September 19 and 20, 2025
Meymandi Concert Hall
Raleigh, North Carolina — USA
North Carolina Symphony; Carlos Miguel Prieto, conductor; Denis Kozhukhin, piano.
Samuel BARBER: Overture to the School for Scandal, Op. 5
Sergei RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Minor, Op. 40 (1928 revision)
Antonin DVOŘÁK: Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95
Christopher Hill | 22 SEP 2025
Carlos Miguel Prieto started his tenure as music director of the North Carolina Symphony two seasons ago. His third season with the orchestra coincides with the bisesquicentennial of our Declaration of Independence, and this season has accordingly been designated America250, with many of the concerts featuring works written here in the United States.
For the season’s opening concert, Prieto chose pieces by three of the greatest melodists ever to have lived in the United States, Antonín Dvořák, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Samuel Barber. In NCS tradition, it launched with the National Anthem. Many in the packed hall seemed genuinely thrilled when Prieto gestured for everyone to sing along. Thunderous applause followed the anthem’s final phrase.
The first half opened with Barber’s School for Scandal Overture, Op. 5. At Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music in the late 1920s, Barber was the star pupil of composition teacher Rosario Scalero. Barber won a prize for a violin sonata he wrote under Scalero as a freshman, and this prize eventually funded an extended tour of Europe in 1931. It’s likely no coincidence that Rosario Scalero spent summers in Italy or that Barber met with his mentor in the summer of 1931 and proposed writing his first work for full orchestra, an overture so titled that it might be considered a contribution to the neo-classical vogue so prominent in that era (Richard Sheridan’s satirical play School for Scandal dates from 1777). Scalero approved the project, and Barber, working intently, finished the full score of the overture in time for it to be performed by the Curtis Institute Orchestra that fall.
However, for whatever reasons, the Curtis ensemble chose not to play it, and Barber, his hopes for a brilliant success thus dashed, had to wait almost two agonizing years before anyone else took an interest in looking at his coming-out score. But when anyone else finally did, that anyone happened to be Leopold Stokowski, and after Maestro Stokowski looked at it, the Philadelphia Orchestra, in the summer of 1935, premiered the work under his baton at Robin Hood Dell—a venue something like Tanglewood. It won Barber a second lucrative prize and was every bit the brilliant success the flegling composer had been hoping for. Within a year or two, orchestral music by Barber was being performed at the Salzburg Festival. Now that’s one meteoric rise. More to the point, the Overture to the School for Scandal has not worn out its welcome and today retains its place in the repertoire of many professional symphony orchestras, including the North Carolina Symphony.
The overture is brilliantly scored, and on Friday evening, finely judged balances in the orchestra brought out the score’s wealth of tonal colors and textures. Tempos were suitably elastic—ensuring that the audience could savor Barber’s superior melodic gifts—yet not so relaxed that there was any loss in forward momentum. In short, the performance got the season off to a brilliant start.
Following the Barber overture, the concert continued with the final piano concerto by Rachmaninoff. The soloist, Denis Kozhukhin, was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (as was Daniil Trifonov). Kozhukhin studied with one of the very best mid-twentieth-century Russian pianists, Dmitri Bashkirov, and in turn, Kozhukhin proved to be one of Bashkirov’s very best students. Kozhukhin came to international prominence after becoming a medalist in two major competitions: the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2006 (3rd place) and the Queen Elizabeth Competition in 2010 (1st place). Today, Kozhukhin resides in Belgium. (As readers will see below, my previous exposure to Koshukhin is limited to a highly praised CD comprising Brahms Op. 10 and Op. 116.)
Rachmaninoff experienced two major compositional crises in his career. The first was the critical response to his First Symphony, which rendered the composer compositionally mute for several years and eventually led him to destroy the symphony’s score. The second major crisis grew out of the critical response to Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Piano Concerto, the one heard this weekend. This time, the composer didn’t destroy his score, but instead revised it twice: first, the very next year, and second, fourteen years later. It is the second revision of this concerto that is usually played and recorded. Kozhukhin, however, is that rare pianist who chooses to play the first revision. He played it with the National Symphony Orchestra under Gianandrea Noseda in 2023, and he’s playing it again in Raleigh this weekend. (As an aside, Prieto led the National Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Rachmaninoff just last January.)
Denis Kozhukhin performs Rachmaninoff’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 4’ with the North Carolina Symphony. (courtesy of NCS)
Your reviewer admires musicians who give the public a chance to audition rarely heard scores, and that admiration naturally extends to Kozhukhin. One of the pleasures of his performance was the way he brought out the powerful bass register of the Steinway Model D. He does the same thing in his recordings of Brahms, so it would seem to be a feature of his pianistic approach. Another feature of his playing is nuanced, poetic solo playing, particularly in the chamber music episodes of the first movement’s development and throughout much of the second movement.
