those pieces, he didn't get up, and clearly wasn't expecting it.

One of the standard practices in classical performances is that groupings of pieces [without breaks for applause] are usually only done within the same composer. This process works, because the German and French masters that so heavily make up the canon wrote extended pieces as well as pieces which fit together as suites. As concertgoers, we're conditioned to expect that, and that when there's a single piece by a single composer, we expect it to be a stand-alone work with no connection to the surroundings. Mr. Osorio's choices didn't play to that expectation, and I think the audience, sadly, wasn't receptive to what he was trying to achieve. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

His playing? Unmannered to say the least. I'd call him a pianist's pianist; He's the guy I'd trust to interpret pieces I've never heard of sight unseen. In all the pieces he played he found an emotional hook to play upon and made the piece work.

Some works have what might be called elusive emotional qualities (Some Chopin mazurkas, Fauré character pieces, the late Beethoven sonatas are a few examples that immediately jump to mind) and have the potential to go dead in a person's hands if they don't know how to handle them. I would trust Osorio with tricky pieces like that. I believe Osorio makes good choices and plays pieces that he can make work. And judging by his adroitness with the major works on the program as well as with his compelling interpretations of the shorter works, he's the complete pianist. You should see him.