Programa 13 de diciembre Festival de Piano de Denia - Tsisana Kikabidze tocará Beethoven, Liszt, Bartok y Rachmaninov

 

Programa 29 de noviembre Festival de Piano de Denia - Mihaela Manea tocará Scarlatti, Brahms, Enescu y Liszt

 

Congyu Wang - 24 Oct Denia International Piano Festival

 

 

Congyu Wan's playing was explosive and at the same time tender. He has definitely thought about every phrase. But he does not over-shape or over-interpret. The emphasis is where it needs to be, the rubato is applied, but never overdone. The dynamics are wide, but never over-emphasised. He has a tendency with Chopin to slow the piano and accelerate the forte. In concert it works beautifully, but the approach might not get past a nit-picking reviewer on disc.

He chose to play the Chopin Nocturne and the Liszt Liebestraum together, deliberately holding off the applause at the end of the Chopin. The effect was to increase musical tension. The Denia audience was spellbound to silenece anyway! Quite memorable. The Earl Wild arrangement of the Vocalise transforms the melody into what sounds like another prelude to add to the Rachmaninov set. There’s a central section that is explosive. After that the Kreisler Libeslied sounds like a show-off piece, which is what it is, but the Rachmnaninov harmony saves it and, indeed, makes it interesting. The Gershwin preludes again sounded more pianistic than usual. Just a little research shows that Earl Wild reworked seven Gershwin Preludes – the usual performance does the three that Gershwin himself published under the title. These pieces were quite different. Highly pianistic and with recognisable melodies that kept poking through the notes. The overall effect was wonderful and simply put brought the house down.

After that, Congyu Wang then embarked on Gaspard de la Nuit. Now this is a challenge at the best of times. It is virtuosic in a way that perhaps only Ravel could write. It’s a style that is unique. It sounds literally like no-one else. But what demands he makes to mimic simplicity! One feels that Ravel always wanted to simplify, but the way his mind worked was just different from the rest of us. The pianistic elements don’t feel like decoration. They are essential elements in the music’s sense.

Congyu Wang’s playing was breath-taking. The emphasis here was in the contrasts. Slow-fast, quiet-loud, the contrasts seemed emphasised, but never mannered. Add to that the rhythmic tension that is always part of Ravel's thinking and the result is this masterpiece of the concert hall. He had really thought about the overall shape of the piece and that came across with clarity. Just what the rather strange mind of Maurice Ravel had in mind we will never know. What is clear is that the place he lived was not quite in this universe, such a transporting experience does his music offer - and this performance in particular.

And then, at the end of the programme, we heard Aldoraba de Garcioso. This is Ravel in “Spanish” mode and the audience will have been totally familiar with the musical phrases and harmonies that keep surfacing in this consciousness stream that is pure Ravel. The playing was again beyond brilliant, but always sympathetic, never spectacular just for effect. Congyu Wang is a true artist.

There followed three encores. Chopin, Debussy and more Chopin. The audience would have stayed for more, but after a programme like that at least one person involved deserved a rest.

 

 

 

 

Costa Blaca Arts Update - Dmytro Choni in Denia

 

Dmytro Choni is a pianist from Ukraine who has won the Santander competition and finished fourth in Leeds. Such results are irrelevant once a musician presents him or herself as a performer: the only thing that counts is a communication with an audience via the interpretation of music. On the evidence of this concert in Denia, Dmytro Choni has achieved near perfection in the art of performance.

Pianists often choose programmes that intend to show off technical brilliance rather than interpretive quality. At first sight, Dmytro Choni’s programme might appear to fall into this category. After all, it’s not anyone who starts an evening with the two Brahms Rhapsodies and then plays for an hour and a half to finish with a work as grand as the Dante Sonata of Liszt. There was even enough energy for an encore.

Those two Brahms Rhapsodies came across as more substantial pieces than I had remembered. Placed together, the contrasts and similarities became clear as they combined to mimic a single work. These were followed by perhaps the most taxing music on the programme. The Sarcasms of Prokofiev sound like Malevich meeting Picasso. Almost aggressively modernistic, these short pieces make a deep impression in the concert hall, since they seem to question what it is that we expect from music. They are atonal in parts, melodic in others, rhythmic here and there, broken elsewhere. Under the fingers of a pianist who does not actively associate with their intention, these pieces can dissolve into an amorphous mass of disconnected fragments. When played with sensitivity and design, as Dmytro Choni did, they become an abstract, surreal world where nothing can be assumed, but a world which we can inhabit. They surprise and enchant at the same time.

Dmytro Choni followed the Prokofiev pieced with the Sonata No1 of Ginastera. Written forty or so years after the Sarcasms, there are sections of this sonata that inhabit a similar sound world, underlining just how experimental was the vision of Prokofiev. Underpinning Ginastera’s music there is always at least an idea of an Argentinian dance, though usually of a much more energetic type than the languid tango. But here also, especially in the slow movement, there is a tendency towards the atonal, and much less stress of rhythm as musical content. In the other three movements, it was rhythm that left enduring impressions.

