Queen Elizabeth Hall
Ravel – Valses nobles et sentimentales
Enescu – Piano Sonata no.1 in
F-sharp minor, op.24 no.1
Debussy – Le Vent dans la plaine
La
Fille aux cheveux de lin
Feux
d’artifice
Brahms – Piano Sonata no.3 in
F minor, op.5
Elisabeth Leonskaja (piano)
I suspect that this recital will, as the cliché has it, divide opinion. Clearly many of those present,
devotees and newcomers, thought Elisabeth Leonskaja’s performance one for the
ages. I tried; I really did. And I should not exaggerate for rhetorical effect;
it was certainly not the case, as I shall recount, that I found nothing of
worth in this recital. That said, I found it deeply unsatisfying as a whole,
and regret to say that much of what I heard seemed perverse.
Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales struck a jarring note with its
opening, but equally a misleading one. The opening waltz sounded quite unlike
Ravel, but not in the way some of its successors did, and not indeed in the way
that Debussy sounded unlike Debussy or Brahms sounded (sometimes) unlike
Brahms. It takes all sorts, I suppose, but all that remained of Ravel here for
me was clarity; what I heard was brash, charmless, and very, very fast, hardly ‘Modéré’,
a strange mixture of Rachmaninov-like gesture and early-Prokofiev brittleness.
The second waltz offered extreme contrast; more ‘très’ than ‘assez’ – even allowing
for the word’s dual meaning – when it came to the ‘lent’; or maybe that was
just how it sounded after the frenetic speed of the first. There was a great
deal of rubato; at best, this was exceedingly Romantic Ravel. Matters improved
thereafter. The third waltz was nicely insistent, with hints of the Tombeau de Couperin to come, if still
rather ‘Russian’ in tone; the fourth added a greater sense of fantasy. If
Leonskaja’s voicing in the fifth and sixth waltzes remained on the Tchaikovskian
side, at least the music sounded recognisably akin to, if not identical with,
Ravel., albeit with extreme rubato once again. The seventh waltz started very,
very slowly indeed, setting the scene for an ‘Epilogue’ that was certainly ‘Lent’,
but which, by the same token, at times pretty much ground to a halt.
The three Debussy Préludes fared better, though were still
odd. ‘La Vent dans la plaine’ and ‘La Fille aux cheveux de lin’ can take a pictorial
approach. Accustomed though many of us have become to something more bracingly
or even half-lit modernistic, it is good to have our preconceptions challenged.
‘Feux d’artifice’ reminded us that fireworks are brightly coloured: no bad
thing. It was, however, hardly celebratory.
In between Ravel and Debussy
had come George Enescu’s 1924 first piano sonata. Leonskaja clearly believed in the
work. My ambivalent response may simply have been a matter of my own lack of
understanding; I do not think I have heard it before, and cannot claim to be an
Enescu habitué. However, I could not
help but wonder whether its meanderings were to be ascribed to work, to
performance, or to both. Leonskaja certainly relished the first movement’s
perfumed tangents; might there, however, have been a more direct path to take?
At any rate, we could luxuriate in the post-Debussy, post-Scriabin, post-Szymanowski
(well, post-the Szymanowski works of which I was thinking) exoticism. The
second movement was lively and more purposeful, probably both as work and
performance. We heard a somewhat motoric scherzo that yet danced. It is clearly
‘serious’ music; quite how good it is, I remain to be convinced. If to a lesser
extent than its predecessor, it nevertheless went on a bit – and, to my ears,
somewhat arbitrarily. The tolling bell of the slowish finale was wonderfully
atmospheric; Leonskaja’s voicing of some gorgeous late Romantic harmonies was
also something to enjoy. (In the horrible words of Harriet Smith’s programme note,
‘Moodwise [?], we’re back to the gravity of the first movement.’) I was pleased
to hear the work, even though I was unsure quite what it had amounted to. The
music of Szymanowski, to take an example not so very distant, may sometimes
sound like an aural tapestry, but it will be finely woven, exquisitely so. This
seemed too often to unravel.
None of Brahms’s three early
piano sonatas is a favourite of mine; like Britten with respect to Brahms in
general, I occasionally listen to them, if only to remind myself why I find
them so uningratiating. (Unlike Britten, however, I adore most of Brahms’s
music.) The first movement of the third sonata opened in grandly ‘Romantic’
fashion, but to my ears, it was not the right variety of Romanticism. Again,
the tone sounded more fitting to Tchaikovsky, and galumphing Tchaikovsky at
that. (To quote the strange programme note once again, if only to show that I
was not being unduly selective in the previous paragraph, ‘An air of supreme
confidence is evident from the opening, which strides in with considerable
aplomb.’) Far more seriously, though, I found it well-nigh impossible to trace
an overall line,which made me wonder whether that had been my problem in the
unfamiliar Enescu. The second movement – ‘drawn-out’, according to Ms Smith’s
strangely un-encouraging description – was played more straightforwardly, being
pulled around far less; it emerged all the more strongly for that. Phrasing and
voicing made excellent sense, even if the climax proved excessively brutal. The
scherzo was a bit effortful at times, yet had a reasonable sense of direction;
the trio yielded far more, though not unreasonably. However, the fourth
movement would have benefited from yielding a good deal more, tending towards
fierceness rather than melancholy. That was not a matter of speed, for it was
actually taken rather slowly, but of overall conception, anything but tender.
If some of the notes were slightly skated over in the finale, that was no
catastrophe; it is arguably a near-necessity. There was a better sense of
chiaroscuro here, even if line again proved more problematical. It was vastly
preferable, however, to the first encore, the finale from Mozart’s F major
sonata, KV 332/300k. That was weirdly
Glenn Gould-like, almost akin to a cross between Czerny and Clementi, non legato proving wearing indeed, and
with a near-total lack of lyricism or charm. At that stage, I decided it would
be better to leave the second encore to those more appreciative.
