Palm Beach Symphony closes season with a feast of Beethoven

Gerard Schwarz conducted the Palm Beach Symphony’s final concert of the season Thursday night at the Kravis Center. File photo: IndieHouse Films

The Palm Beach Symphony ended its 50th season Thursday night with an all-Beethoven concert that began with the composer’s first major orchestral work and ended with his last.

The concert opened with a piano concerto composed largely for Beethoven’s own use as soloist and concluded with the Symphony No. 9, a work that would tower over the next century of music, inspiring such composers as Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler.

Anyone not fond of all-Beethoven programs, by the way, may have a rough time in a couple of years with the 2027 concert season, which will take place on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death—and following the composer’s 250th birthday anniversary in 2020. 

Although published after Beethoven’s first keyboard concerto, the Piano Concerto No. 2 was actually composed earlier, begun in 1787 while Mozart was still alive. Beethoven would revise it for years.

Handling the solo part was Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the Russian-American pianist and son of the celebrated author and critic of Soviet communism Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

To say that a performance was Classical in proportions can imply that it was dry and metronomic. But without pounding the keyboard or going much above forte, Solzhenitsyn gave a sparkling, buoyant account of the work’s busy and melodic solo part. His tone was singing and rounded in the lyric passages that looked forward to Romantic piano concertos. The cadenza came off as virtuosic, rumbling and grandiose.

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