Music Review | Yale At Carnegie: Moving Out Of The Ivy Halls To Perform At Carnegie

“Yale at Carnegie” offered different come-ons to different constituencies on Sunday night. The concert, the fifth in a series bringing the university’s school of music to Carnegie Hall, appealed first to the curious. Prokofiev’s B flat Piano Concerto for the left hand is not exactly a repertory item, and Boris Berman was there to play the solos, joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale, led by Shinik Hahm.

Boris Berman playing a Prokofiev concerto on Sunday.

Academics could celebrate the new Prokofiev Society of America, based at Yale and intended as a clearing house for international research and promotion. Listeners interested in hearing Prokofiev in his gracious mood could enjoy the beloved “Classical” Symphony at the start of the evening and excerpts from ballet music from “Romeo and Juliet” at the end.

Clues to the concerto’s relative obscurity were abundant. It is not a friendly piece. The language is bitter and acidic. The long slow movement is gracefully shaped but moves through a barren landscape. Prokofiev had the gifts to write any kind of music he chose. Here he follows a 20th-century aesthetic that assigns to music the obligation not to please but to report in musical terms on the harsh circumstances of life around it.

If the piece is unkind to listeners, it is even more unkind to pianists, and no one could help admiring Mr. Berman’s fluency with such dense and fiercely complicated piano writing. Prokofiev was one of a number of composers commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein (Ludwig of the “Tractatus” was his brother), who had lost his right arm in World War I.

Wittgenstein was not pleased with the Prokofiev submission, saying it was music he did not understand. Maybe Prokofiev should have counted his blessings. Ravel, whose Concerto for the Left Hand is the most enduring of these commissions, was said to have been appalled by Wittgenstein’s interpretation of it.

Friends of Yale might have been attracted to Sunday’s concert just to hear how the school’s current music students are doing. You heard a lot of fine individual playing, but not all of it exactly at the same time. You came away from the “Classical” Symphony realizing how hard it is to make this ubiquitous piece precise.

Among student orchestras the Yale Philharmonia is certainly better than most, although it has a hard time matching the otherworldly ensemble and professional level of sophistication that similar orchestras from the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School brought to New York this season. Student orchestras, on the other hand, are about students more than about audiences, and listening to education in progress had its own satisfactions.

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