I can’t help but be skeptical about Janine Jansen. Would she have the career she currently has if she didn’t look the way she did? She definitely is a remarkable talent — she blazed through the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, one of the most dizzying pieces of music ever written. But there was one moment where she and the orchestra lost each other. One split second — I wouldn’t have caught it if I wasn’t a) really familiar with the piece and b) sitting as close as I was at that particular angle. She and conductor Lorin Maazel shot one another and look and some kind of classical music ESP took over.
This is no big deal in any other context, but this is the New York Philharmonic and this is the closest thing I ever heard to a flat-out WRONG NOTE at a performance. And it happens to be with a lead performer who gets a little bit of flak for being all about her outfits and her MySpace Page. I swear I’m not being sexist — if it were some Stradivari stud I’d be equally suspect.
Anyway, it’s not like the performance wasn’t altogether awesome and the second act of the Tchaikovsky 4th Symphony was as balls-out tremendous as you might expect. Quite possibly was the loudest unamplified music I’ve ever heard. The beginning of the last act woke all the old doctors up, I can assure you.
