PORTLAND, Ore. – Pianist Makato Ozone made a splashy debut with the Oregon Symphony on May17 with a jazz-infused and invigorating performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Ozone’s fans, including a large contingent of young Japanese men, flooded the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and almost filled it for the first time in quite a while (the Schnitz, as it is locally known, accommodates 2,700 people). Working seamlessly with guest conductor Kevin John Edusei, the pianist electrified his listeners with captivating improvisations.
Ozone is a very rare pianist whose schedule is split between classical and jazz engagements. His father was a keyboardist who owned a jazz club in Kobe, Japan. So, steeped in jazz from an early age, Ozone initially mastered the organ before transitioning to the piano at the age of 12, entranced by Oscar Peterson’s artistry. Soon after he graduated from Berklee College of Music, Ozone’s career took off, and he currently has more than 30 albums as a composer and performer to his credit.
In 1996, Ozone performed Rhapsody in Blue in the small-band arrangement, but in 2003 he was invited by Tadaaki Otaka to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 (Jeunehomme) with the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra. He has since expanded his repertoire and performs the Gershwin and concertos by Mozart, Bernstein, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff with major orchestras around the world.
Rhapsody in Blue gave Ozone ample opportunity to dazzle Oregon Symphony’s audience with over-the-top jazzy riffs. His detours briefly touched on boogie woogie, stride, swing, and other styles that are above and beyond this reviewer’s knowledge base. Even when some of the chords became super-crunchy with chromatic excesses that were topped off with a dollop of dissonance, Ozone always found a way to get back to the harmonic baseline and familiar territory that listeners know so well.
Keen listening by Edusei and the orchestra made sure that their entrances were seamless, and the opening glissando by acting principal clarinet Mark Dubac stretched to the back of the hall with a terrifically elongated wildness. After the final crescendo of the piece, the ecstatic applause brought Ozone to center stage several times. For an encore, he collaborated with orchestral bassist Colin Corner on an impromptu rendition of “I’ve Got Rhythm” that brought down the house.
Prisms Cycles, Leaps by Derrick Skye reflected his polyglot interests as an amalgam of Ghanian, Balkan, and Hindustani classical styles wrapped in European music with a hint of a Lutheran chorale tossed in. Constantly shifting rhythms overlaid with hand-clapping gave the piece a Morse-code-like character. Although an electric guitar grounded some of the first sections and slow-moving chords from the brass anchored later segments, the piece ended with an uplifting ascent of shimmery strings.
Josef Suk’s Scherzo fantastique put listeners in familiar territory with lovely folk-like themes that suggested the music of Suk’s father-in-law, Antonín Dvořák, with a dash of Rimsky-Korsakov. Suk must have known that he had a winner with the warm, melodic line introduced by the cellos, because he came back to that same melody several times. If he had trimmed the piece a bit, it might have become more established in the orchestral repertoire.
Edusei and the orchestra delivered a vivid performance of the suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, a one-act ballet Bartók wrote in 1918-1919 when he and his wife were living in dire poverty in Hungary. Based on a shocking story of the same name by Menyhért Lengyel, the ballet depicts erotic seduction, robbery, and murder, all of which caused a scandalous premiere in Cologne in 1926. It has been interpreted as a tale about life in a gritty urban setting under the unrelenting grind of materialism. The suite, finished by Bartók in 1928, contains about two-thirds of the ballet. It opens with a cacophony of strings and brass followed by a thematic line laid down by the violas.
Urged on by Edusei, the orchestra conveyed the squalid life of three thugs who use a pretty girl to entrap men and then fleece them of their money. The clarinet section (Dubac, Ricky Smith, and Todd Kuhns) marvelously created scenes of enticement and tension. Snarling trombones suggested an old rake, while oboe implied a young lad, both of whom are lured by the girl and then violently thrown out after it’s discovered they have no money. An exotic sonic blur topped by the flutes announced the appearance of a wealthy Mandarin, who becomes the final victim. A furious maelstrom with all sections of the orchestra going pell-mell invoked the ensuing chase, followed by lingering tremolos and finally the accented blasts from the brass that signaled his death.
