Cohen-Venzago victorious

Lang Lang was pre-feted, honored and attracted a nearly full Hilbert Circle Theatre crowd. A pizza party mainly for his local Chinese-American supporters was held afterward. Trouble was, Lang Lang wasn’t there. The much-heralded 21-year-old piano virtuoso was sidelined by his doctors for muscle strain and had to cancel.

Brazilian pianist Arnaldo Coehn was a worthy replacement for Lang Lang.

Still, the show must go on, and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra music director Mario Venzago adroitly got a most worthy replacement for last weekend’s 12th ISO classical program: Brazilian pianist Arnaldo Cohen. The 55-year-old virtuoso-in-his-own-rite substituted Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 for Lang Lang’s scheduled Saint-Saëns’ Concerto No. 2 — both in G Minor. And, to put it bluntly, Cohen played the hell out of it.

In fact, it’s difficult to imagine anyone rendering this light-veined-but-stylishly-characteristic display piece of the 22-year-old Mendelssohn any better: Cohen’s musically sensitive touch, accompanied by beautifully wrought passage and scale work, abounded throughout the concerto’s three connected movements.

He struck a well-nigh perfect balance between articulation and legato. Together with Venzago and his ensemble, Cohen revealed more musically worthy material than one usually associates with this work. His standing ovation prompted two Brazilian encores, the second a take-off on Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz.

As an added audience fillip for the soloist/program change, Venzago began with Mendelssohn’s all-too-famous “Wedding March” from his incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61. A bit rushed in places, the piece nonetheless delivered us everything except the ritual rice throwing.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D (“Titan”) made up the program’s last hour — as well as showing our music director at his best. With this work, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) not only defined his massive symphonic style — to be further expanded in his following, and more “titanic” — eight (and a third) symphonies, but provided the more casual listener his most ingratiating one. Venzago, beginning ominously on string-played super low and super high A’s, wove his way through the four movements, building Mahler’s Viennese folk-tune structure into a world embracing monument. Though I’ve never seen this discussed, a motif fully brought out at the final movement’s stormy opening surely came from the first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Minor, D.784 — the resemblance being “plain as day” and underscoring the symphony’s indebtedness to all things Viennese. Given the work’s heroically victorious conclusion, by the time the house ceased standing, shouting and applauding, Lang Lang had surely been forgotten.