After Lise de la Salle’s enthralling Colorado debut in 2009 at the Aspen Music Festival, expectations were running high for her first appearance Saturday evening with the Colorado Symphony.
And the young pianist, who was born in Cherbourg, France, in 1988 and already has built an impressive international career, did not disappoint.
In what has become a cliche, French pianists are typically asked to perform works from their national school, and de la Salle can more than hold her own in such music.
But, countering stereotypes, she has made something of a speciality of the Russian repertoire, and Saturday evening she took on Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1 in C minor for Piano and Trumpet, Op. 35.
Like many of today’s young soloists, de la Salle is overflowing with technique. What sets her apart is her appealing, innate musicality and the extraordinary tonal range she draws from the piano.
She totally embraced the kind of pained beauty and uneasy idiosyncrasy that suffuses this 1933 piece — the odd saloonlike riffs in the first movement, the ugly splats in the final movement and the manic passages that almost tumble out of control.
Joining de la Salle as soloist was the orchestra’s fine principal trumpeter, Justin Bartels, whose polished, self- assured playing was highlighted by pinpoint articulation and a pure, gleaming tone.
In what was a commendably diverse program — the first of two devoted to Slavic repertoire — the concerto, along with Leos Janácek’s “Taras Bulba,” Rhapsody for Orchestra (1918), provided a perfect counterbalance to the two other considerably more familiar pieces.
Janácek’s operas are increasingly performed, but his avant-garde orchestral music remains rarely heard, as evidenced by the nearly 40-year gap since this work was last performed by the symphony.
The ever-dependable Peter Oundjian, a regular guest conductor in Denver, delivered a rich, cohesive interpretation that captured the unsettled complexity and constant shifts within this idiomatic, folk-tinged music.
Rounding out the program was Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave,” Op. 31, and Nikolai Rimsky- Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnol,” Op. 34.
The concert will be repeated at 2:30 p.m. today.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
