Debargue - Scarlatti, Chopin, and Alkan, 22 June 2023

Wigmore Hall

Scarlatti: Sonatas in A major, Kk208 and Kk24; in D major, Kk491; in D minor, Kk141
Chopin: Ballade no.2 in F major; Prelude in C-sharp minor, op.45; Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major, op.61
Alkan: Concerto pour piano seul, op.39 no.8: ‘Allegro assai’

Lucas Debargue (piano)

Lucas Debargue has built a considerable reputation, both as pianist and composer, over the past few years. I have yet to hear his own music and this was my first encounter with him as pianist. Much in the first half of this Wigmore Hall recital, devoted to Scarlatti and Chopin, puzzled me, though a large audience reacted with great enthusiasm. It was in Alkan that he seemed most at home to me; or perhaps I should say it was with his Alkan that I felt most at home. For knowing now that Debargue is a composer as well as a performer, my sense that much of the Scarlatti and Chopin edged towards paraphrases, albeit using (almost) all the notes provided, on original works rather than performances of the works ‘themselves’ makes more sense. There is room for many approaches to repertoire and performance, and the polite, disarming way Debargue spoke, at the beginning of the second half, concerning Alkan left one in no doubt concerning his sincerity and dedication.

The four Scarlatti sonatas with which the programme began can rarely – no, never – have sounded like this from any other performer, regardless of instrument. I was intrigued by the beginning of Kk208: it sounded pristine, if often bizarrely deliberate. A sudden crescendo and quick withdrawal of that extra volume offered contrast, even if I struggled to understand why. It was pianistic and rhetorical, to the degree of well-nigh Chopinesque eruption in the bass, if not in a vein anyone might have expected. Its A major companion, Kk24, provided frenetic contrast, until falling into reverie. What I missed above all was harmonic rhythm, often indeed simple rhythm, but perhaps I was missing the point. Kk491 in D major was still highly inflected, though more recognisable and with greater momentum. There was no doubting the beauty of Debargue’s touch here, whether with utmost delicacy or fullness of tone in Scarlatti’s Iberian strumming of guitars. If Kk141 at times sounded more like Liszt or Bartók, there is nothing necessarily wrong with that; all three composers were poets of their instrument, clearly an aesthetic that appeals to Debargue as creative, as much as re-creative, artist. I wished it had settled, just once, so that I could have a sense of where it was going and where it had come from, but again perhaps that was the point. Mahan Esfahani’s immersive harpsichord recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last autumn seemed to me far closer to performance of the works, without in any sense inhibiting interpretative freedom. Likewise Tamara Stefanovich on the piano earlier last year. But as I said, there is room for many. 

Chopin’s Second Ballade began with a greater sense (to my ears, at least) of line, although soon it also began to sound all too manipulated for manipulation’s sake. The idea of letting musical works speak ‘for themselves’ may be a chimera; it may be an undesirable chimera at that. It came to my mind more often, nevertheless, than I might have wished. The C-sharp minor Prelude, op.45, still seemed listless or dreamlike, according to taste, but line was stronger again, as if this were a dark, yet moonlit improvisation. This I could certainly admire, even if it is not remotely how I hear it. With the Polonaise-Fantaisie, there was an undeniable fascination to what Debargue did with it, but a strangely distended reading, whatever the pianist’s evident conviction, left me bewildered. 

The first movement of Alkan’s Concerto pour piano seul, a work I confess to knowing far less well, seemed to me to be played much ‘straighter’ and came as relief. Debargue’s careful-yet-not-too-careful distinction between ‘solo’ and ‘tutti’ helped prepare our ears and minds. More to the point, there was always a sense of where the music had come from and where it might be heading. It was, I think, a more ‘Classical’ as well as ‘classical’ reading and far more to both my taste and understanding. Debargue cared for both the formal outline but also the details that contributed to that outline. He also offered a far more varied palette, and much greater variegation of touch and tone. At last, I felt, here was musical development as I (Teutonically?) understood it. Ultimately, this turned out to be a Berlioz-like Romanticism, albeit for the piano, which worked very well. 

As for the first half, I can well imagine Debargue’s approach appealing more to devotees of, say, Ivo Pogorelich and Khatia Buniatisvili than it did to me, though this seemed far less an ‘act’ than that of either. Even when I did not like and/or understand what I heard, it made me think—and there are worse things that. The encore, Miłosz Magin’s Nostalgie du pays, proved simple yet piquant, a loving contrast to what had gone before.

