Music review: Hèléne Grimaud illuminates Brahms with L.A. Phil at Bowl

This review has been updated. See note below.

Brahms’ brawny First Piano Concerto in D Minor has never really been considered women’s work. Where that notion came from is anyone’s guess, but it somehow persists even in supposedly post-sexist concert life. My wisecracking college piano teacher — a Bay Area political agitator in the ‘30s and the sister of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen — dubbed it the battle-ax concerto because the only woman she had ever known to play it was the formidable British pianist Myra Hess, although someone named Miss Baglehole happened to give the first performance of the 1858 concerto in London.

FOR THE RECORD:
Helene Grimaud: A review in the Aug. 8 Calendar section of Helene Grimaud’s performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl misspelled the last name of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and his sister, Estelle, as Cain.

How Estelle Caen would have loved Hèléne Grimaud at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night, for her illuminating account of the concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic but also for her elegant, cinematic presence. The French pianist is the only stellar modern woman I can find who has recorded the concerto. Grimaud has, in fact, recorded it twice, first 15 years ago with Kurt Masur in Berlin and in a new set of both Brahms piano concertos on the way in October conducted by Andris Nelsons. For Tuesday’s D Minor, the young American James Gaffigan was on the podium.

The whole topic of gender and performance is, of course, far more highly charged than meaningful. Close your eyes and you guess who. But there really is something about this concerto that gets guys going at the keyboard. Even the not exactly macho Glenn Gould, to whom Grimaud has been compared in her fearless originality, could become uncharacteristically blustery when attacking the D-Minor Concerto.

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In that sense, Grimaud proves here more Gould than Gould had been. She plays with tonal clarity and rhythmic élan. She can make a plumy big sound when she wants, too, but that isn’t very often. Instead, she prefers propulsion. You don’t necessarily know where she’s going with a phrase but you do know there is no stopping her.

The nearly 50-minute score, which was played after intermission and which was the main piece of the program, is symphonically big-boned and so entrenched in the classical canon that we easily forget it was originally a young romantic’s calling card. Brahms was 24 when he finished the score. He had, then, long hair and a poet’s soulfully penetrating gaze.

Grimaud has a habit of rotating her upper torso while waiting for an entrance, as if she were assuming a musical trance. But when she danced around Brahms’ stunning lyrical themes or egged on his hard-edged counterpoint, she added useful grace to Brahmsian ardor. The big trills in which big guys like to put all their weight for her became studies into the science of resonance.

In the slow movement, Grimaud came close to achieving a greater sense of spiritual intensity than most can at the Bowl, and without the slightest trace of sentimentality. But when the fast movement took off, her tone turned glittery and the joint jumped. The accents were alive, and momentum was the main thrill.

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Gaffigan, who is music director of the Lucerne Symphony, is somewhat Brahms-obsessed himself these days. He’s just completed a Brahms project with his Swiss orchestra of pairing the four symphonies with new pieces by the prolific German composer Wolfgang Rihm. Now Rihm has collected those into a large symphony, “Nähe Fern.” The title comes from a phrase in a Goethe poem about how all nearness becomes distance when night falls, and Gaffigan has recorded it.

It’s the best thing I’ve heard from Rihm in at least a decade, and it would have made a perfect companion piece for the D-Minor Concerto were the Bowl the kind of place to do such programs. Instead, the program, which will be repeated Thursday night (to allow the orchestra extra rehearsal time for the upcoming big Verdi performances by Gustavo Dudamel next week), began with an almost perfunctory first half — Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture and Strauss’ early short tone poem “Don Juan.”

Gaffigan, though, made the most of everything he conducted. In the Brahms, he was broad and energetic, but made room for Grimaud to be Grimaud. His Beethoven was punchy.

“Don Juan” happens to be another showpiece by a brilliant 24-year-old with an already recognizable sound. Gaffigan went for rhapsody and excitement. He was dripping wet at the end, and the L.A. Phil sounded in fine full bloom.

[For the record: An earlier version of this review misspelled Caen.]

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