By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 23, 2024 performance – The final Friday concert of the 2024 Tanglewood season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summertime sojourn in the Berkshires consisted of Frederick Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Opus 11, featuring pianist Bruce Liu, followed by Edward Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, Opus 36, Enigma, with Ryan Bancroft conducting.
Chopin (1810-1849), a prodigy who made his debut as a pianist at age 7, was so crazy for the piano that he composed no music that wasn’t piano-centric. Besides all the brilliant music he created for us, Chopin also was a pithy wit, as this great line proves: “I’ve never heard anything so great; in it Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.” (Chopin was referring to the Archduke Trio)
Who knows whether tonight’s piano soloist, Bruce Liu, ever snaps his fingers at anyone? He certainly makes an audience snap to attention when his fingers dance along the keyboard. At the conclusion of the concerto, the audience called for an encore, and I was surprised to hear another note from the piano, so exhausted I imagined it to be.
Edward Elgar, pretty much an autodidact, had the great good luck to marry the woman who would be the catalyst of his best work. As we learn in the program notes, during their thirty years of marriage, Elgar became the first English composer of widespread acclaim in two centuries; sadly, however, he completed no large works during his fourteen years as a widower.
In his own program notes on Enigma, Elgar wrote, “through and over the whole set another larger theme ‘goes,’ but is not played.” We note that his countryman, Churchill, never found the key to Russia, which he famously called a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma. Elgar gave us the key to his: each variation represents how he imagined someone important to him would have played the original theme, beginning with his wife!