Michael Church – International Piano live roundup May 2024
Queen Elizabeth Hall: Marc-André Hamelin Feb 23
Wigmore Hall: Andras Schiff March 3; Steven Osborne March 12; Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy March 14; Katya Apekisheva March 17; Alexandre Kantorow March 20; Nelson Goerner March 25; Alexander Melnikov March 30; Alexander Gadjiev April 2; Murray Perahia April 16
Southbank Centre: Nicholas McCarthy March 30; Vadym Kholodenko April 14
Andras Schiff’s avuncular chats at the Wigmore have now brought him to what he describes as ‘the greatest work by the greatest composer who ever lived’: The Art of Fugue. And this chat sure had its surprises. ‘Don’t play this music too soon’ he said in his preamble. ‘It took me seventy years to feel ready to do it. You must play the two and three-part inventions first, and the preludes and fugues. And don’t read the programme notes while I am playing.’ His mike then began burping so noisily that he grabbed another to continue his homily. ‘And why do people try and complete this unfinished work? Unfinished paintings are left as they are. Who would finish a Michelangelo sculpture? Why in music is this done?’ At this point the second mike started its own burping commentary, at which Schiff, red with rage, hurled both mikes furiously into the audience, and continued, bristling and unamplified.
But his performance itself was as serene as could be wished. For this concert he had roped in his assistant Shaghajegh Nosrati to join him for the final three Contrapuncti, and the music flew thrillingly until its sudden suspension. Cue a long and pregnant silence, before anyone dared applaud.
Over at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, that noted speedster Marc-André Hamelin was tackling what many people regard as Beethoven’s greatest work. And when he got stuck into the ‘Hammerklavier’, it was no surprise that he went like the wind. But that had a serious downside. The passage-work in the Allegro has a gritty beauty with every note needing to be heard, but Hamelin smudged and slurred so much of it that the excitement it should generate was simply not there: he seemed completely unaware, in his busy rush, of the thrills built into this edifice, with its sudden harmonic shifts and its stark contrasts in colour. This magnificently daring movement demands extreme muscular clarity, but what Hamelin gave us was a nimble but noisy fog. As a result, the contrast in tone which should have been set up for the Scherzo was lost.
On the other hand Hamelin did the Adagio proud, with such sustained and tender grace that it became a profound meditation. But then we were back to square one, with the beauty of the finale’s contrapuntal originality lost in hurry and smudge. Back home I cleaned my ears out with Pollini’s version in 1976 and Barenboim’s in 1989.
Steven Osborne takes the stage like a cross between a night-club performer and a diffident dentist, but at the Wigmore he got to grips with Schumann’s Arabesques and Kinderszenen Opus 15 – plus four pieces from Debussy’s Children’s Corner – with infectious delight. The apparent casualness of his manner belies the loving meticulousness of his tonal control, and each of these little pieces emerged with its own colour, texture, and (often playful) character, and the Poet spoke out of a deep stillness.
Osborne crossed the Atlantic for his second half, beginning with a delicately shaded piece from Marion Bauer’s From the New Hampshire Woods, then taking us on a fascinating journey (helpfully analysed in a programme essay by Simon Brackenborough) which climaxed in Osborne’s own high-octane transcription of Oscar Peterson’s arrangement of James F Hanley’s Indiana.
Meredith Monk’s Railroad (Travel Song), a motoric piece requiring the use of forearms, fists, and elbows, was the second stop in that journey; it segued into Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (from 4 North American Ballads) which was almost trance music. Then it was Osborne’s turn to star in his own modest improvisation, a gentle ramble inspired by his boundless admiration for Keith Jarrett, whose ‘supreme control of keyboard sonority’ has always been Osborne’s touchstone for the art. Then came Osborne’s transcription of Jarrett’s My Song.
Finally caution was thrown to the winds. First with Osborne’s transcription of Bill Evans’s full-throated arrangement of Gershwin’s tumultuous I loves You, Porgy. Then came the Peterson arrangement, and joyful bedlam. Getting wilder by the second, Osborne’s mountains of notes were super-dazzling, yet still technically immaculate. I don’t think there’s a jazz pianist alive who could have equalled the technical feat which this unassuming and very likeable Scottish pianist pulled off, with the ease of a walk in the park.
Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy have established themselves very successfully as a double act joined at the hip, and for their latest Wigmore foray they appeared in fancy dress as twin Pierrots. But there was nothing Pierrot-like about the way they approached Stravinsky’s four-hand version of his Rite of Spring. I have never heard it so mechanical and relentless: for much of the time their volume was shatteringly loud. This was of course Stravinsky’s wish for parts of the work, but not for all of it: it’s also about poetry, wonder, and mystery, and in those respects these enthusiastic young players didn’t do it justice.
What came next was both intriguing and provoking. Trompe-l’oeil was written for this duo by the Ukrainian-born composer Leonid Desyatnikov, and his comments in the programme seemed to be a warning not to take its juxtaposition to Schubert’s Fantasie in F D940 too seriously: ‘You can envisage my piece as the follow-up to – or rough draft of – Schubert’s Fantasie. Something incomplete. A kind of postmodern doppelganger to Schubert’s original.’ To which Kolesnikov and Tsoy had added: ‘Simultaneously an interpretation, a re-composition and an independent work, it exposes and magnifies the essence of Schubert’s gestures, multiplying them as in a mirror chamber.’
Well, that’s one way of looking at it. It was like seeing fragments of a much-loved tapestry surfacing then sinking from view in a sea of musical debris; Schubert’s motifs and gestures were all there, but caricatured in wrong-note form, and delivered with a sly grin. It was a relief when the players segued into the Fantasie itself, conveying its tender force – shorn of postmodernist blather – with noble fidelity. Having sat through this weird concert, we were rewarded with two enjoyable trifles: ‘Jardin féerique’ from Ma mère l’oye, and the Sonatina from Kurtag’s transcription of Bach’s Cantata Gottes Zeit.
Three days later the impetuous Katya Apekisheva swept in, trailing her youthful cosmopolitan audience, and bringing some much-needed musical nourishment. Her starter was Bartok’s 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs, the first four of which came with a massively powerful touch. As the series of songs and dances unfolded, so did her palette of colour, playfully feminine or stampingly masculine, all quintessentially outdoors music.
And what followed was magnificent: Brahms’s 7 Fantasien Opus 116 in all their thunder and sweetness. It’s in works like these that Apekisheva’s Russianness comes to the fore, as she brings out the drama of each of these little masterpieces. Her gaze is fixed on heaven as though in a dream, and every bar is played from the heart. In the second piece she seemed to be lulling the piano to sleep, and the fifth – devoid of all inflexion – had a bleached, mortuary plainness.
After Schubert’s 3 Klavierstucke D946 Apekisheva returned to Bartok with his 3 Hungarian Folksongs from Csik BB45b, the third of which was ineffably graceful, and then – with a segue so deft that I missed the join – she wound up with Liszt’s twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody. Her encore in this well-constructed programme – Schubert’s Ungarische Melodie in B minor D817 – only whetted our appetite for more. Apekisheva never speaks from the platform, but her music speaks so powerfully that we would gladly listen to her all night.
The combination of Liszt, Brahms, and Bartok seems all the rage at present, and it cropped up again in Alexandre Kantorow’s recital three days later. We now expect the highest of high-octane virtuosity from this young French pianist, and we certainly got it with Liszt’s Chasse-neige and Vallée D’Obermann, with Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No 1 in D minor, and with Brahms’s left-hand arrangement of Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ from the Partita in D minor for violin.
Kantorow’s control of sound and structure has a peerless authority, as do his evocations of atmosphere, viz the bells permeating the Rachmaninov, and the earth-shaking bass roar in Chasse-neige. And though he coped heroically with the demands of the Bartok Rhapsody – he is by nature instinctively rhapsodic – he couldn’t disguise the irritating waywardness with which the 23-year-old composer had kept trying out effects, then impatiently discarding them. The Bach was at times ponderous, and after the rich fare which had gone before, it made an indigestible dessert. His encore could not have been more unexpected: a gently-swung arrangement of an aria from Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila by Nina Simone.
