With her hands barely free, Khatia Buniatishvili stretched her arms out behind her back, closed her eyes and bent her torso and head forward in a theatrical gesture that made her look like the figurehead of a ship ready to face the storm. Her first big, open phrase, pale and fluctuating, followed by a few moments of hesitation with the orchestra which conductor Kirill Karabits quickly corrected, left a mixed impression that was soon to turn into a shipwreck.

Khatia Buniatishvili and the Orchestre de Paris
© Ondine Bertrand

It is impossible to speak of an interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto: the pianist falls far too short of the demands of this score. Her instrumental mastery this evening would not permit her entry into the Paris Conservatoire. Her fingers are limp, neither embedding into the keyboard, nor playing a single phrase legato, and only the difficulties that miraculously fall within her natural facility pass without too much trouble. But most of the time, her fingers fly over the keyboard: she bluffs her way through the piano part, but without winning.

As a result, this concerto lurches forward like a rowing boat, in fits and starts and askew because, as soon as she can, she swoons, sitting straight as an ‘i’, head, arms, hands motionless, fingers moving without the slightest sustained song being heard… from just the fifth row, directly in front. She has no projection of sound; the louder she plays, the less the piano sounds: 80% of the energy is lost in the agitation. It was all the more depressing that she gave three encores. The audience didn’t really ask for them after the first one, but she offered them nonetheless, after demonstrating her love by forming a heart with her thumbs and index fingers together. At the interval, a musician who had come to listen to his friends from the Orchestre de Paris, seeing my sombre face, confided: “I filmed it, because no one will believe me when I tell the tale.”

There comes a time when it has to be said: there is something wrong here. The audience came for this pianist, not for the conductor, who was making his debut with the Orchestre de Paris this evening, nor for the programme, which featured Alexander Scriabin’s dispensable Symphony no. 2 in C minor in the second half. If this soloist was chosen, it’s because she plays to full houses, whereas Karabits is little known in these parts. But those who invite her know that she plays at best in a perfectible way – Mäkelä held her in an iron grip during a decent Tchaikovsky First – but not at the level of this ensemble. It’s understandable that a private producer should invite her: with the money earned, he compensates for less busy recitals, and so the informed music lover forgoes his seat that evening. That a major subsidised institution should do so for this reason is cynical when it has the choice of 30 other magnificent and respected pianists. And if the Orchestre de Paris really wanted, in these times of war and symbols, to ‘marry’ a Georgian pianist to a Ukrainian conductor in a Russian programme, Eliso Virsaladze, one of the greatest living pianists, would have been the obvious choice. And the evening would have gone down in history.

Kirill Karabits conducts the Orchestre de Paris
© Ondine Bertrand

It all began so well with Feodor Akimenko’s Angel, a “poem-nocturne” composed in 1924 by the Ukrainian composer to a poem by Lermontov. A short, beautiful, atmospheric piece, sumptuously orchestrated, Slavic in colour, refined and evocative, symbolist. Karabits conducts with precision, paying attention to balance, nuance and line. It’s very beautiful. The second half continued well with a very short piece by Niloufar Nourbakhsh, a 32-year-old Iranian composer. Knell is dominated by the idea of death, a funeral procession of sinuous, independent lines of striking beauty. Karabits follows without pause into Scriabin’s symphony, which entered the Orchestre de Paris’ repertoire in 1974 at the request of Evgeny Svetlanov, was unearthed in 2019 by Paavo Järvi and again in 2024 for a ceremony of turning over the dead that we would gladly do without when we see that the Ukrainian Boris Lyatoshynsky’s Third Symphony – a masterpiece from 1951 – is still waiting to be played by the Parisian ensemble. Tonight, the orchestra and Kirill Karabits were admirable from every point of view.