Orchestral alchemy

Anyone expecting to be blown away by visiting U.K. piano star Benjamin Grosvenor at Friday’s (May 9) Lansing Symphony Orchestra season finale concert was in for a surprise.

Yes, he blew everyone away, but he did it his way: by not blowing them away.

The screw-tightening, nerve-wracking emotional trappings of the big performance were blissfully absent. It felt like you’d wandered into his studio and caught him playing just for fun.

The word “revelation” is thrown about too lightly, but that’s just what Grosvenor delivered in a fresh, oxygenated performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor.”

Not that Grosvenor cut corners. He simply had the mastery and confidence to ditch the razzle-dazzle and zoom in on what interested him, emotionally and intellectually. Rather than projecting power and drama to the last row of the hall, he drew you into his own ongoing search for the music.

The orchestra caught on to Grosvenor’s approach — alert, engaged, but at a walking pace and a human scale — and matched it right away. They played with a chamber-music focus and intensity instead of relying on numbers and firepower.

Grosvenor didn’t go in for dramatic body language, head tossing, hand recoil and whatnot. He sat at the keyboard like a gem cutter, as if thinking, “OK, let’s see what I can do with this.”

Late in the first movement, he took hold of a march theme, played earlier by the full orchestra as a strutting, pompous, militaristic march, and transformed it into a glittering, airy dance of fireflies. He kept the languid scales of the slow movement aloft like Chinese lanterns drifting across a dark night.

Crazy as it may seem given the concerto’s hoary age and familiarity, there were many moments when it sounded as if Grosvenor and the orchestra were making up the whole thing as they went along via telepathic coordination.

After a standing ovation, Grosvenor stuck around to play a solo work that showed a completely different side of his artistry. Encores don’t usually get much post-concert attention, but this was no perfunctory gesture. Having pumped the hall full of oxygenated Beethoven, Grosvenor turned his alchemy to the fluid ripples, surges and undertows of Maurice Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau.” The silence in the hall was absolute as he transformed a piano into a cube of water, a seamless, mesmerizing effusion of ringing melodies and harmonies.

The Ravel encore proved to be the perfect bookend to the piece that came first on Friday’s slate, “Under Sea, Above Sky,” by LSO composer-in-residence Jared Miller.

This was a daring and arresting way to open a concert. Like Grosvenor’s watery Ravel, Miller’s orchestral alchemy sublimated the 70-plus musicians and their instruments into a non-physical state.

A snake’s nest of glassy, undulating, ultra-high tones gradually enveloped the hall, drifting nearly above the threshold of human hearing. A battery of percussionists scraped their bows along the metal rims of every object in sight: a vibraphone, hi-hat cymbals, even timpani.

It took a while for the music to coalesce into a panorama of more solid things. With a sonic palette and brushstrokes like those of Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, Miller brought mountains, forests, skyscrapers and teeming streets to the mind’s eye. (The score is abstract enough to let the imagination run wild.)

Before the concert, Miller explained to the audience that he wanted to express the power and fragility of the Earth. In between the bigger moments, the musicians emitted audible sighs and deep breaths to evoke a living, breathing — and perhaps expiring — planet. The final moments weren’t exactly comforting as the percussionists picked up their bows, and a glassy nothingness again enveloped the hall. Whether Miller was painting a picture of desolation, purity or both at once was left to the audience to ponder.

After two such strong pieces in the first half of the concert, the choice of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 as a season closer was a bit puzzling. Maybe the idea was to take the evening full circle, back to the subject of the Miller opus, the Earth, but Dvořák’s tread on the planet is that of a leisurely, pipe-smoking stroller. Most of the symphony is burnished with bohemian-travel-poster picturesqueness and attenuated echoes of folk dancing that recall quaint stereoscopic views from the 19th century.

The orchestra played these musty melodies with polish and finesse, though, and things came alive in the last movement, when the music became more richly textured, abstract and Brahms-y.

With so much new, neglected and unexplored music out there, it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that it’s time to give Dvořák a long, long rest. But orchestras are expensive beasts and have to eternally triangulate among diverse segments of their audiences. No doubt the Eighth pleased a lot of people, and it also offered a chance for retiring trombone great Ava Ordman and the rest of the brass section to sneak in a few last licks.