That was sixteen years ago when the then 36-year-old pianist Lars Vogt, the great hope for young talent in the German piano heaven, came on the scene with Johannes Brahms’ second piano concerto: In the second movement, an “Allegro appassionato” charged to the point of bursting, the Munich Philharmonic also ran into top form, bundling their strings into a powerful, intoxicating sound drama. Nothing in Lars Vogt seemed superimposed or even academic, as one can definitely experience in this piano concerto; everything flowed inevitably and yet almost naturally. conductor Christian Thielemann kept everything taut to keep the triumphant arches from sagging, and sometimes the zeal broke through as he rowed and shoveled as if crossing the ocean.
It was actually most intense when the sea shone most calmly. If he could break a mezzoforte back into a clearly sounding piano and finally, as the most effective effect, into the still singing pianissimo. The pianist Lars Vogt suddenly swam with the flow, clinging to the orchestra, where he could also have designed tonal counter-worlds in order to straddle the tonal-mental balancing act that Brahms stages so effectively here.
In this country, Vogt has made a name for himself with his chamber music festival “tensions”
Lars Vogt, who was often assumed to be completely at home in the German repertoire, did not always escape the danger that his creatively thought-out idiosyncrasies sometimes turned into mannerisms. One heard this in his recordings of Ludwig van Beethoven, where he was just as sure as with Brahms. Lars Vogt was always most convincing when his apparently robust self-confidence began to falter a little. If there were other musicians “in the mix” with whom one first had to communicate professionally; when it was no longer a matter of who asserts himself on the pitch, but instead caution and consideration came into play. Then you could experience Lars Vogt as a congenial partner, then the orchestra, conductor and solo pianist worked together without one being lost as a whole. Then the focus was on the musical effect.
He was one of the most successful pianists of recent years. Lars Vogt, who studied with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling in Hanover, came second in the 1990 piano competition in Leeds. He was just 20 years old and from then on appeared as a soloist with the major symphony orchestras, built up a solo career, was pianist in residence with the Berlin Philharmonic, and opened the new hall of Carnegie Hall in New York with a recital. In 2012 he received a piano professorship in Hanover, and in 2019 he became chief conductor of the Orchester de chambre de Paris. In this country he has made a name for himself above all through his Chamber music festival “tensions” in the Heimbach power plant in the Eifel. As a co-founder of the Rhapsody in School project, he campaigned for music education in schools. Vogt had been battling cancer for more than a year and succumbed to the disease last Monday at the age of 51.