LANG LANG'S LONG-AWAITED KLEINHANS PERFORMANCE

Concert Review, Buffalo Philharmonic, July 11, 2011 (Buffalo Spree)

It should be noted that on Sunday July 10, 2011 Moscow’s weather was essentially the same as Buffalo’s. Both of these northern cities, known for their frigid winters, were hot and sultry. Thus, as I sat in a slightly clammy but highly-charged Kleinhans Theater, a great building raised when Stalin ruled the steppes, it seemed somehow possible that the enigmatic Russian spirit had infused the great hall for an all-Russian program and the long-awaited Buffalo debut of the Chinese pianist Lang Lang.

The Philharmonic opened with Dmitry Kabalevsky’s Overture to his opera Colas Breugnon, the first of two Soviet-era pieces. Kabalevsky survived the purges which doomed so many of the artists of the Stalinist era by cultivating political connections and hewing closely to the socialist realism orthodoxy. Colas Breugnon, an opera based on a suitably socialist text, is interesting but underwhelming. The Orchestra performed it well, crisply repeating its fanfare theme in the different parts before br…