Esfahani - Scarlatti, 14 October 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Sonatas: in F, Kk.296; in F, Kk.297; in F minor, Kk.466; in F sharp minor, Kk.25; in G minor, Kk.12; in C minor, Kk.11; in F, Kk.6; in F minor, Kk.19; in F, Kk.106; in F, Kk.107; in D minor, Kk.552; in D minor, Kk.553; in C minor, Kk.116; in G, Kk.470; in G, Kk.471; in E minor, Kk.263; in E, Kk.264; in A, Kk.24; in D minor, Kk.32

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

One of the first professional concerts I heard—it may even have been the first—was of Scarlatti sonatas on the harpsichord, at the suggestion of my childhood piano teacher, with whom I learned a good few along the way. I cannot now remember who the harpsichordist was and am not even sure of the venue; oddly, I think it may have been Rotherham’s Civic Theatre rather than the Arts Centre (part of a wonderful brutalist complex, since demolished, that included the town’s Central Library from where I borrowed many of my first books and, later, first musical cassettes and scores). Scarlatti loomed relatively large in the early repertoire I was occasionally allowed to try out on my teacher’s spinet. As soon, though, as I started organ lessons in my teens, my adoration for Bach somewhat crowded out contemporaries. Not that I have or had no interest in Scarlatti, Handel, Rameau, Couperin, and many others, but I am reasonably sure I have never been to an all-Scarlatti recital since. I have no idea how I might react today to what I heard as a schoolboy in Rotherham—I assume I am not imagining the whole thing—but I can say that this immersive experience from Mahan Esfahani, performed without an interval, much of it without as much as a break between pieces, was quite a journey on which to be taken.   

Over ninety minutes or so, with a couple of bonus D minor sonatas as encores, Esfahani’s selection covered a broad range, whilst still of course only encompassing a small proportion of Scarlatti’s output in this genre. (One might reasonably go so far as to call the Scarlatti sonata close to a genre in itself. It does not spring out of nowhere, nor does it lead to nowhere, but few if any binary forms are quite like it.) From the outset, we knew that this was music internalised, so that these performances, without a hint of the wilful, could in a positive sense be like no others. Freedom was not licence; rather, it offered a guiding thread that enabled a particular sequence of works to emerge in a particular way, with fresh performances that would have been otherwise in a different order, let alone a different day. For instance, in the first pair of works, in F major, harmonic rhythm that was allied to, yet never dictated by, metre was the frame for a relish in the composer’s obstinacy and graciousness alike: aristocratic in the best sense. As the recital progressed, repeated figures, sequences scales, ornaments and other building blocks emerged as characteristic, yet varied, nothing so mundane as a cliché. The illusion of dynamic contrast was conjured—except, of course, that it was not always an illusion. 

A fascinating sequence of minor-key works communicated a proper sense of Affekt, quite distinct from later tonal understandings, associative or otherwise. Where I as a teenager had been tempted to the maudlin, here this music was brought to life, without any of the irritating, nonsensical reductionism of many so-called ‘Baroque’ musicians who would claim all music of the period is a dance. This is a world with as many options as ours, and so too it sounded here, whilst making the sum of those options more than the sum of its parts. Continuities and discontinuities, and the way they fit together, offered here and elsewhere courtly dignity and allure, and a fine sense of caprice. Crossing of hands, leaning appoggiaturas, agogic accents, fanfares that spoke of a world beyond the keyboard, and magical moments of suspense expertly punctured led towards a final sequence of sonatas that built in gravity and abandon, tempting us to think each one the last, until a successor twisted the screw a little further. Something darker, mysteriously Mediterranean characterised the final programmed work, the perfect response to its predecessor’s abandon. Programming and performance worked as one.

’20 Sonatas’ – Stefanovich: Bach, Soler, Scarlatti, CPE Bach, Ives, Bartók, Eisler, Hindemith, Scriabin, Roslavets, Janáček, and Ustvolskaya, 27 February 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Bach: Sonata in A minor, BWV 965, after Reincken
Soler: Sonata in C minor, R.100
Busoni: Sonatina seconda
Scarlatti: Sonata in C minor, Kk.158; Sonata in G major, Kk.13
CPE Bach: Sonata in G minor, Wq.65/17
Ives: Three-Page Sonata

Scarlatti: Sonata in C major, Kk.406
Bartók: Sonata, Sz.80
Scarlatti: Sonata in G minor, Kk.450
Eisler: Sonata no.1, op.1
Soler: Sonata in D-flat major, R.110
Hindemith: Sonata no.3 in B-flat major

Soler: Sonata in G minor
Scriabin: Sonata no.9 in F major, op.68, ‘Black Mass’
Scarlatti: Sonata in G minor, Kk.8
Roslavets: Sonata no.2
Scarlatti: Sonata in B minor, Kk.87
Janáček: Sonata in E-flat minor, 1.X.1905, ‘From the Street’
Ustvolskaya: Sonata no.6

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Twenty piano sonatas over three fifty-minute-long recitals; avoiding the ‘core’ Classical and Romantic (broadly speaking) repertoire, from Haydn to Liszt; asking why composers might time and time again have returned to this genre, if indeed it can be considered the same genre at all. What would you choose? Why? There are no answers, of course, or rather no definitive answers, only an almost infinite host of opportunities. Such is the embarrassment of riches, usually a blessing but just occasionally a curse, of the piano/keyboard repertoire more generally. Tamara Stefanovich’s selection proved typically imaginative, committed, and both spiritually and intellectually nourishing, as well as an outstanding feat of musicianship and pianism.

