Royal Festival Hall
Liszt – Années de pèlerinage: Deuxième année, S 161: ‘Après une lecture de
Dante’
Schumann – Fantasie in C major, op.17Stravinsky – Three Movements from ‘Petrushka’
Brahms – Variations on a Theme by Paganini, op.35
There are ‘controversial’ pianists,
and then there is Ivo Pogorelich. Neither love nor money would have me part
with his recordings of Gaspard de la nuit
and Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata. However, my two experiences of him as a concert
pianist, at the 2009
Edinburgh Festival, and now tonight, have gone some way beyond the merely
eccentric; indeed, I am not quite sure I have the vocabulary to describe them.
Nevertheless, try I must.
Liszt’s Dante Sonata opened the programme, its opening – ‘Abandon hope all
ye who enter here’ – declamatory, although almost metallic in tone. (Throughout
the first half in particular, I felt there was something distinctly odd about
the regulation of the piano, but maybe it was just Pogorelich’s ‘way’ with it.)
There was little in the way of beauty of sound – with Liszt, I always have in
the back of my mind Tovey’s observation that here was clearly a man who could
not fail but make a beautiful sound whenever he touched the piano – but somehow
there seemed to be a sense of truthfulness. Once past the introductory
material, Pogorelich’s performance initially seemed subdued, but volume and
tempo increased. Then came the great slowing: nothing wrong with that in
principle, of course, and it needs to happen. But to something quite so
glacial? Phrases, let alone paragraphs, were so distended – a word, I am
afraid, which persistently came to my mind throughout the recital – that they
stood on or beyond the brink of losing all meaning. Exacerbating a tendency
already present, the performance became weirdly fragmentary. Moreover, picking
up of tempo did not, sadly, equate to any (re-)gaining of coherence. At least,
that is, until, apparently out of nowhere, Mephisto seemed, uninvited, to join
us, presaging his final waltz. But where had he come from? Perhaps more to the
point, where did he then go? Some of the playing that ensued was, for a brief
time, diabolically virtuosic, yet also brutal to the point of charmlessness. I
was captivated, somehow, or should that have been ‘captive’?
If the Liszt work had its
problems, that was nothing, however, compared to Pogorelich’s performance of
Schumann’s C major Fantasie. Never
have I heard Schumann sound so – unlike Schumann. Indeed, there were times
when, had I not known the work to which the performance was distantly related,
I might have guessed the composer to have been one of those cultish
nineteenth-century eccentrics such as Alkan. From the outset of the first
movement, the thin, bright sound of the instrument seemed less suited still
than it had to Liszt. Indeed, oddly, the music often sounded more akin to Liszt
than it ever did to Schumann. I longed for something deeper, mellower: ideally
a Bösendorfer. And yet, when Pogorelich occasionally yielded, there were proto-Brahmsian
half-lights to be experienced, that experience alas proving to be of
frustrating brevity. More seriously still, form seemed as elusive as compositional
‘voice’. The torpor into which the movement descended was beyond all other
things straightforwardly perverse. When it came to the second movement, the
jubilation with which it opened sounded briefly closer to Schumann, although
the now-inevitable distortions would soon undo that good, or at least comprehensible,
work. At one point, the performance sounded as if it were about to metamorphose
into an account of the ‘Great Gate of Kiev’, before Schumann briefly
reappeared, only to be replaced with someone closer to Liszt, both in sonority
and rhetoric. And so it went on. There was greater yielding in the third
movement, but as music, it utterly baffled me. I have little idea about the
time on the clock, but it seemed interminable, quite devoid of direction. It
unsettled – but not in any way I could begin to consider ‘right’.
With Stravinsky’s Three Movements from ‘Petrushka’ the
recital reached its nadir. The ‘Russian Dance’ was bizarrely slow, but also
oppressively heavy: rather like a piano transcription of what someone who has
never really listened to Klemperer might think one of his more extreme
performances to have sounded like. Except, of course, without the sense of
form, or line, or indeed of anything else. O for Pollini here! The second
movement eventually reached something beyond rehearsal speed, only to lose it
soon after, Odd snatches of surprisingly Ravel-like sonority were interspersed
with Petrushka on a distant ‘Bydlo’ and passages so distended that they sounded
more like random collections of notes and durations. ‘Shrovetide Fair’ sounded
as an amalgam of tendencies in its predecessor. Fistfuls of notes, some right,
some less so, had me ready to confess to anything: if only it would stop. I
half expected Pogorelich’s left hand to quit, citing ‘artistic differences’
with his right. Had it done so, it might well have proved an act of mercy.
Very much to my surprise, Brahms’s
Paganini Variations emerged best from
the evening’s confrontations. A welcome chaste opening to the First Book almost
suggested Neue Sachlichkeit, arguably coming a little closer, if still not
very, to Stravinsky than the previous performance ever had. Here, for the most
part Pogorelich’s technique was marshalled in a good, mesmerising cause. The
third variation really sounded as if Paganini had turned pianist; the fourth
and fifth seemed to herald the Second Piano Concerto and to pay tribute to
Schumann in a way the Fantasie
performance never really had. Weighty turbulence in the eighth was disrupted by
a few oddities, but remained recognisably Brahms. Slower tempi, however,
brought greater eccentricity, the twelfth sounding like – I really do not know what.
The coda, however, was (relatively) back on the straight and narrow, boasting
real direction and purpose. Coherence regained was maintained in the first
variations of the Second Book. They were not necessarily ‘conventional’, but
nor were they merely outré. We even came to hear later on a sense, briefly, of
repose that was yet quietly ecstatic. Wonderful! Scampering post-Mendelssohn
figures gained diabolical edge – although, I must admit, not always; nor did
they always quite scamper. Double octaves, though, had greater depth than they
ever had in the Liszt performance. The twelfth and thirteenth variations went
so far towards what we might generally expect that they beguiled, rubato and
voicing alike not only delightful but meaningful. Following a coda which did –
more or less – what it should, I fled, lest there be an encore.
