Charlotte Symphony: Two mixed bags and an unusual Beethoven Fifth

October 27, 2025

Lawrence Toppman

By Lawrence Toppman

The Charlotte Symphony delivered an ambitious program this weekend at Knight Theater. Most audience members had never heard the first two pieces, and virtually all of them had heard the third piece – Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – but not the way Tianyi Lu conducted it.

I’d intended to spend much of my review discussing Gabriel Kahane’s “Judith,” as he’s been named the CSO’s “artistic partner” this season. But I had a hard time getting a handle on his self-described “character study for orchestra,” an expansion of his song “Last Dance;” it’s about a fictional older woman who has recently been widowed, and the sudden changes in tone might well have mirrored sudden changes in her psyche.

Mournful woodwinds, queasily anxious brass, strings that could be lovely or spooky and bursts of percussion followed each other quickly through nine minutes. I felt like someone trying to meditate on beauty underneath a window opened to the clamor and chaos of a large city. It left me wanting to hear more from Kahane, which will be easy: He’s featured on two further programs this season in the CSO Spotlight Series.

Then Soyeon Kate Lee showed what happens when a wholly committed soloist does first-rate work in a second-rate piece. She energized the CSO premiere of Amy Marcy Cheney Beach’s only piano concerto, trying to give it weight and cohesion it doesn’t have. (Beach’s Gaelic Symphony does hold together, and I hope to hear the CSO play it sometime.)

Beach summons and discards moods through the piece without creating memorable melodies. She premiered it in 1900, the year Rachmaninov was writing his Piano Concerto No. 2, and it sounds like a concerto the Russian master set aside because he couldn’t make it work. Lee played with an understated poetic tone much of the time but had enough muscle to make big climaxes thunder, and she and Li took the pace as quickly as they could to keep the concerto from lagging.

Li used a similar approach to Beethoven after the intermission: light-footed yet not lightweight. She didn’t avoid drama, but she didn’t lean on it. Beethoven emerged as the best late Classical Era composer, not a harbinger of the Romantic Era to come. I thought of Schubert’s flowing melodies, or of what Mozart might have done in his 60s. (Had Mozart reached 73, he’d have outlived both Beethoven and Schubert. Hardly unthinkable, as his pal Haydn lived to 77.)

I heard a gracious warmth I don’t often associate with this piece or composer. No terrible goblins were dispelled, as in the famous passage from E.M. Forster’s “Howards End.” What many conductors interpret as a final triumph over adversity became a prodigious burst of joy – not the last word in understanding this symphony, but a welcome new way of thinking about an old friend.