The first selection began with Bach. (Does not everything?) Here we heard him in the sonata ‘after’ Johann Adam Reincken’s Hortus Musicus trio sonatas: some distance, perhaps, from what we generally think a sonata to be, but perhaps that was part of the point. No one would deny the glories of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, et al., but they can sometimes obscure other paths, especially earlier ones. Stefanovich left us in no doubt that this was a performance for the piano. (If you want to give a harpsichord performance, surely you should do that on the harpsichord.) Voicing gave the sense of a small orchestra at her disposal, a flute answering an oboe, a cello a viola. ‘Ornamentation’ was shown to be melody. There was declamatory joy, a strong sense of harmonic motion, and throughout a vivid, directed performance, culminating in a splendidly ‘present’ Gigue. Antonio Soler offered a very different voice, with both greater pathos and lightness. Stefanovich’s performance drew one in to listen. Busoni’s Sonatina seconda grew out of its close. Restless, diabolical, or better Faustian, it took us to the edge of atonality in a performance of virtuosity entirely at the service of the music, recalling what we know of Busoni's own pianism. Long-range coherence and incident of the moment were two sides of the same coin. 

Domenico Scarlatti made the first of several appearances, with a finely contrasted pair of sonatas (as we often hear his music). The first notes of the C minor Sonata, Kk.158, sounded truly disorienting, emerging as they did from Busoni. Where were we? In a liminal zone, so it seemed, in which eighteenth-century tonality reassembled itself. Both performances seemed thought out from first principles, from individual materials. What joy there was to be had in hearing the second’s repeated notes (more difficult on the piano than they sound). A sonata by CPE Bach, in G minor, followed. Its opening benefited from the grandest, most magnificent opening to a work of his I can recall, rhetoric harnessed as if to the rise of a velvet curtain. The first movement’s fantasia-like swings of mood and material were disciplined, just about, into a whole, yet never too much. This justly lived on the edge. The central Adagio sarabande, still duly involved, nonetheless offered some sense of relief, its arioso quality finely captured. The sheer strangeness (Sturm und Drang, one might call it, I suppose) of the third movement was again relished, never tamed. From one avant-gardist to another, we moved to Charles Ives’s Three-Page Sonata. Strikingly Schoenbergian language—close, not identical, and only for a moment or two—unleashed a parade of restless, radical, and wry freedom, whose chimes were almost the least surprising feature. The vehemence of disciplined chaos to its close made it almost impossible, had I not seen it for myself, to credit that there were only two hands at work here. 

The second recital was announced by Scarlatti: full of incident and pictorial character and contrast. ‘Percussive’ is a word we often hear used to describe Bartók’s piano-writing. One can understand why, but in reality it begs still more questions. (No bad thing.) For here, in his strangely neglected Piano Sonata, there were such profusion of melody, such variegation in the entirely unfussy weighting of each chord, propelled by rhythm and harmony alike, it seemed more than usually inadequate. A relentless first movement paved the way for a second of equal (at least) emotional intensity. The finale was every inch a finale in its substantive release. Rightly, for the first and only time within a recital, the pianist paused for applause. Returning to Scarlatti, it was fascinating to hear his repetitions and other, lighter obstinacies through the shadow cast by Bartók. 

Hanns Eisler’s opus one brought us fascinatingly close in its first movement to the language of the serial Schoenberg, yet held its distance too: more skittish, Scarlatti an excellent preface. Structure on paper became living form in liquid performance. Prokofiev seemed close at times too, perhaps particularly in the second of the three movements, its line unerringly traced and projected. The care and abandon with which not un-Schoenbergian idiosyncrasies were integrated in the finale typified the performance as a whole. Following an unexpectedly fragrant ornamental flowering from Soler, its harmonies taking a while to get used to after Eisler, we moved to Hindemith’s Third Piano Sonata. In its first movement, siciliano rhythms immediately standing out, they sounded as if formed by their surrounding harmonies. A scampering scherzo and two deliberate yet purposeful movements to follow led us to a sense of hard-won victory. 

Soler opened the third and final instalment: courtly yet capricious, ornamentation speaking of a freedom of which we stand in greater need than ever. Scriabin’s ‘Black Mass’ Sonata suggested dissolution as another, more dangerous form of emancipation, even through the burning fire of Bakunin-like anarchism (very different from Ives’s). There was wayward alchemy, though, and direction to be appreciated looking backwards from where we had come, even if we were uncertain at the time where we were heading. Command of detail was crucial to that greater sweep, just as it was in the dignified pathos of the Scarlatti sonata that followed. The post-Romantic constructivism of Ukrainian Nikolai Roslavets took a different path from Eisler (or Schoenberg) yet could nonetheless be felt as something of an antidote to Scriabin. There were moments of languor, yes, but motivic construction and transformation won out. Once more, the strangeness in context of Scarlatti’s harmonies was to be relished as a pendant.

Janáček’s Sonata, 1.X.1905 could hardly fail to have particular resonance given the state of the world around us. It went beyond that, though, in a moving performance of proud dignity and deeply communicative humanism, fusing the subtle and the direct. Its second movement was more songful, yet no less impassioned, through rather than despite its fragile nerve endings. For the final work of the day, Stefanovich donned black gloves to tackle the immediate yet reflective violence of Galina Ustvolskaya’s 1988 Sonata no.6. More unremitting than Bartók, blacker than anything we had yet heard or wished to hear, it duly bludgeoned, yet spoke of and with an integrity that refused to offer easy answers. Was there, perhaps, a glimmer of hope in there somewhere? It was probably something more equivocal than that. And then it was gone.

