Jorge Bolet's Top Review?

Another contender for Jorge Bolet's best review...

16-18 November 1980 (Sat/Sun)

Orpheum, Vancouver, Canada

Brahms Piano Concerto No.2

Vancouver Symphony Orchestra under Kazuyoshi Akiyama.

He was replacing Lazar Berman, whose cancellation  - due to diplomatic difficulties between the US and USSR due to the invasion of Afghanistan - was announced early on the season. [Of Bolet:] "It was like the substitution of one diamond for another of equal or even greater brilliance." 

Doug Hughes of The Province: 'Once in a very great while, an experience in the theatre or concert hall can be so transporting that it sends you out into the streets, confused and dizzy, and it takes some time to readjust to reality. There is every reason to suspect that the most, if not all of those who left the Orpheum on Sunday afternoon after Jorge Bolet's performance, felt that way. In my years of concert going, I have heard Brahms 2 played by some highly distinguished artists, among them Dame, Myra, Hess, Solomon, Sir Clifford Curzon, Wilhelm Backhaus, and Rudolf Serkin. I have heard more recordings of it than I can possibly remember.  But with Bolet's incredible performance of this towering work on Sunday afternoon, I believe I have now heard it in all its glory, perhaps as close as it is possible to come to the way the composer intended it to be played. There were many things about this performance that were less than technically ideal. Nevertheless, it added up to one of those all to rare instances in which musicianship (bolet, orchestra, conductor) took the lead over mere technique.'

 (*Bolet had played in Vancouver on Sunday, 1 November 1953, and was advertised for the 1954-55 season.  On 12/13 January 1964 he played Beethoven's fourth piano concerto.)