Pianist Ikemiya adds fire to BSO

There is something deliciously compelling about Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat minor. It is, at once, bombastic and delicate, harrowing and cajoling, confusing and lucid.

There is also something wickedly inviting about soloist Masanobu Ikemiya, a classically trained, internationally known pianist with an unquenchable passion for ragtime.

So when Ikemiya sat at the piano Sunday to play Tchaikovsky’s whirling masterpiece with the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, it’s no wonder a hush of rich anticipation fell over the hall at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono. The first half of the concert had been somewhat tepid, and the audience was ready to rock – and suspected that Ikemiya, best known in Maine as founder of the Arcady Music Festival and ragtime master, was the man for the job.

Indeed, Ikemiya proved himself a vehement classical pianist, generous in spirit and exuberant in style. This is nerve-racking music, the kind that makes you sit up straight with tight shoulders because the ornamentation is filled with musical hiccups, battering percussion and cascading jaunts on the keyboard. No matter how one reads this score – as vulgar or as captivating, profane or profound, with fastidiousness or fluency – the sheer tonnage of it is always exciting.

Predictably, Ikemiya went for it. He summoned forth the bigness and found poetry in the smaller moments. No matter how you look at it, his performance was a fireball.

Which, it’s true, could not be said of the performances of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 1 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 earlier in the program.

Guest conductor Jonathan Hallstrom, who is also music director of the Colby Symphony Orchestra and a teacher there, led the BSO in a studied reading of the Bach. It was meticulous and measured but more in a mechanical fashion than in the gracefulness of regal, balletic dances. To Hallstrom’s credit, the trio of two oboes and bassoon – that small play within a play in this piece – were light and refreshing. And there were moments of brightness among the strings, but the pace was generally too languid to get much more than a sense of the elegance of this work.

Maestro Hallstrom’s deliberate tempos worked better in the opening of Beethoven’s Fourth. Is there any symphony with a more suspenseful start? Take it slow, tempered, on tiptoe, and then ski into action. It can be utterly exhilarating. While the nuances were there in the BSO performance, Hallstrom could have pushed that drama more, could have dipped a little deeper into the humor and liveliness of the entire piece. Schumann called the Fourth a “slender Grecian maiden,” but to its fondest admirers, this joy-filled gem has always been a robust celebration of fun and warmth.

Hallstrom, for his interpretation, kept the action contained and modest and, ultimately, it was a ruggedly unhurried performance that coaxed some full, beautiful tones out of the players, especially in the string section.

Fortunately, Ikemiya added the spunk this concert needed, and by the end, audience members were only too eager to rise with applause and appreciation.