Kern duo dazzles symphony audience

A mother-son double piano concerto may seem and look on stage like a novelty, but in Friday night’s San Antonio Symphony concert, Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos was much more.

The concerto was a novelty when composed by Mozart at a time, 1779, when two-piano pieces were rare and new. And it involved family. Mozart wrote the piece to play with his sister.

Friday night, it was Olga Kern and Vladislav Kern’s turn. What flowed from the stage was a remarkable, sophisticated piece, regardless of the kinship at the keyboards. So much melody-sharing occurred between the pianists and with the orchestra that it became clear this was a threeway conversation, a happy social event.

The highlight was the dreamy middle movement that unfolded with grace and beauty.

Just before intermission, Vladislav Kern, who is about 20, returned to the stage, nonchalantly knocking off two difficult Chopin Etudes, Nos. 1 and 2, that sparkled as encores, adding credibility to his emerging talent.

Olga Kern is a San Antonio audience favorite as a Van Cliburn International Piano Competition gold medal winner. She functions as the bookends to the orchestra’s classical series season, having performed the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 to open the season last fall.

Olga Kern returned to the stage Friday night after intermission to show her Russian roots with a fierce rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Her entrance for the pulsating, surging opening theme was breathtaking in its power and authority. The middle section was otherworldly.

Olga Kern’s encore of Prokofiev’s Etude No. 4 was followed by another encore with her son coming back on stage — Rachmaninoff ’s “Polka italienne” for four hands.

The concert opened with an orchestral showpiece, Tchaikovsky’s “Mozartiana.” Under Music Director Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Tchaikovsky’s lush orchestrations rippled with ease, suggesting ballet, especially the sensitive shaping of the composer’s arrangement of Mozart’s transcendental setting to “Ave Verum Corpus.”

The final listed piece was Tchaikovsky’s “Francesca da Rimini,” aimed at expressing Francesca’s story in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” The whirlwinds of hell filled the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts as Francesca’s story of doomed love emerged. The piece concluded the listed program not with triumph but with terrifying emotional devastation, the orchestra in top form.

Lang-Lessing wasn’t quite ready to let the season’s last classical concert end with that, though. He led the orchestra in a rousing performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Cossack Dance” from “Mazeppa” as an encore for the audience of nearly 1,150 people.

The concert repeats at 2 p.m. today at the Tobin Center downtown.

Pianist Olga Kern performed Prokofiev’s Etude No. 4 as a first encore Friday night.