Cho brings acute refinement and poetic introspection to an epic Ravel afternoon

Seong-Jin Cho performed music of Ravel Sunday at Symphony Hall. Photo: Robert Torres/Celebrity Series of Boston
Tis the season for musical marathons, at least in New England. A little more than a week after the Boston Symphony Orchestra wrapped its survey of the complete Beethoven symphonies, the Celebrity Series brought Seong-Jin Cho to Symphony Hall to present all of Maurice Ravel’s solo piano works.
Well, almost all of them: there was no La valse, though, admittedly, the keyboard version of that score is a transcription of the orchestral original. Regardless, Cho, who won the First Prize at the 2015 Chopin International Competition, had his hands full with a baker’s dozen of other selections, large and small, that spanned nearly three hours (including two intermissions).
A decade out from his big triumph in Warsaw, the 30-year-old South Korean pianist has established himself as a musician of the first rank. His technique is, as expected, impeccable. To that he brings a strong feeling for matters pertaining to color, shape, phrasing, and voicing.
Also, dynamics. Cho possesses such a command of his instrument that, when he dials things down, he forces the listener to lean in and pay that much closer attention.
The pianist put this special skill to fine use several times on Sunday. During the spacious “Épilogue” of the Valses nobles et sentimentales, for instance, the recollections of themes heard earlier came across with intense, touching pathos. Similarly, Cho’s poetic account of Pavane pour une infante défunte combined delicate balances, luminous tone colors, and fluid melodic direction with exquisite inwardness.
At times, though, Cho’s introspective bent resulted in a refinement that didn’t entirely suit the music.
For all its slashing rhythms and precise filigree, the Sérénade grotesque’s natural acerbity sounded a bit tempered. So was the finale of the F-sharp-minor Sonatine—though the pianist’s classy sheen resulted in some alluring textures in the movement’s middle part.
Jeux d’eau, too, was surprisingly gentle, even lyrical. Yet this short effort also danced. What’s more, the clarity of Cho’s articulations gave it a pointillistic aspect: at times, Jeux almost sounded like one of Georges Seurat’s Pont-en-Bessin seascapes rendered in notes.
A similar understanding of musical character permeated each of the afternoon’s big numbers.
In Gaspard de la nuit, Cho ably teased out the contrasts between the accompanimental glitter in “Ondine” and its shapely melodic phrases. So, too, the eerie plays of light and shade in “Le Gibet.” His take on “Scarbo” was vibrant and extroverted, the low-tessitura passagework ringing with ominous authority.
For its part, Miroirs offered no shortage of vivid imagery: flitting moths in “Noctuelles,” the torpor of a late-summer afternoon in “Oiseaux tristes,” the serene mists of “La valée des cloches.” In “Alborada del gracioso,” Cho’s dry-toned attacks belied the limber energy he brought to the outer thirds’ snapping rhythms and the textural clarity he drew from the music’s dissonant sonorities.
Even more striking was “Une barque sur l’océan.” Though Cho’s reading was a touch episodic, his clean projection across the keyboard’s range—not to mention the pianist’s hypnotically precise, billowing arpeggios—called to mind the studies of space, sonority, and gesture latent in, of all things, George Crumb’s Vox balaenae.
That unexpected connection delivered, in fact, one of the afternoon’s surprise realizations: despite Ravel’s reputation as one of the 20th century’s great originals—which he was—the man wasn’t really a musical progressive. Much of his music, for keyboard and beyond, draws freely and happily on the past. But unlike, say, Schoenberg, Ravel’s approach to archaic forms and devices didn’t simultaneously seek to redefine traditional notions of sensuousness and beauty.
This tendency was emphasized by Sunday’s novelties, like the elegant Menuet antique and the enchanting Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn. It also cropped up in the whimsical Á la manière de Borodine and Á la manière de Chabrier, both of which Cho dispatched with elan. But the afternoon’s most striking display of the practice came in Le tombeau de Couperin, the composer’s moving homage to friends lost in the Great War.
Cho’s performance of this suite, with its dual nods to the French Baroque and early-20th-century Gallic harmonic practice, emerged as a play of opposites: reflective yet unsentimental, rhythmically precise but also winsomely flexible. The fast movements were well-directed and playful. The “Fugue”—with its lapping, beautifully calibrated entrances—unfolded, paradoxically, as the most unostentatious of contrapuntal exercises. Meantime, the “Forlane” and “Menuet” tripped gracefully, Cho executing their ornamentations with biting electricity.
The result was nostalgic and inward, yes, but also dynamic and multi-dimensional. As Ravel understood—and as we’re constantly reminded—the past, for better and worse, is always with us.
The Celebrity Series presents Caleb Teicher & Conrad Tao’s COUNTERPOINT 8 p.m. February 7 and 2 p.m. & 8 p.m. February 8 at Boston Arts Academy Theater. celebrityseries.org
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