Greilsammer - Scarlatti and Cage, 4 January 2019

Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke’s

Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti and John Cage

David Greilsammer demonstrating the prepared piano 

Freedom and organisation are two sides of the same coin. Any good German, perhaps still more so any good aspirant German, will tell you that. They, we, think dialectically: we can do no other. The most important composer of the twentieth century – no, I have no intention of qualifying that – certainly did. But what of what we, sorry they, might once have thought of as the ‘periphery’ or at least as less central to Austro-German tradition? What, say, of that composer’s most celebrated American pupil? Such was but one of the many questions – generally, fruitfully questions more than answers – that ran through my head during this fascinating juxtaposition of ‘sonatas’, works justly titled, yet hardly in the Beethovenian sense, by Domenico Scarlatti and John Cage from David Greilsammer in the opening concert of this year’s ‘Baroque at the Edge’ festival.

Should that ‘hardly’ be true of Scarlatti, whatever anticipations of some aspects of Classical style – if we prefer, The Classical Style – we may find in his music, it is perhaps still more so of Cage, whose explicitly non- (or is it anti-?) Beethovenian sense of the sonata owes something to examples such as Scarlatti’s. A quality not only of invention – after all, who is more ‘inventive’ than Haydn? – but also of the composer as inventor perhaps inevitably came through. Schoenberg’s celebrated description of John Cage as ‘an inventor of genius’ was double- or maybe triple-edged: ‘Not a composer, no ... but an inventor. A great mind.’ Cage, however, was delighted, not offended, when he heard – not least since it arose, as is less often reported, from Schoenberg having been asked whether he had yet had any interesting pupils: he had initially said no, and then, at least according to Cage, had smiled and admitted that, yes, there had been one. The comparison may be exaggerated; Scarlatti, after all, did not invent the harpsichord as Cage may truly have been said to have invented to the prepared piano. Moreover, Scarlatti was here performed not on the harpsichord, nor for that matter on the fortepiano, but on the modern piano. That, however, would be somewhat to miss the point. Here we heard what, in the first, naïve instance, might have seemed to be Scarlatti in the spirit of Cage and Cage in the spirit of Scarlatti, but was surely, ultimately, rightly music by Scarlatti and Cage in the spirit in which Greilsammer decided both to combine and perform them.

The period of the interval having been given over to some words of explanation, demonstration – the audience asked to go up onstage to watch – and questions, the darkened second part had pieces alternate: one more from Scarlatti, who began and ended the recital. A swivel stool placed between the piano and prepared piano (both Steinway grands) enabled Greilsammer to switch quickly, affording both affinity and contrast or any number of other dialectics – but yet also, I think, a questioning of that mode of dialectical thought, perhaps increasingly so. My responses changed, often startlingly: not so much in a banal sense of getting used to what I was hearing, although I am sure there was an element of that, as of thinking and perhaps listening differently. I think – I hesitate to say more – that I also began to understand or to experience Cage’s music more conceptually than I had previously done, thereby appreciating the effort, which I can imagine irritating some Cageians, to turn Cage’s preference for ‘new ideas’ – ‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of old ones’ – upon himself. He surely deserves that at least as much as Stravinsky and others given to antagonistic – for good and for ill – aesthetic pronouncements.

For when I first head the music by Scarlatti – there was no printed programme, nor was there one online – I was often surprised both by the brusqueness and the somewhat distended, non-developmental quality afforded to many of the musical lines, almost as if they had been taken from different pieces, not necessarily even by Scarlatti, and assembled by ‘chance’. There was little or no attempt made to reimagine the sound of harpsichords or other instruments; nor, however, did the performance really fit into any pianistic tradition I knew. (Glenn Gould perhaps slightly? But swiftly again, it did not.) Even when a sonata came along that I knew, that I had played, it sounded radically different. Repeated notes were played with an unevenness I should never have attempted, should never have achieved even by incompetent default; I was far from sure that I understood why, yet had little doubt that this was not haphazard, that this was ‘mere’ chance.

Greilsammer's copy of Cage's instructions for preparing the piano

Chance, however, can be more than mere; or so some, not a million miles away from this programme, might tell you. So too can many other concepts, indeed any other concepts; is that not the very idea or indeed concept of a concept? There was doubtless chance, or indeed determination, to the spirit and ears with which I heard both Cage and Scarlatti here. Having very tentatively begun listening to and exploring some Indian and Javanese music last year, I doubtless came to the ‘Eastern’ – with apologies for the half-knowing orientalism – music with certain of those expectations too. Did that help? Like anything, at least anything with Cage, the answer, should there be one, is most likely yes and no. Or is that not precisely what his aesthetic is designed to have us think? Like Stravinsky, except more so, how different? Again, yes and no, etc., etc., for as long as one wishes to proceed. Percussion sounds almost inevitably invited comparison with the ‘other’ instruments evoked by Scarlatti. What struck me as much as anything else, though, was again how limited such comparison proved: certainly more a starting point for listening to something that was very much this musician’s particular performance, this listener’s particular response to that performance, than an end in itself. I might well, of course, have thought differently on another occasion. Who knows?

