The sound of muzhik

Gurt, Lansing Symphony roll out Russian revelry

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The Russians have a proverb: The only tool you really needis an ax.

Michael Gurt, a brilliant pianist with a bearish frame,untucked shirt and savage glee in his eyes, kicked through classical decorum tohew, hack and finesse his way through Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto Friday nightwith maestro Timothy Muffitt and the Lansing Symphony.

Muffitt and Gurt may as well have kissed each other on bothcheeks, tore their shirts off and tussled like two brawny muzhiks (Russianpeasants). They’ve known each other for decades and didn’t seem inclined tocoddle each other.

Gurt brought out all the glorious extremes of thisschizophrenic music, moving with ease from knife-throwing fury to ballroomniceties and back again. While pounding out a whirling-dervish theme in thefirst movement, he suddenly slowed down as if tiptoeing through the Russian TeaRoom, then slipped out the back door into the alley, where the poundingresumed.

In the slow movement, he embroidered the most delicatemelodies with grace and clarity. You really can do anything with an ax.

By the end, Gurt and Muffitt seemed high on their thirdvodka, er, movement, together, shooting big grins at each other. When Gurt hadto repeat a cutesy “dink-dink-dink” passage three times, he smiled at theaudience and made a little fairy-dance arm gesture, as if to say, “Silly, butfun, eh?” Then out came the broadaxe again for a final, ferocious volley.

When the concerto was over, the Wharton crowd shot up as ifthey had been sitting on bees. It was the quickest and warmest ovation I’veseen for a soloist in years. Nobody calmed down until Gurt agreed to an encore— the jingly, ragtime rave-up “The Banjo” by Louis Marie Gottschalk.

It’s no wonder Muffitt programmed the evening’s majorstatement, the Sibelius Fifth, before the intermission. A cynic might concludethat Muffitt was worried about losing half the audience if he servedTchaikovsky first. In hindsight, I understand that nothing could have followedthe Tchaikovsky concerto’s cathartic fun, least of all so serious a slab ofsymphony.

Muffitt is deeply committed to Sibelius, and every bar ofFriday’s performance glowed with his passion for the music.

It began as a cinematic flight skirting the Scandinaviantreeline, with huge foothill-to-peak chords and sudden swoops into the cragsand lonely pines. No detail in the panorama was lost, from glittery straysnowflakes to dark outcrops of rock amid the snows below. After such a spaciousand meandering flight pattern, the sudden acceleration to climax in the firstmovement hit the hall with the G-force of re-entry from space. It was one ofthe most powerful moments the symphony has delivered in recent years.

Muffitt and the orchestra sustained the grandeur and majestyall the way through the symphony’s strange, in-and-out final chords. Have youever tried to order a burger through a broken speaker at a drive-up window?“Eyes with that, sir?” The ending of the Fifth uses similar interrupted sounds,as a deliberate technique, albeit with grander ends in mind. Sibelius — no,make that God — is cupping his hands over your ears, taking them away for asplit second at a time, because your head would explode if you heard the finalchords at full force.

It must be tempting to rush such a tricky ending to keep theaudience on the hook (and stop them from clapping in the mistaken belief thesymphony is over.) But that’s not Muffitt’s style. If anything, he opened upthe pauses to full fjord-flows-into-ocean breadth, but the maestro’s controland momentum was so deeply rooted nobody dared applaud until the symphony wasreally over.

If Tchaikovsky and Sibelius were painted in rich orchestralcolors, the evening’s opener, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme byThomas Tallis,” was etched in black and white — strings alone, deployed in athree-tiered array of large ensemble, medium ensemble and four soloists.

Let’s face it — like that dumb old song “Get Happy,” bubblyovertures can tire you out. This was a much more satisfying way to begin aconcert. Beginning from a mere glimmer in the violins, a medieval melody passedthrough a dark prism of 20th-century harmonies and variations, as ifechoing through long catacombs and deep caverns. The feeling of depth wasuncanny; the transitions among sections and soloists were delicate as awhisper.

The strings, for many years the Lansing Symphony’s shakiestpillar, came through at every level, achieving organ-like sonorities thatthrobbed through the hall with overwhelming power.

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