Big-time Beethoven

The Lansing Symphony Orchestra has hosted its share of world-class soloists in recent years, but London-based pianist Benjamin Grosvenor is in a class by himself.

Grosvenor, one of the biggest international stars ever to appear with the LSO, fit a Lansing date between gigs in Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin, Dallas, Boston and London to play Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto at Friday’s season closer.

“Music is music,” Grosvenor shrugged. “It’s great to come and visit and experience new faces. I’m really looking forward to meeting the musicians.”

Not only has the quality of regional orchestras like Lansing’s sharply risen in recent decades, but musicians in smaller cities often play with a verve and gusto that eclipses the jaded pros of Vienna, New York City and other such places.

“In a part-time orchestra, people are doing it because it’s something they’re passionate about,” Grosvenor said. “That leads to really great and passionate music making.”

Last week, Grosvenor, 32, was in Canada, playing Maurice Ravel’s gorgeous Concerto in G with the Montreal Symphony. In 2004, at the age of 11, he won the keyboard section of the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition for playing the same piece.

In old clips on the internet, Grosvenor’s emotional and technical mastery of Ravel’s sophisticated music is almost shocking.

“When you learn something that young, there’s a level of comfort that remains with you, but I don’t play it the way I did when I was a child,” he said. “There are many things I do differently. I’m not the same person I was then, and I won’t be the same person in 10 years.”

His way of relating to orchestras has also evolved.

An animated Grosvenor is torn between finishing a sandwich and playing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in a promotional video for a 2013 Decca recording.

“As you go on and have experiences performing, you get a sense of what works, knowing where to have your eye on the conductor and help the ensemble — tricks you learn as time goes by,” he said.

As a youngster growing up in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, Grosvenor was enthralled by piano recitals by visiting greats Stephen Hough and Evgeny Kissin.

“There was something about the atmosphere, the focus of it, that enchanted me,” he said.

But listening wasn’t enough.

“I think what drew me to it was when I actually started to perform myself,” he said. “I knew I loved the music, but sharing it with people gave it a purpose.”

Grosvenor became the youngest soloist in history to perform at the opening night of the famous BBC Proms concerts in 2011. He played Franz Liszt’s knuckle-busting Piano Concerto No. 2. His repertoire was limited more by the size of his growing hands than his technical abilities.

He played the cello briefly in his youth but found it too limiting. The piano proved to be a much better-suited vehicle for his restless and probing mind.

“It’s a percussion instrument, but it’s a big box of illusions,” he said. “It’s so complex, and there’s such a scope of sounds and colors. That’s what drew me to it. Also, we pianists have the challenge and the adventure of playing a different instrument every time we go on stage.”

When it comes to interpreting Beethoven, the familiar mantra “you do you” isn’t exactly apropos, but it’s not entirely off the mark, either.

“I don’t know if you want to do you, but inevitably, you do,” Grosvenor said. “You are you, and you can’t avoid it. The score is the starting point. The composers couldn’t write everything. You have to think deeply about what they wrote and why. Serving the music and being individual is probably the right approach, rather than trying to be different just for the sake of it.”

Far from coasting along on his superhuman skills, Grosvenor likes to roll up his sleeves and dig for the meaning of every note, an approach that Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto richly rewards.

“It has a lot of grandeur but also a lot of intimacy,” he said. “The slow movement is so incredibly beautiful, so simple. It’s basically a scale — not a great melody as such, but a suspension, a great moment in music, so luminous.”

Unlike many predictable back-and-forth tennis matches of the classical era, the interplay between soloist and orchestra is fluid and sensitive.

“It’s a give and take, and it requires healthy collaboration with the conductor,” Grosvenor said.

There’s drama and struggle — this is big-time Beethoven, after all — but the concerto’s celebratory feeling befits a season closer.

“It’s a very sunny piece, really,” Grosvenor said. “There aren’t that many moments where the music is so troubled. You leave the room with an incredible sense of joy.”

Friday’s concert will open with LSO composer-in-residence Jared Miller’s expansive work “Under Sea, Above Sky,” a large-scale ode to the power and fragility of the planet, written in 2019 for an extra-large National Youth Orchestra of Canada. The evening’s closer, Antonín Dvořák’s tuneful Symphony No. 8, takes it back to the Earth with a ravishing set of tableaux evoking the pastoral Czech countryside.