Nikolai Lugansky

Wigmore Hall, London

Nikolai Lugansky was a typical Soviet prodigy, able at five to learn a Beethoven sonata by ear, before he could even read music. As one of the last survivors of the golden age of Muscovite pianism, he exhibits both the strengths and weaknesses of that almost extinct breed.

When he gives a rare interview, it’s to rubbish the whole idea of such things. Cornered in Geneva last year, he told a hopeful interviewer that all press interviews were ‘fake’, and that ‘every performance is a kind of failure, because you never arrive where you planned to arrive in your head. Playing piano on stage destroys you.’

Playing to an encouragingly youthful audience at the Wigmore, he began in the most unassuming way, with six of Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Wörter, ‘Songs without Words’. These simple pieces, of which Mendelssohn wrote 40 examples, have suddenly if belatedly become à la mode, thanks to their championing by a handful of leading pianists including Lugansky.

Virtually everyone else in the pianistic world regards them as only fit for amateurs. The fact that their moods never go deep or tragic – always sticking to the sunny side, like everything else Mendelssohn wrote – is an additional black mark.

Some have had nicknames attached, but Mendelssohn wanted them to be seen as ‘pure’ music. ‘Each one conceives its own words and sense’, he wrote, ‘it depends on one’s own perception’. Lugansky seemed to have taken those words to heart, giving each of his six pieces an individual colour. And there was nothing saccharine or ingratiating about his playing, which was clean and clear throughout.

During this first part of his recital Lugansky’s gaze was fixed on the ceiling, as though drawing inspiration from the heavens, and it remained there for Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 27 No 2, whose floating melody and melismatic flights of fancy were gorgeous.

But while Mendelssohn was writing his wordless songs, Chopin was writing his majestic Ballades, and Lugansky gave us the third and fourth of those, both being tone poems requiring fastidious control of sound and structure. But that quality was only intermittently forthcoming from Lugansky. His tempi were on the slow side, and when he reached the extraordinary closing section of the fourth Ballade, his effects were rather slapdash.

Lugansky’s second half was devoted to piano reductions of Wagner: first his own piano transcription of four scenes from Götterdämmerung, then Liszt’s piano reworking of the Liebestod from Tristan. The latter work was transcendently beautiful, but about the former, the less said the better.

Finally, two Rachmaninov encores, and one by Chopin played too fast – uneven, like the whole evening.