One gripe: on the night, we were assured that a list of works performed would go up on the festival’s website, were it not there already. It was not. Moreover, at the time of writing, two days later, it still has not gone up. If a decision not to tell us were part of the concept, fair enough, whatever one’s thoughts on the matter, but that is not what the organiser told us. I assume the programme was the same as Greilsammer’s CD combining Scarlatti and Cage, but I cannot be sure. Most of the Scarlatti sonatas I did not know; I cannot, truth be told, remember which of the Cage sonatas were performed and when. Similarly regrettable was the lack of any sort of printed programme, even if only a piece of paper with a biography of a performer who had stepped in at short notice and whom some in the audience might not even have been expecting.

I do not wish, however, to close on such a note, so shall add that, for an encore, Greilsammer offered Scarlatti again, albeit on the prepared piano. How different did it sound? Again, many of those questions, many of those ideas found themselves restated; or, should one prefer – I am now unsure – they were restated, but by whom, and to what end?

Esfahani - Bull, Kalabis, D’Anglebert, Borup-Jǿrgensen, Saariaho, Kidane, and Scarlatti, 19 July 2016

Wigmore Hall

John Bull – Chromatic Pavan and Galliard, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s’
Viktor Kalabis – Aquarelles, op.53
Bull – Fantasia XII
Jean Henry d’Anglebert – Pièces de clavecin: selection
Axel Borup-Jǿrgensen – Tarocco, op.124
Saariaho – Jardin Secret II, for harpsichord and tape
Daniel Kidane – Six Etudes (new version)
Scarlatti – Sonatas: in F major, Kk518; in G major, Kk259; in G major, Kk260; in A major and E major (Barcelona MS 1964 nos 34 and 31); in D minor, Kk516; in D minor, Kk517

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord).


One would be hard put to find a more varied programme from any instrumentalist today, or indeed in the past. It was indicative of Mahan Esfahani’s typically venturing spirit – and achievement – that this harpsichord recital, sadly my final visit to the Wigmore Hall of the 2015-16 season, was listed under both its Early Music and Baroque Series and its Contemporary Music Series. I think we can forgive him for the lack of Chopin and Liszt. Instead, we heard intriguing juxtapositions, the intent not, insofar as I could tell, didactic, but willing or, perhaps better, permitting the listener to make what connections and contrasts he or she would. Where unapologetically modernist artists such as Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Maurizio Pollini would more often than not present us with a guiding, almost Schoenbergian Idea behind a programme, Esfahani’s approach might be considered more post-modern, which is not in any sense to imply unconsidered, far from it.

What a joy it was to start with John Bull, whose waywardness clearly attracts Esfahani. The Chromatic Pavan and Galliard seemed almost to look forward to Purcell, albeit with a knack for surprising one that made me think not so much of English contemporaries or successors, but of Gesualdo. (Would that we had more keyboard music from him!) There was great flexibility to the performance, but flexibility with reason that always announced itself. Both dances seemed to gather up complexity as they developed – in a fashion that, doubtless fancifully, put me in mind of Schoenberg and his school. Viktor Kalabis’s Aquarelles, which I had also heard Esfahani play at a Milton Court recital a little more than a year ago, opened with an intriguing hint of Poulenc (the Concert champêtre), but developed – that word again – in a very different way. There was perhaps more than a hint of Shostakovich to the second, marked ‘Andante’; what struck me, though, more than any mere correspondence, was the sense conveyed of what lay between and beneath the notes. There was an intimacy in the spareness of halting progress. The third and final piece proved kaleidoscopic and adamant in its rhythm, in turns and also together. Bull’s Fantasia XII emerged from it as if a cousin, which then proceeded upon its own, highly virtuosic, wonderfully realised way.

Five pieces from Jean Henry d’Anglebert’s 1689 collection followed: a ‘Prélude’, an ‘Air d’Apollon du Triomphe de l’Amour,’ an ‘Air ancient: Ou estes vous allé,’ ‘Les Songes agréables d’Atys’, and the ‘Passacaille d’Armide’. The opening Prélude was gravely rhetorical, or should that be rhetorically grave? And yet, it sounded full of light and shade. The airs were sung gracefully, kinship and differentiation both perceptible. The Lully ‘Passacaille’ was imbued with proper grandeur and impetus, which yet proved capable of more tender yielding.

The first half closed with two pieces of what we might consider to be Scandinavian modernism. First was Axel Borup-Jǿrgensen’s Tarocco. Its twists, turns, and above all, guiding thread were communicated with a winning sense of adventure. Logic and fantasy were revealed not so much as in competition but as two sides of the same musical coin. Kaaija Saariaho’s Jardin Secret II I found harder to get on with, but the fault may well have been mine. It opened in almost concertante fashion, but the relationship between harpsichord and tape seemed to be in a state of constant, or at least continuing, flux. Some of the rather strange electronic noises – the work was written using IRCAM technology – puzzled me in themselves, but that was perhaps the point. I was delighted, in any case, to have the opportunity to hear such music – music, I must admit, I had not even known existed, and which the ‘Early Music’ crowd would not touch with an authenticke bargepole.