However, to me, Kozhukhin’s approach to Rachmaninoff seems a bit schematic, ternary in fact—that is, in the outer movements when he isn’t hammering out a tune over the full orchestra, and when he isn’t playing poetically in solo episodes, he is playing prestissimo. The first time he did this, in the opening paragraph of the first movement, he got ahead of the orchestra. The North Carolina Symphony and its conductor were and are too good to let this happen more than once. But credit the pianist for consistency: he remained fully committed to his prestissimo passagework throughout. His is clearly a formidable technique, and even the most difficult passages always ended gracefully, as if he could play them in his sleep. There’s no question that Kozhukhin’s interpretation was deft and athletically satisfying—for many, these qualities may carry the day.
To your reviewer’s ears, on the other hand, the prestissimo approach turned all passagework into sweeping gestures that, after a while, start sounding more and more the same and less and less sweeping. Many virtuosos distinguish, to great musical effect, between gestural passagework and melodic passagework in the Fourth Concerto, just as Kozhukhin does in Brahms. That’s not possible when playing sixteenth notes as a race to the finish line. Yet one can, at the very least, be grateful for the pianist’s expertise and his industry in presenting this rarely heard revision of what some consider Rachmaninoff’s best concerto. The encore, brief and austere, was “In Church”—No. 24 from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, Op. 39.
Following the intermission interval, Maestro Prieto and the North Carolina musicians rewarded their audience for its consumption of two lesser-known works by performing one of the undisputed warhorses in the classical repertoire, Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, composed while Dvořák was in the United States during the early 1890s. In the unlikely event that you don’t happen to know Dvořák’s final symphony, chances are it will make an instant positive impression on you. Why? First, the Ninth Symphony’s musical gestures are rhythmically incisive. Second, its melodies are deeply felt. Third, its chord sequences are a bit unconventional and still sound fresh.
Let me cut to the chase: Prieto is an ideal conductor for Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, and I doubt I will ever hear a better performance or even perhaps a performance that matches what the North Carolina Symphony accomplished under his baton. Trim, elegant, and energetic, Prieto can make you forget that he is a seasoned veteran of the podium. But that seasoning and the insights stemming from it were evident throughout all four movements. First, the pacing was superb, flexible, and never too fast nor too slow. And in Dvořák, pacing can be a tricky thing. One can be a fine conductor and flunk the Dvořák test. A couple of years ago, in Carnegie Hall, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, a fine conductor, and the Philadelphia Orchestra programmed Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony. To your reviewer’s surprise, the symphony performance turned out to be a flavorless version of this delightful and quintessentially Czech work. Nothing clicked.
On Friday night in Raleigh, to the contrary, everything clicked. In the coda of the last movement, your reviewer’s limbic system got a workout, and I suspect many other audience members felt goosebumps, too. Attention to sonority was a highlight throughout, but especially in the second movement. There, the orchestra played a very extended passage in a continually hushed and nuanced pianissimo—a difficult task. What made this performance particularly special, though, was its pacing. One of the hazards of the New World Symphony is letting all the repeated phrase sequences create a flat musical surface; one starts noticing those repeated phrases (and maybe even counting them, as Bruckner did). In the Friday evening concert, phrase sequences were always plastic, always headed somewhere. There was too much musical detail to leave time for counting.
A yet greater hazard in the symphony is allowing Dvořák’s formal sections to sound like a medley. When you study Dvořák’s early symphonies, you learn how many complexities he had dropped by the time he wrote his last three symphonies. He really knew exactly what he was doing. Yet when we first encounter these last symphonies, they can at times appear merely folksy and relaxed. B follows A, but it may appear that A could just as well follow B. This, in your reviewer’s view, was where Neset-Sequin went wrong in the aforementioned concert. In any event, it is particularly through subtle emphases and balances that Prieto and the orchestra made the formal structure of the symphony sound organic, not arbitrary. This is no small feat, and also evidence of how hard the musicians have worked together. The orchestra is a really fine ensemble (even if high horn solos occasionally have flubs), and this conductor is living proof that even in the mid-2020s, you don’t have to be Scandinavian and under 30 to be worthy of a major orchestra. Raleigh is lucky to have Prieto.
The North Carolina Symphony has the delightful habit of offering ticket-holders pre-concert activities. Friday night’s offering was a winning performance of Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet, opus 96, by four of the orchestra’s string players: violinists Jacqueline Wolborsky and Erin Zehngut, violist Amy Mason, and cellist Nathaniel Yaffe. There’s a lot to like about classical music in Raleigh. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- North Carolina Symphony: ncsymphony.org
- Carlos Miguel Prieto: carlosmiguelprieto.com
- Denis Kozhukhin: deniskozhukhin.com
Read more by Christopher Hill.
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