Nel's Ravel gels well

Symphonic music is all about sophistication, poise and polish, right? Wrong! Get too full of yourself on the concert stage and Bugs Bunny will bang the bandshell with a giant hammer until you vibrate, or make you hold a note until your face turns plaid. The Three Stooges will flick grapes down your throat, fill your piano with cats, sprinkle ants on your bosom and saw your cello in half.

If you’re more stuck on yourself than the music, you deserve it.

Anton Nel, the Lansing Symphony’s live-wire piano soloist at Saturday’s season closer, understands this, and so does maestro Timothy Muffitt.

Total, self-abnegating absorption in great music can bring forth miracles, and that’s what happened at the symphony’s season closer Saturday.

I can’t remember when I’ve seen a soloist throw himself into his work with as much energy, precision and gusto as Nel threw himself into two difficult concertos by Maurice Ravel.

He wasn’t a potential target for Bugs Bunny — he was Bugs Bunny: quick, nimble, tireless, full of high fun and utterly in command.

It wasn’t just Nel, either. During a big moment in Ravel’s stormy Concerto for the Left Hand, a front-row violinist leaned into a note, eyes shut with ecstasy, and recoiled so hard she nearly head-butted the violinist behind her.

Even the relatively light curtain-raiser, George Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture,” got a grand, Hollywood-style reading that came at you in layers and layers, building up surprising force. It was the first time I’ve ever gotten goosebumps from an overture — a good omen.

But the meat of the program was the unusual Ravel pairing. It’s rare for a soloist to play two major works in one night, but the two concertos made a perfect contrast. The G Major concerto (the one for two hands) is an urbane, bustling affair, beginning with a manic-depressive kaleidoscope of melodies and gestures. At first, the pseudo-jazz energy sounded more like Gershwin than the real Gershwin (a neat bit of sequencing on Muffitt’s part). But flaccid interludes inexplicably interrupted the razzle-dazzle. This is cubist music with its own trans-logical logic, and Muffitt focused and dissipated the energy with timing so brilliant it bordered on sleight of hand.

Following an emotional narrative only a genius like Ravel could put over, the first movement’s odd circus sets the stage for one of the most beautiful and moving slow movements ever written.

Nel played alone for about five pregnant minutes, focusing as if his life depended on each note. He slowly let the melody down, down, like a bucket into the deepest well of memory and mortality. The delicate moment when the orchestra finally enters was pure magic. Richard Sherman took up a note from Nel, as gently as if he were picking up an infant, handed it to oboist Jan Eberle next to him, who passed it to Gretchen Morse on English horn.

Underneath this quietly miraculous triple play, the violins started to swell like a spring breeze, and unutterable wonderment was underway. It sounded like the stream of time itself, an autumnal creek where moments float away like curled leaves, beautiful and sad. Somehow, Nel made the piano sound liquid, as if he were dipping the keyboard into that same stream.

But you can only dwell on mortality for so long. When the last movement snapped back to the razzle-dazzle, Nel’s performance never flagged. 

If the first concerto was manic-depressive, the night’s second helping of Nel and Ravel was volcanic-impressive. The Concerto for the Left Hand had half the appendages, but whipped up twice the sound. It rose inexorably from of a murky blur of low instruments —bassoons, basses, gongs — into a towering wall of sound.

Written for a pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, the concerto is a breathtaking assertion of the human will to survive and flourish, and a passionate rebuke to the horrors of war. “See,” it seems to cry. “We can do this as well!”

Grasping the side of the piano with his right hand at times, Nel discharged the tenderness and grandeur of a whole human being, the whole human race, through his left hand. 

The evening’s closer, Gershwin’s “An American In Paris,” made a fine dessert, although it sounded a bit banal after the sublime double dip of Ravel. But Gershwin’s whoops, honks and sassy smeared notes were all deployed with panache and even some crudity, and that’s what being an American in Paris is all about. 

Throughout the season, but especially Saturday night, Muffitt and the troops showed that great symphonic music, is the opposite of posturing and self-regard. It’s soldiering for peace, total immersion in terror and beauty, absolute surrender to creative tumult.

Leave the preening and posing to Spinal Tap. If you can’t geek out to classical music, what’s the point?