Despite my attending literally thousands of concerts in the past, each new offering still has the potential to surprise, to go where music has never taken me. The experience does not often do so, despite the fact that it rarely disappoints. Also, approaching a concert that I am responsible for makes me nervous and makes me also less able to relax to absorb whatever is on offer. After organising well over five hundred concerts, it remains the case that each new one is a challenge and that challenge can militate against personal enjoyment. Without the support of skilled people, musicians and technicians alike, the presentation of a concert would be impossible, and I have to record the fact that in Denia last night we had the best of both professions.
A program, however, can create expectations, but in the case of the latest Denia International Piano Festival concert, Mathis Cathignol, a young pianist from France, offered Granados, Fauré and Chopin. One the face of things, this was not going to surprise, but by the end of the concert, Mathis Cathignol had played so elegantly and so poetically that the surprise lasted from the first note to the last.
Mathis Cathignol is a 26 year-old French pianist. Before the concert, he asked whether it was normal or acceptable to have music open on the stage. My reply, as ever, was that he had to decide. I have learned over the years to go with a musician’s flow and not try to impose anything. In the event, he played the Granados and the Fauré from scores, but the Chopin from memory. Eventually, all that matters is the musical communication and more than a hundred people in the audience were left in no doubt about the quality of that.
Mathis Cathignol started his concert with three pieces by Granados. A Frenchman playing Spanish music to an audience in Spain is taking a risk. But Mathis Cathignol’s playing left no one unconvinced of his ability to communicate via this language. The playing, and with it the expression was exquisite. The phrases, even the specifically Spanish in a Spanish idiom, were played beautifully. What’s more, the music made perfect sense. Too often in Granados and other Spanish composers, a pianist can emphasize the stereotype and thereby lose contact with the overall effect. Mathis Cathignol did not fall into this trap and indeed his shaping of Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor was exceptional. It is a piece that I personally have heard many times, but Mathis Cathignol’s interpretation completely renewed the experience.
I do go to a lot of concerts, and I cannot remember any recent program that included three substantial pieces by Fauré for piano solo. On the face of it, this programming was conventional, but on reflection, I admit that it was something special. For me, Fauré is a quintessentially impressionist composer, and the three nocturnes completely fit the bill. Mathis Cathignol was poetic and expressive, managing to convey subtlety of tone, harmony and shape that sounded truly faithful to the composers intention.
The Chopin that followed was more of a concert piece. But in the hands of Mathis Cathignol, it became more than a series of show off variations and became a rounded, playful examination of what variation form could deliver.
In the end, the young French pianist played Liszt’s Chapelle de Guillaume Tell from the first year of pilgrimage, Années de Pèlerinage I. As an encore, it was a substantial piece and its reception in the hall suggested that the audience wanted even more.
Mathis Cathignol is already an accomplished pianist,
whose musical communication is sound. He plays with a lightness of touch which
is astounding but can also deliver pace and volume apparently at the same time.
He also has the element of surprise which promises greatness.
