SYMPHONY REVIEW

Ludwig van Beethoven is not usually seen as a painter of musical landscapes, but there was something deeply natural about the performance of soloist Yuliya Gorenman and the Lancaster Symphony Orchestra in his Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major on Friday night at the Fulton Opera House.

The concert opened with Gioacchino Rossini's Overture to the Opera "L'Italiana in Algeri" ("The Italian Girl in Algiers"), a love-struck cross-cultural comedy. It began with deceptively demure plucked strings and a plaintive solo for the oboe, but soon the woodwinds and strings were scampering around each other in a merry dance, led by David DiGiocobbe's piccolo. It was a jolly beginning to a most impressive program.

Gorenman, last heard here in a well-received 2008 performance of Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor, is a specialist in Beethoven, and her performance was shimmering and iridescent.

The piece opened with a few deceptively simple chords on the piano, followed by the orchestra entering, quietly but almost shockingly, in a different key. After an extended passage for orchestra, Gorenman re-entered with a torrent of notes, seeming to spill over the orchestra like flowing water. Her pedaling created a veil-like effect in some of the passages, increasing the watery feel.

In the second movement, Gorenman and the orchestra, conducted by Stephen Gunzenhauser, seemed to be opponents, with the calm piano eventually subduing the jagged unease of the orchestra. The final movement brought joy and even playfulness to the work, as the piano and orchestra batted themes back and forth and Gorenman shifted into a more extroverted, less veiled mode.

It was a marvelous performance, and Gorenman followed up with not one but two encores, first introduced by Gorenman as "More Beethoven" — the first movement of the Waldstein Sonata (No. 21), a dramatic contrast. The next encore was Franz Liszt's transcription of the Robert Schumann song "Widmung" ("Dedication") — another winning performance.

Also on the program was Symphony No. 1 in C Minor by Johannes Brahms, a work that took him 16 years to write. Beethoven was both an ideal and an obsession for Brahms, and this symphony, in many ways, shows the struggle the later composer had with the old master.

In his introductory remarks to the Brahms work, which took up the second half of the program, Gunzenhauser described it as a piece of "musical architecture" that directly draws on Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and "a remarkable example of the heart and mind."

The performance also was remarkably cohesive and gripping, from the stormy beginning through the melancholy love story of the second movement into the folk dances of the third. The work culminates in a massive fourth movement, with a magnificent chorale and passages that call to mind Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

The orchestra will perform again today at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m.

epatton@lnpnews.com