Review

Reviewed today is pianist Leif Ove Andsnes at the National Concert Hall, Dublin

Leif Ove Andsnes (piano)

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Schubert - Sonata in D D850.

Janácek - In the Mist.

Mussorgsky - Pictures At An Exhibition

Poor Mussorgsky. His best-known orchestral works and his most successful opera are most often heard in versions that have been filtered through - some would say bowdlerised by - other men's hands. And his most popular piano work, Pictures At An Exhibition, was for a long time known in editions that turned some of the composer's intended effects on their head.

Mussorgsky was viewed in some circles as a kind of inept amateur, a man whose genius greatly exceeded his ability to handle the technicalities of composition. Helpful editors lined up after his death (he left a lot of projects needing completion) to produce the musical texts they imagined he would have wanted had his skills been up to it.

Why rehearse these well-documented facts now? Well, the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes offered Pictures At An Exhibition in his celebrity recital at the National Concert Hall on Wednesday.

And, in spite of the fact that, a day earlier, he had declared in an interview in this newspaper that "in the end, you have to just trust the music - to let it speak for itself", he did anything but in his performance of Mussorgsky's memorial to his painter friend Viktor Hartmann.

Andsnes engaged in any amount of touching up, turning bare octaves into chords, substituting more complex textural patterns for straightforward tremolos, reinforcing here, decorating there, generally filling things out with pianistic tricks, as if he were convinced that most of the unconventional aspects of the piano writing were mistakes in need of correction.

He's not the first pianist to have done this kind of thing, and he's probably not going to be the last. But his changes are no more of an improvement than would be a widening or a warming of the Mona Lisa's smile or a toning down of angularity to make a cubist portrait look more directly representational of its subject.

He did, of course, give the audience an experience of the Mussorgsky that few of them will ever have had in concert before. And as a demonstration of exactly the sort of savvy as a pianist that Mussorgsky may have lacked as a composer, his playing offered much to admire.

The first half was a less happy affair. Schubert's late D major sonata was finely controlled but shallow in its paciness, and the music-making came fully to life only in selected moments of soft-spoken delicacy.

Janácek's In The Mist was generally warmer in its colouring, but it still sounded to be more a statement about the music than an expression of it. The audience made no bones about its preference for the Mussorgsky/Andsnes of the second half.

Michael Dervan