A new version of Daniel Kidane’s Six Etudes, an earlier version given in that 2015 recital, opened the second half. Before looking at the programme, I was struck by the varying transformative techniques running throughout these six beautifully crafted miniatures. I was then delighted – and relieved – to see the composer’s own reference to an ‘inbuilt transformative aspect [which] also adds a playful nature to the pieces’. That was certainly how it sounded here, particular ‘problems’ set up – as is traditional with a ‘study’ – and explored within certain restrictive parameters. Cellular is probably not quite the right word – I have had no opportunity to read the score – but I am not sure that it was entirely the wrong word either. And yes, it was great fun to welcome back the hotel reception bell, wryly described by Kidane as ‘an external pitch’, in the sixth piece.

Finally, we heard several sonatas by Scarlatti. That in F major, Kk518, offered characteristic insistence but also variety of figuration, clearly, meaningfully brought out in performance. The turn to the tonic minor was splendidly, even heartrendingly, inward in quality. G major (Kk 259 and 260) proved warmer and, in the first sonata, perhaps gentler, also, I think, more exploratory. The second of those two sonatas offered relatively extrovert contrast, surprising both harmonically and melodically; Esfahani proved an expert judge, moreover, of its rhetoric. The two sonatas from a Barcelona manuscript, discovered by Barry Ife, may well have been receiving their modern premieres. They sounded very much as a pair here, their different key signatures notwithstanding: contrast and kinship, as in earlier works in the recital, were both apparent and to be questioned. There were, even by Scarlatti’s standards, some striking disjunctures to be relished in the E major sonata. The D major Sonata, Kk516, seemed at times to evoke the world of John Bull in its manner, at least before highly contrasting material took it along a quite different path. It struck a note of melancholic relief, Esfahani, having heard some of its material performed by Spanish folk musicians, taking it at a significantly slower tempo than marked. Keyboard fireworks returned in the closing D minor work, Kk517. And then, it was time for another, charming surprise: a Richard Rodney Bennett encore, Little Elegy.

Prohaska/Arcangelo/Cohen - Lachrimae, 2 August 2015

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Dowland – Lachrimae Pavane

Tarquinio Merula – Hor ch’e tempo di dormir
Purcell – The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation
Cavalli – Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne: ‘O più d’ogni richezza’
Giovanni Felice Sances – Usurpator Tiranno
Purcell – Sonata in G minor, Z.807, from Ten Sonatas in Four Parts
Strozzi – Diporti de Euterpe, op.7: ‘Lagrime mie’
Dowland – Flow my Tears
Strozzi – Che si può fare
Salomone Rossi – Sonata terza sopra l’aria romanesca
Purcell – The Fairy Queen: ‘The Plaint: O let me weep’
Scarlatti – Sonata in D minor, K.90, arranged for violin and continuo
Cavalli – La Calisto: ‘Restino imbalsamate’
Purcell – An Evening Hymn

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Arcangelo
Jonathan Cohen (director)

I apologise that this will not be a ‘review’ as such. That is not primarily because Anna Prohaska, the soloist, is a friend of mine. (I think a lot of nonsense is spoken about such things. It is the nature of things that, sometimes one has to write about a performance, a book, a musical work by someone one knows. It may in some ways render the task more difficult, but it may also afford insights. Honesty is the best policy here – and indeed anywhere else.) However, I was unable to buy a programme – the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ran out very soon, and only offered them again for the second half, which struck me as extortion – and was thus unable to follow the texts and translations, and indeed in many cases was unaware what was being performed. Quite a good test of one’s ear in many ways: I was delighted to recognise one of Cavalli’s two arias and to guess that he was the composer of another (from a work I thought I knew, but which I clearly do not know well enough!) I was still more delighted to hear works by Barbara Strozzi, whose music I have long admired, but whom we hear far too little: alas, we all know why. I wanted simply to post the programme, discovered from Arcangelo’s website after the event, to remind me what I had seen and heard.

 

If you will permit me – and even if not – I should like to say that Anna gave an intensely dramatic performance, quite befitting the theatrical location. I very much liked the way the various works fitted together and suggested moods and even narratives greater than the sum of their parts. A hint, and sometimes more than that, of the wilder world of the Mediterranean was sometimes present, especially in Strozzi’s music. (I know I am being ungrateful, but a little Monteverdi would have been greatly appreciated too. When, however, would that not be the case?) Moreover, whilst I am, as any regular readers will know, anything but a paid-up member of the period-instrument lobby, I found Arcangelo’s performances, on their terms and indeed often on mine, mostly highly convincing, even if I could not quite work out what an arrangement of a Scarlatti keyboard sonata was doing there. The Playhouse is, whatever its acoustical problems for the performers, an interesting and, yes, beautiful space; I look forward to seeing a play or an opera there. I shall stop now, lest this turn into an actual review, whatever that might be…

Baryshevskyi - Scarlatti, Ligeti, Chopin, Messiaen, and Schumann, 2 March 2015

Wigmore Hall

Scarlatti – Sonata in A major, Kk 113

Sonata in C major, Kk 159
Sonata in D major, Kk 96
Ligeti ­– Musica ricercata
Chopin – Mazurkas: in B-flat major, op.7 no.1; C major, op.56 no.2; F minor, op.68 no.4
Messiaen – Three pieces from Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus
Schumann – Piano Sonata no.2 in G minor, op.22

Antonii Baryshevskyi (piano)

 

Many of us fall into an easy, perhaps too easy, dismissal of ‘competition winners’. No one in his right mind would say that winning a competition is anything but a beginning. Moreover, we have all heard plenty of the bland, technically perfect playing, with nothing to say about the music, or indeed the musician, which gives ‘competition winners’ a bad name. That said, it seems perverse and indeed unfair to dismiss the very real achievements, both musical and personal, triumphing in such conditions may indicate. Antonii Baryshevskyi, winner of the first prize and gold medal at the 2014 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition here made an impressive Wigmore Hall debut, which would have been just as impressive whether he had won that competition or not, but for which that experience may well have helped prepare him.

