Grosses
Festspielhaus
Schubert:
Four Impromptus, D 899
Schubert-Liszt:
Schwanengesang: ‘Ständchen’, D 957/4; Gretchen am Spinnrade, D 118; Erlkönig, D 328
Liszt:
Études
d’exécution transcendante:
no.4, ‘Mazeppa’; Hungarian Rhapsody
no. 6 in D-flat major, S 244/6
Stravinsky:
Three
Movements from ‘Petrushka’
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| Image: Salzburger Festspiele / Marco Borrelli |
At what point does
‘interesting’ become ‘perverse’? At what point does ‘strong personal
interpretation’ become ‘self-indulgent’? At what point does a recital become
solely about the performer, having long since left behind any reasonable claim
to be performing ‘the music itself’? The answer to those and other such
questions will always depend: not only on the particulars of the performance,
but on the listener’s own personal inclination, which itself may, almost
certainly will, vary from concert to concert, and indeed from performer to
performer. A performer in whom one holds a particular, often longstanding,
interest will most likely be received very differently from one in whom one
does not. For me, at any rate, not only was the point in those respective
journeys was reached soon in this case; Khatia Buniatishvili’s eccentric ‘comet’
continued hurtling through the skies to destinations rarely imagined, let alone
visited, some way past, say, Planet Pogorelich, to draw an obvious, if not
entirely just comparison.
The opening set of Schubert Impromptus was bizarre, but not without
interest (for me, at least), nor without seductive tone. I wondered to begin
with, given the present later on the programme of Schubert-Liszt and Liszt
unhyphenated, whether Buniatishvili were attempting to play them, even
recompose them, in some imagined Lisztian style: a fascinating proposition. It
soon became clear that if so, she needed to study Liszt as well as Schubert a
little harder: in terms not of technique, for she can certainly muster
something of the transcendental when she decides to, but of any degree of musical
understanding. At any rate, the C minor Impromptu opened, at least in my
imagination, as if attempting some sort of Lisztian paraphrase of the work. I
could not imagine what Schubert might have thought, but perhaps Liszt might
have liked it. What, I think, he would not have liked, nor would Schubert, was
the persistent ‘dramatisation’ of every single phrase, nor the incessant
reduction in already-absurd tempo from glacial to more glacial. The music,
marked Allegro molto moderato,
struggled ever to reach Andante. Its
successor, marked Allegro, was taken
at a tempo one might have described at least as Presto, arguably faster. It sounded like little more than a Czerny
study. If the first had been interesting after a fashion, this was at best
glib.
Andante for the G-flat major Impromptu? Of course
not: more akin to Lento. But it had
its moments. I did not mind Buniatishivili’s pauses for emphasis, though I can
imagine they would have irritated many. The music was often in danger of being
smothered with affection, or something else, but at its best, this was a
performance imbued with a dark Romanticism that not only provoked but also
enticed. At worst, I fear, it was merely distended. The final Impromptu
descended into mere caricature: whether of a Liszt paraphrase or of what we had
already, I was unsure. It was pulled around mercilessly, but worse, was often atrociously
phrased and sometimes quite without phrasing at all. Some audience oddball
leaped up immediately and hurled flowers her away, perhaps having miscalculated
his timing of the equinox. An audience
of fans, replete with wearying applause after each and every impromptu, was
clearly seeing and hearing what it had come for.
Schubert-Liszt fared little
better, alas. Indeed, this was just the treatment that tends to give Liszt,
with or without hyphen, a bad name. The Schwanengesang
‘Ständchen’ was slow, if not quite bizarrely so: at least to begin with, or
perhaps at least with respect to the expectations I had now internalised. You
will be well able to fill in the rest by now. Some left-hand voicing was
exquisite, on its own terms, but really: all that sotto voce narcissism… Ultimately, Buniatishvili slowed for diminuendi and sped up for crescendi: the sort of thing a good
piano teacher drums out of one round about Grade 2. A telephone call for once
raised a smile on my face rather than the usual glare. A seemingly interminable
tragifarce finally terminated, we heard a Gretchen
am Spinnrade full of similar cheap tricks, the balance between some lines
so peculiar that it sounded closer to a minimalist film-track than I have ever
heard Schubert sound before: quite some achievement, given those harmonies. Erlkönig began reasonably straight: it
sort of has to. At least I had thought so, the pianist’s closing accelerando offering playing to the
gallery of the very worst kind.
After the interval, we heard
more Liszt, followed by Stravinsky. Mazeppa
brought awe-inspiring technique, wonderful sounds-in-themselves, and no
phrasing, let alone any sense of the piece. By this time, I was fully of the
mind that Buniatishvili should be sat down and made to play in the style of
Alfred Brendel for the next three years. A Hungarian
Rhapsody was, well, rhapsodic, but full of interpretative choices so
perverse that I soon lost all interest: as if Buniatishvili were offering a
handy compendium of all her worst choices so far. And some of that hammering
away was plain ugly: something one should never be able to say of Liszt. What
was my safe word again? Brendel?
Stravinsky’s Three Movements from ‘Petrushka’ were
often plain careless. Here there were far too many wrong notes, still more
taken at individual, self-regarding micro-tempi, and inexplicable accents all
over the place. My aesthetics are hardly identical to Stravinsky’s, but how I
should love to have heard his inevitable condemnation. I cannot imagine why
anyone would hear this music, let alone play it, like this. Dear reader, I
shall spare you the encores; if only I likewise had been spared.