Book One of Debussy’s Images followed. Though harmonically Debussy’s sound world is now familiar to audiences, in its time it was nothing less than revolutionary. After the rhythmic drive of much of the Ginastera, Debussy’s sense of space impressed and this came across in the playing.

And the, having already earned his living several times over, Dmytro Choni ended the concert with Liszt’s After a lecture on Dante, Fantasia quasi sonata. It’s a vast piano sonata in everything but name and shares musical ideas with the Sonata Liszt did write. This is music on a grand scale and needs a pianist with vision and interpretive skill as well as the technical skills to render the experience musically credible rather than a mere test of dexterity. And this audience was treated to a superbly shaped picture of how Liszt responded to Dante, though it must be said that the pianist was tiring towards the end. Understandably so… It’s not every pianist who take on a programme like this!

The evening finished with an encore. It was inevitable, perhaps essential that this Ukrainian pianist would finish with some music from his homeland. The short, lyrical but reflective piece by Valentin Silvestrov was perfect, as was the rest of this superb recital.

 

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Pianist Daniel del Pino plays in La Nucia

A few days ago I wrote a piece about a Russian pianist who successfully mixed so-called ‘classical’ music with jazz on the same programme. In her case, it was one half of each, half great Romantics and half jazz standards plus her own compositions. I could not have predicted that soon I would be reviewing a work by a Russian composer who does much the same thing, but at the same time! 

Daniel del Pino is a fine, even great pianist, known throughout Spain and in concert halls across the world. I have heard recitals by him at least once a year for the last six years or so. Certainly one thing he always delivers is hard work, his own, that is, because his performances are nothing less than a complete delight from beginning to end. 

But there’s no opening Haydn Sonata followed by Mozartian gentility for Daniel del Pino. His programmes are never less than demanding and his most recent recital in La Nucia’s Auditori de la Mediterrània, organised by Los Amigos de la Musica de la Marina Baixa, was no exception. On reading the list of works in prospect on this occasion, however, something immediately stood out. There was a composer I had never heard of – and that’s quite a rare occurrence these days! Daniel began with a finger loosener. In his case this meant six of Rachmaninov’s Opus 39 Etudes Tableaux! If he had played nothing else all night, I would have gone home in bliss. Opus 39 number 5 in E flat minor is a personal favourite and in Daniel del Pino’s hands the exquisite shape of the music, a complex interaction between three musical arguments, was close to sublime. In all, Opus 39 numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 9 might, for many pianists, have formed a grand finale. For Daniel del Pino, they were openers. 

He followed this with two pieces by Granados, both Goyescas, El Pelele and Quejas, o Maja y el Ruiseñor. In many ways I find the idioms of Rachmaninov and Granados similar, in that they were both late Romantics, celebrants of the luscious, the personal, the individual and the national. In Rachmaninov’s case, it’s usually the pathos that dominates. In Granados, it’s the sunshine, dance and display, but mingled with some absurdity. Daniel del Pino was able to switch his interpretive landscape effortlessly to bring out the more impressionistic subtleties of Granados. This is music for which he clearly has more than mere feeling. 

His final piece was a rousing finale in the form of Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody. Alongside memories of the Granados, this was musical tourism, but cultural tourism at worst! Showpiece it may be, but it is harmonically and structurally inventive, so it is musically satisfying as well as being a pyrotechnic display. As an encore he chose a simple – not so simple! – study by Mendelssohn. I have, of course, missed something out! 

Between the Granados and the Liszt, Daniel del Pino presented the eight Concert Studies Opus 40 of Nikolai Kapustin. Now I can hear the concert goers of western Europe saying, “Who?” in concert. In over forty years of listening to music, I have never encountered the name … I think … I have vague recollections of a piece for Jazz Big Band being played on the BBC Third Programme’s Music In Our Time in the mid-1960s. I missed the name of the composer, but now I think I know it. Daniel del Pino introduced the music to his audience before playing it. He told us that Kapustin was Russian, born in 1937, and composed in a pianistic tradition he inherited from Rachmaninov, but placed his thematic and rhythmic material firmly in the idiom of jazz. I have expressed my opinion of ‘crossover’ music before. Usually the result is puerile from the point of view of expression and often mundane in terms excitement and performance. Via the scored and highly pianistic music of Kapustin, we heard something that was definitely not crossover. The music was precisely scored and perhaps there was an arpeggio too far here and there. But while it was clearly rooted in the harmonic language of Rachmaninov and even Scriabin, the material and its treatment were pure bee-bop. Though it may have lacked an improvisatory edge – it seems that Kapustin himself does not claim that he scores improvisations – the music still had the feeling of jazz, but was presented in a structure that revealed itself and engaged. These eight pieces proved to be a major work and technically at least were perhaps the most demanding part of a thoroughly demanding programme. Daniel del Pino’s recital was the work of a complete artist. He can surprise as well as deliver amazing technique alongside superb interpretation and musical sensibility. Hear him play. You will not be disappointed.