 

It was only in Schumann’s second piano sonata, the final piece on the programme, that I thought in those ‘competition’ terms. It is no mean feat to perform the work with such virtuosity as we heard, but I did not always discern so much beneath the surface. In its first movement, likewise in the scherzo and finale, I did not feel that Baryshevskyi’s Fazioli did Schumann many favours. There was welcome clarity, but the brightness of tone did not always sound ideal. Fluency was undoubtedly impressive. The slow movement, however, was possessed of a characteristic sadness, with a crucial Schumannesque sense of ‘poetry’: songful, yet not maudlin, with kinship to Mendelssohn.

The recital opened with three Scarlatti sonatas. I could not help but wonder whether including one minor-key and/or one slow piece would have offered greater contrast, but what we heard was nevertheless well conceived. The A major sonata, Kk 113, opened in bright, declamatory fashion. Terraced dynamics made their point but there was variegation within too. The C major sonata, Kk 159, showed still more that Baryshevskyi was unafraid to use the full resources – well, more or less – of the modern piano to Scarlatti’s benefit: no attempting to imitate a period instrument here, though there were welcome echoes of the guitar. Hand-crossing was relished, and put to musical as well as technical ends. The Handelian opening of the D major sonata, Kk 96, came with a splendid flourish. Harmonic twists later on were conveyed with proper understanding. If there were times when I thought the pianist’s way with ornamentation might have sounded more idiomatic on a harpsichord, there were others when it emerged in melodic terms to the advantage of his chosen instrument. Repeated notes were mightily impressive in their despatch.

Ligeti’s Musica ricercata was a very welcome choice. This is process music in the best sense; one hears and experiences the implications – whether as pianist or as listener – of the increase in notes: from just the two in the first (and the D is only added to the A in the final bar) to all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in the eleventh. Baryshevskyi’s performance was as full of wit and character as the work itself, and conveyed with evident understanding its nature as a whole. The first piece seemed well prepared by Scarlatti, its crescendi something quite new, magnificently executed by the pianist. One could really appreciate the novelty of a third note in the second piece, which, moreover, truly sounded as Ligeti has it: ‘Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale’. After its high drama, the third piece sounded like the love-child of Scarlatti and Prokofiev, its toccata-spirit unabashed. The ‘Tempo di valse’ piece which followed seemed almost to evoke Chopin’s ugly sister, the ungainliness of its dance predicated on a secure waltz-foundation. The eighth and ninth pieces sounded very much as a Bartókian pair. (The ninth is dedicated to Bartók’s memory.) Rhythm and melody alike in the former sounded very close to the earlier Hungarian master, whilst his dirge- and night-music seemed reimagined in the latter. Toccata-like writing again came to the fore, both in work and performance, in the tenth, whilst it was Bartók, Bach, and of course Frescobaldi who were recalled in the chromatic final piece, the ‘Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi’. It offered a clear, inevitable conclusion, again both as composition and as performance.

Three Chopin Mazurkas opened the second half. For me – and this is unusual – the B-flat piece, op.7 no.1, suffered from too much rubato, it proving difficult to discern a pulse. However, there could be no decrying an identikit, ‘competition winner’ performance; this was clearly a personal response. There was no such problem with the C major work that followed, op.56 no.2. It was far from metronomic; such would be monstrous. There was, however, a strong, even heavy pulse – quite appropriate to the piece – which was then varied tellingly. The F minor Mazurka, op.68 no.4, one of my favourites, again was performed with pronounced rubato, but in winningly ‘old school’ fashion. Baryshevskyi’s Chopin certainly intrigues, from this taster.

In between the Chopin and Schumann came three pieces from Messiaen’s Vingt regards. ‘Première Communion de la Vierge’ instantly proclaimed the ‘right’ sonority, irrespective of instrument. The brightness of its treble was certainly put to excellent use, but the ‘rightness’ was more a matter of old-fashioned ‘touch’ than anything else. Just as important, Baryshevskyi had a fine sense of how Messiaen’s music hangs together and progresses: how it works. His voicing of chords was often exquisite, but never narcissistic; there was always an understanding, or so it seemed, that Messiaen’s theology insisted upon something far more than the hoary construct of ‘absolute music’. Post-Lisztian virtuosity was not, however, to be sneezed at. ‘Noël’ conveyed the ecstasy of the Incarnation well, although there were just a few occasions, especially earlier on, when rhythms might perhaps have been tighter. The echoes of Gaspard de la nuit were well judged, though. In ‘Regard des hauteurs’, that excellent toccata-style once again came to the fore, here well negotiated in terms of tricky metres. I only wished I could have heard more.