Sometimes life arranges itself with a pleasing symmetry: after another three-day gap, along comes Nicholas McCarthy, pat on cue, born without a right hand, and also playing Brahms’s left-hand arrangement of Bach’s ‘Chaconne’. And where Kantorow couldn’t hide the awkwardness of the challenge the work posed for him, McCarthy sailed through it as though nothing could have been more natural. Being the first one-hand pianist to graduate from the Royal College of Music, and now known as The Left-Hand Pianist, McCarthy has become a standard bearer for all musicians with physical disabilities, and his commentaries from the platform are as graceful as his playing. For his Southbank recital he programmed some classics of the left-hand genre, starting with Paul Wittgenstein’s luminous take on Wagner’s Liebestod. Wittgenstein had lost his right arm in the First World War; Geza Zichy, whose persuasive left-hand version of the Erlkönig came next, had lost his right arm at sixteen in a hunting accident. Left-hand pièces d’occasion by Scriabin and Bartok were followed by Julie Cooper’s Galilean Moons which McCarthy himself had commissioned; enthusiasts claim that there are already 3,000 piano works written for one hand alone, and McCarthy is augmenting that number.
Meanwhile Alexander Melnikov and Nelson Goerner – both now in their fifties – were letting us catch up on their current obsessions. Melnikov gave us a feast of Rachmaninov – the Chopin Opus 22 variations and the Corelli Opus 42 variations, followed by the Opus 39 Etudes-tableaux. The Chopin set are very much a young man’s creation, madly ornate and showily virtuosic, but Melnikov’s golden touch did them proud. The more focused Corelli set, composed thirty years later, was magnificent, as were the Etudes-tableaux. Melnikov bade us farewell with two of the composer’s most popular Preludes, Opus 32 Nos 4 and 10.
Goerner began his lunchtime recital with Handel’s Chaconne in G HWV435, a kaleidoscopic work which drew from him a truly festive performance. Then it was Schumann’s Davidsbundlertänze, even more kaleidoscopic, and charmingly brought to life. He concluded with an account of Islamey in which you really could sense the Caucasian folk music which had been its inspiration. His graceful encore was Margaritki (Daisies), from Rachmaninov’s Six Songs Opus 38. This Argentinian pianist’s modesty means he doesn’t get much talked about, but his compelling artistry has earned him an army of fans.
Four years ago I heard Alexander Gadjiev play at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and I praised his artistry to the skies in this journal. In the intervening period that artistry seems to have coarsened. Franck’s Prelude, fugue, et variation Opus 18 had meditative moments, but it left me feeling clubbed over the head; Chopin’s Scherzo No 3 in C sharp minor Opus 39 descended at times into sheer noise, with awkward pedalling which unsettled the harmonic structure. Scriabin’s ‘Black Mass’ sonata emerged unscathed, but Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Variations became dislocated; Gadjiev gave no indication that the individual variations were part of an organic whole. After a weird encore consisting of three bits of Pictures at an Exhibition, he did at least send us out into the night with a sweet Bach-Siloti chorale prelude, which no one could quarrel with.
Finally, two well-deserved accolades. Vadym Kholodenko has a penchant for left-field oddities, and for his latest London recital he dealt nobly with two. He brought Karl Klindworth’s ten-finger arrangement of Mozart’s Requiem brilliantly and sensitively to life, creating effects which were implicitly both symphonic and vocal. And his account of Fredric Rzewski’s The people united will never be defeated! became thrillingly alive, a buzzing, pulsating world full of delights and surprises.
And on April 16, after six years’ absence from the stage thanks to a persistent hand problem, Murray Perahia returned to the Wigmore to take the lead in Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat with Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin’s in the Fields Chamber Ensemble. This ardent and emphatically youthful work may not be the ideal vehicle for Perahia’s refined artistry, but it did show him on triumphant form, commandingly effective in every bar of the work. At the end the jubilant audience just wouldn’t let him go. We all wanted you back, Murray, and long may you prosper! MC May 2024