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Lang Lang, Rafael Payare, and an Evening of Revealing Contrasts Montreal
Maison Symphonique, Place des Arts
09/23/2026 -
Emilie Mayer: Overture No. 2
Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E‑flat major, “Emperor”, Op. 73
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43
Lang Lang (piano)
Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Rafael Payare (conductor)
L. Lang, R. Payare (© Antoine Saito)
The advertised sovereign of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’s September 23 concert was, naturally, Lang Lang. Yet the evening’s most intriguing discovery came before he had played a note, in Mayer’s Overture No. 2. And its most tantalizing promise came in the opening movement of Sibelius’s Second Symphony, a promise that Rafael Payare’s subsequent interpretive choices did not entirely fulfill. Between those two discoveries stood a Beethoven Emperor that proved considerably more rewarding than anticipated.
Emilie Mayer (1812-1883) deserves considerably more recognition, and this performance offered a persuasive reminder of why. Her Overture No. 2 inhabits a familiar nineteenth-century vocabulary, with all the expected Romantic gestures, contrasts and climaxes. Yet familiarity of idiom does not entail predictability. There are enough harmonic and structural twists to keep any aficionado spellbound when the work is played with conviction. Payare and the OSM did just that. The overture received a performance alert to its contrasts without overstating them, and its cumulative momentum was convincingly maintained. What might easily have seemed merely an exercise in musical archaeology instead emerged as accomplished, attractive and genuinely individual music. Mayer’s obscurity increasingly seemed a historical accident rather than an aesthetic verdict.
Then came Beethoven’s Emperor, and Lang Lang. I approached this encounter with some reservations. Lang Lang’s spectacular showmanship is hardly incidental to his public persona, and at times his physical involvement with the music can seem almost choreographically extravagant. Yet on this occasion the theatricality was backed by something considerably more substantial: genuine depth of feeling and an impressive knowledge of the score. The result was a considerable success and better than I had expected. The pianist’s opening flourishes were appropriately imperial, but he did not mistake grandeur for bombast. His playing possessed weight and rhetorical amplitude while remaining attentive to Beethoven’s architecture. The slow movement was particularly revealing, its lyricism acquiring an inwardness that placed the pianist’s celebrated theatrical personality in a different perspective. The gestures remained, but they seemed to arise from the music rather than being superimposed upon it.
Lang Lang’s musicianship also emerged in his handling of Beethoven’s transitions and contrasts. He could luxuriate in a phrase without losing its structural function, and could unleash formidable virtuosity without reducing the finale to a mere display of pianistic prowess. Spectacle, in other words, was not the opposite of substance here; it was supported by it. Payare proved an unusually sympathetic partner. The OSM played with clarity, flexibility and considerable refinement, providing the concerto with its necessary orchestral grandeur without overwhelming the soloist. The subsequent encores further complicated the easy caricature of Lang Lang as pure virtuoso showman: the delicacy of Liszt’s Consolation No. 2 and the incendiary brilliance of de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance revealed markedly different facets of the pianist’s musical personality.
Sibelius, however, was another matter. The first movement of the Second Symphony was absolutely sublime. Payare elicited wonderfully graded dynamics from the OSM, and the music seemed to grow organically from its deceptively modest opening. The strings possessed both warmth and suppleness, while the winds contributed that particular Nordic luminosity that makes Sibelius’s orchestration so distinctive. Tension accumulated almost imperceptibly, and the movement seemed to portend greatness to come. Sadly, that greatness did not fully materialize. The problem was not the quality of the playing. Indeed, individual sections and episodes were frequently magnificent. Rather, the performance became less than the sum of its parts, largely because of Payare’s pronounced tendency to exaggerate the dramatic and flamboyant. That instinct has obvious virtues. It can produce thrilling climaxes, sharply etched contrasts and moments of undeniable theatrical impact. However, Sibelius’s Second Symphony requires something more elusive than a succession of impressive moments. Its grandeur is ultimately architectural: themes must accumulate significance, tensions must be allowed to develop patiently, and the final triumph must seem to have been discovered rather than imposed.
Payare occasionally pushed the music toward the latter. Climaxes were sometimes made to announce themselves too emphatically; contrasts became more spectacular than organically inevitable. The effect could be impressive in the moment, but the larger trajectory consequently lost some of its inevitability. One admired the individual peaks while becoming increasingly conscious that the mountain range was not quite holding together. This was especially frustrating because the first movement had demonstrated how effective Payare could be when he trusted Sibelius’s natural processes. There, the dynamics breathed, tensions accumulated with remarkable subtlety, and the music seemed almost to generate its own momentum. Later, the conductor’s taste for dramatic amplification sometimes overwhelmed precisely that quality. The final apotheosis therefore failed to deliver the overwhelming sense of arrival that the opening movement had promised. It was powerful, often beautifully played, and certainly not without excitement; but it did not achieve the inexorable cumulative force that Sibelius’s architecture demands.
The concert nonetheless offered much to savour. Mayer provided a genuine discovery; Lang Lang demonstrated that spectacular showmanship can coexist with depth, intelligence and serious musicianship; and the OSM repeatedly displayed the virtuosity and responsiveness that make it such an accomplished ensemble. But the evening also offered a useful distinction between dramatic effect and dramatic architecture. Payare has an evident gift for the former. The challenge is to make those impressive moments serve the latter. In Sibelius, particularly, the conductor must sometimes resist the temptation to underline what the music already says so eloquently for itself.
The Emperor may have commanded the evening’s publicity, but Mayer provided its most unexpected revelation, while Sibelius provided its most tantalizing lesson: sometimes the most powerful climax is the one that has been allowed, rather than compelled, to arrive.
Ossama el Naggar
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