 

 

Alexandre Tharaud - Scarlatti, Chopin, and Liszt, 15 February 2012

Wigmore Hall

Scarlatti – Sonata in D minor, Kk 64
Sonata in D minor, Kk 9
Sonata in C major, Kk 72
Sonata in C major, Kk 132
Sonata in D major, Kk 29
Sonata in E major, Kk 380
Sonata in A minor, Kk 3
Sonata in C major, Kk 514
Sonata in F minor, Kk 481
Sonata in D minor, Kk 141
Chopin – Piano Sonata no.2 in B-flat minor, op.35
Liszt – Funérailles, S 173/7


This proved a surprisingly mixed recital, the surprise lying for the most part in what came off best. On the basis of Alexandre Tharaud’s wonderful Couperin and Rameau, I had lazily expected that Scarlatti would fare equally well. Scarlatti’s music is of course different in almost every respect, and it was only at the end of the first half that Tharaud’s performances really caught fire, a good number of the earlier sonatas having proved frustratingly prosaic. Moreover, I had not expected that some of the most impressive pianism and musicianship would come in the music of Liszt.

Scarlatti first. As a schoolboy I played a good number of his sonatas, not least because they tended to crop up as alternatives to the more ‘difficult’ works by Bach in the Baroque lists for Associated Board exams. It was not really until I also took up the organ and became truly besotted with Bach that I persuaded my teacher that I should really have the chance to explore Bach on the piano. For children, the attractions of Scarlatti are many: rhythm, ‘Spanish’ colour, technical challenges that can generally be surmounted with a bit of hard work, and so on; one tends to assimilate him, consciously or otherwise, into a semi-alternative view of piano-history to the solidly Teutonic. In that respect, I was intrigued to hear what would be made of the juxtaposition with Chopin’s keyboard poetry, though more was offered in theory than reality. Tharaud’s lack of exaggeration in many of the sonatas was welcome; for instance the willingness only to hint at the Hispanic elements – guitars strumming, mordants and some of the harmonies – in the first sonata, Kk 64, though but there were times when I longed for a broader expressive range. Scarlatti as precursor of Chopin and Bartók, amongst others, might have been more apparent. There was a beautifully dreamy opening to the second of the D minor sonatas, Kk 9, but it suffered from a loss of momentum in the material that followed, meandering rather than directed. Kk 72 and Kk 29 were performed in virtuoso moto perpetuo mode; I could not help wishing that Tharaud would allow them to yield, if only a little, and there was occasional clumsiness too, especially in the former. There is more to this music than he allowed there, as some delicate shading in Kk 132 attested. Even in that case, however, more might well have been made of Scarlatti’s dissonances and other harmonic surprises.

A more generous palette was employed in Kk 380, whilst abrupt contrasts and extraordinary chromaticism were clearly relished in an impressive account of Kk 3. Kk 514 was somewhat on the brittle side, however: yes, there is an undeniable percussive element to the music, but there are also melodic phrases to be shaped. The final two sonatas received what were perhaps the best performances. Kk 481, in F minor, received a sensitive reading, showing Tharaud perfectly capable of cantabile tone and a recognisably pianistic touch; it was just a pity that they had not been more readily on offer earlier. There was a more pianistic sensibility to the closing D minor sonata, Kk 141, too; had Tharaud perhaps been a little too eager to imitate the harpsichord? It is difficult to say, but if so, it had not really worked. The sonata’s opening theme was an especial highlight, almost Lisztian in the sense of the first Mephisto Waltz. Fierce ‘Spanish’ repeated strumming notes opened an equally impressive second section.

The second Chopin sonata also took a long time to catch fire. Indeed, the first two movements proved disappointing. The first movement progressed from phrase to phrase in alarmingly four-square fashion, exhibiting little sign of any grander sweep. Weighting of chords could be heavy-handed too, sounding closer to Rachmaninov than Chopin. The second movement tended to grimace rather than to rage, whilst its trio material emerged in distended fashion, again largely a consequence of proceeding from phrase to phrase, even beat to beat. Harmonic rhythm was sadly lacking. The Funeral March, however, sounded on quite a different level. It was given a straightforward, unaffected performance, in which Chopin’s line was permitted magically to reveal itself. The cantilena of the second subject was sensitively, movingly shaped: quite absorbing. Chopin’s finale came across with a true sense of its weird, disorienting experimentalism.

Liszt was represented by Funérailles. Tharaud’s opening bars clearly meant business, seemingly invigorated by the success of the latter part of the Chopin sonata. They truly thundered, both as true piano music and telling of something beyond the concert hall: Liszt’s – and a revolution’s – grief. As the piece progressed, echoes of Chopin’s funeral march became more pronounced, not just in the obvious sense of ‘likeness’ but in their generative function for Liszt’s form, actually conveyed more tellingly, more dramatically, than the ‘original’. Again, the contrasting cantilena was beautifully handled. It was tempting to wish that, in the light of this performance, Tharaud would return to Scarlatti and see whether more might be done with his music now.

The recital was being recorded, I assume for Wigmore Hall Live.