KALAMAZOO, Mich. — The Gilmore International Piano Festival has always understood that great piano festivals are about more than piano playing. For its 35th-anniversary edition, the organization made its most audacious institutional statement yet: a co-commission with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra of a new solo work for baritone, piano, and orchestra, American Sputnik, with music by Evan Mack and libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning Mark Campbell, premiered May 1 at Chenery Auditorium.
The subject, Van Cliburn’s legendary victory at the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Competition and its reverberations through Cold War culture, could hardly be more apt for a festival that Cliburn himself helped launch in 1991, famously escorting his elderly mother across town to a sold-out hall. That this new work arrives at a moment of renewed U.S.-Russia tension gives it an additional charge its creators cannot have entirely anticipated.
That American Sputnik is an enormously ambitious conceit is beyond doubt. Composer Mack centered his score on the twin pillars of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Second — the very repertoire Cliburn wielded as cultural weaponry in Moscow — but these function as reference points rather than raw material; after an opening invocation of the Tchaikovsky, the score is, to Mack’s considerable credit, mostly and distinctively his own.
Baritone Joseph Lattanzi inhabited Cliburn with a Candide-like innocence, and pianist Stanislav Khristenko — himself a Tchaikovsky Competition laureate — played for what seemed like the entire hour with brilliant displays of self-communion and sudden bravura. There were individual moments of real power: a fine cello solo early on; a passage of angular, aggressive energy that captured the competitive pressure with genuine theatrical force; and lines of Campbell’s libretto that arrived with the directness of felt experience: “When the piano met my fingers, there was no letting go.”
The four-part arc — departure, competition, triumph, and return — traced a coherent emotional journey, even when the musical language grew episodic and the projections (white plane wings, Kremlin silhouettes rendered as squat pagodas, Hockney-saturated colors for the American sequences) strained for metaphor. Lattanzi’s articulation occasionally disappeared into melisma, but whether or not every word carried — and there were surtitles above the stage — an emotional current ran through the hall; I met several in the audience who had been there in 1991 and felt thrilled at seeing the young Cliburn on that Moscow stage: ardent, untested, impossibly gifted — perhaps easier to love than the man time delivered to Kalamazoo.
The connections to the evening’s second half were uncanny. Alexandre Kantorow, the 2024 Gilmore Artist — the youngest ever named, and the first French pianist to receive the award — is himself a Tchaikovsky Competition Gold Medalist, winning in 2019 at the age of 22. That he was now performing the companion concerto to the one Cliburn had wielded to conquer Moscow felt like a conversation across time — or fate.
Tchaikovsky’s Second Concerto is perfectly suited for those who love big Romantic gestures without the tyranny of an unforgettable tune, with frequent long stretches of solo passages for the piano, every one of which Kantorow seized and played with brilliance, authority, and deep pools of underlying reflection that made him the undisputed center of the evening’s second half.
A small smile occasionally flitted across Kantorow’s face as he enjoyed the long stretches for orchestra alone, which Julian Kuerti conducted with electric precision. Alongside concertmaster Jun-Ching Lin and principal cellist Igor Cetkovic, Kantorow found a chamber intimacy — dark, simple, shared — in the slow movement. The finale had the engaging spirit of a Mozart rondo, its second theme dispatched with Cossack energy and something delicious and willful in the flourishes.
For an encore, Kantorow offered his arrangement of “Moscow Nights,” the Russian folk-pop song that in 1958 was the sonic wallpaper of the city where Cliburn made history. A concert that had explored the alchemy between Russian music and American identity closed with a young French pianist reimagining a Soviet pop song as something entirely his own. Some encores merely please; this one linked eras.
