Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the premiere in San Francisco.
Magnus Lindberg the third piano concerto receives both breathless and reserved praise from US critics. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the premiere in a concert with his San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. The soloist was a star pianist Yuja Wang.
The San Francisco Chronicle is the region’s leading paper, and critic Joshua Kosman spends the majority of the text praising Yuja Wang’s superiority as a concerto soloist. The piano part written by Lindberg is almost record-breakingly dense, but Wang plays everything effortlessly.
For Kosman’s taste, Lindberg overcrowds the sonorous space with “maximalist aesthetics”. At the same time, the critic admits that Lindberg’s music is innovatively energetic and engaging.
Korman seemed to understand Lindberg’s tonality best in the cadenzas, where he could listen to piano parts without an orchestra.
The Wall Street Journalin David Mermelstein praises as much Wang, but is more enthusiastic about Lindberg. According to him, Lindberg creates his own world, even if he places fleeting memories of other composers in the work From Ravel to Gershwin. Lindberg’s ideas are winning and the balancing of the soloist and the orchestra is masterful. The cadenzas also receive special praise from Mermelstein, as does the collaboration between Salonen and his orchestra in Lindberg’s music.
Musical American Steven Winnin according to that, quite a few fireworks were written for both the soloist and the orchestra, but the pianist remained in the main role. He was most impressed by Wang’s lively way of realizing Lindberg’s tense and multi-layered harmonic thinking.
The concert also received a great deal of preliminary attention, for example with a joint interview of Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen The New York Timesissa.
The concert will then continue with concerts by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.
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Read more: Magnus Lindberg makes a major work in London to the texts of Edith Södergran, and he still uses Macintosh computers from the 1980s to compose (60th anniversary interview from June 2018)
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