Musicon / Saint Saens / Jean-Yves Thibaudet: Saint-Saens is great fun!
Jean-Yves Thibaudet: Saint-Saens is great fun!
“I actually regard playing a concerto almost like it’s chamber music. That’s why I enjoy it so much,” pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet says. As a concerto soloist, “I don’t feel I’m playing and not listening to the orchestra while they follow me. Music is listening with each other.” Thibaudet will be piano soloist with conductor Marek Janowski and the Pittsburgh Symphony at concerts Friday through Sunday at Heinz Hall, downtown Pittsburgh. The program consists of Camille Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 2 and Hector Berlioz’ “Symphonie fantastique.”
Thibaudet is glad to be playing Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 2, a favorite piece by a composer he’s not alone in regarding as underrated. He believes the Saint-Saens music is very interesting, intelligent and cultured, and says the composer obviously was a great virtuoso pianist himself.
“This concerto, like all of his concerti, was basically written for him just to show off what he could do as a pianist,” he says. “As simple as that — a piece he could play and take on tour.”
After an opening movement that begins like a slow improvisation by Johann Sebastian Bach, the second movement is a complete contrast. “This little Scherzo is our version in France of the Mendelssohn Scherzo,” Thibaudet says. “When you finish this movement, you hear the audience sigh in appreciation. It’s so cute.”
If the second movement is like drinking champagne, the finale is like a dance to the good life, Thibaudet says. “It’s not quite the French can-can, but it is a big dance and very virtuosic. It may not be the most profound music, but the audience always likes it. And it is great fun, a marvelous piece to play.”
Thibaudet says he’s especially touched by a post-concert comment he often hears from people with recent loss in their life. “They say, ‘My husband died,’ or ‘I lost my mother, and for two hours you made me forget everything.’ We who have a gift have an obligation to share it. It is an amazing gift to be able to give people so much pleasure, really an incredible privilege.”
From Pittsburghlive; excerpts, edited by MUSICON
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