Can Saraç with the Westdeutsche Sinfonia
(c) Remy Franck

As part of the ICMA Young Artist Awards Network, the young Turkish pianist Can Saraç, winner of the 2025 Discovery Award, made a guest appearance with the Westdeutsche Sinfonia in Leverkusen. Remy Franck reports.

The Westdeutsche Sinfonia began its program under the baton of principal conductor Dirk Joeres with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Op. 62, which Joeres turned into something truly magnificent.

He conducted the overture with the energy and pulsating intensity befitting the grandeur and significance of Coriolanus in his relentless struggle against injustice and corruption. Thus, the orchestra engaged in a fascinating interplay of power, dynamics, and tempo, resulting in an exceptionally compelling musical performance, not trivial chatter, but rhetorically shaped music, conceived in a highly dramatic and narrative manner, full of character, rich in nuance, dramatically effective, and correspondingly expressive.

In Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4, Op. 58, the 18-year-old Can Saraç impressed with a highly dynamic yet subtly nuanced interpretation, well supported by the Westdeutsche Sinfonia, which was, as always, excellent. Dirk Joeres gave the work the necessary depth alongside all its brilliance and color, and infused it with vitality through spontaneous accents.

For his part, Saraç combined pianistic brilliance and virtuosity with poetic sensitivity. Particularly impressive were the clarity of his fully committed playing and the exciting dialogue between both hands, which pointed to a truly masterful performance, as we were subsequently able to hear in the wonderfully soaring interpretation of a Scriabin etude, an encore which was requested by the enthusiastic audience.

A delicate, highly lyrical Pavane by Gabriel Fauré opened the second half. Dirk Joeres imbued the work with a quasi-impressionistic, typically southern French-Mediterranean atmosphere.

A magnificent performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony brought the concert to a close. This symphony is arguably one of the most fascinating unfinished works in the musical canon, and in Joeres’s interpretation, it ultimately took on a sense of completion.

Schubert’s music needs no gimmicks and tolerates none; it lives from within itself. In the first movement, Joeres therefore adhered precisely to the tempo marking, truly making the introductory movement an Allegro moderato. This made the stark contrast with the subsequent Andante con moto all the more apparent.

The result was an excellent build-up and release of tension, creating a gripping intensity that demonstrated the horizons Schubert had set out to explore in this work. He was likely well aware that he could add nothing to these two movements, let alone a scherzo after such a second movement.

In this piece of music, Schubert expresses both joy and pain, often allowing one emotion to evolve from the other. Joeres demonstrated this particularly well in the first movement. Many passages thus blossomed with a sense of lightness and optimism, in stark contrast to the ominous intensification of the sound which crashed over the listener like a tsunami, bringing the full drama of the music and its forebodings of death to life.

These emotions continued to overshadow the second movement, which was equally significant in Joeres’ interpretation. It took on a quasi-sacred character through the prominence of the brass section, which played in a chorale-like manner. The audience rightly applauded this outstanding performance.