Reviews

Irish Times reviewers attended two recent piano recitals in Dublin.

Evgeny Kissin (piano)

NCH, Dublin

Schubert - Sonata in E flat D568. Beethoven - Variations in C minor. Brahms - Six Pieces Op 118. Chopin - Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante

Evgeny Kissin's programme at the National Concert Hall was oddly structured by any yardstick. It was probably best to regard it simply as a sequence of four pieces that Kissin wanted to play, with the more extrovert ones placed second in each half, and that's rather how it sounded on the night.

Kissin is at times a puzzling performer. He's uniquely gifted when it comes to piano playing. Technical barriers hardly seem to exist for him. But his musical approach is not always easy to fathom.

He set about Schubert's rarely-heard Sonata in E flat as if he were wary of upsetting it, reluctant to let its quiet passages relax into real intimacy, afraid of giving the climaxes their head lest they get out of hand. The music-making conveyed a sense of formality, of correctness, but little in the way of Schubertian warmth.

Beethoven's 32 variations in C minor, on the other hand, were delivered with free virtuosity, as if they had beckoned with an irresistible invitation to be treated as a showpiece.

It was undeniably exciting to hear Kissin master the various challenges of virtuosity he posed himself, but the performance was more than usually successful in revealing why Beethoven himself once voiced a low opinion of this piece.One way of viewing Kissin's musical approach is to think of him as trying to take on different pieces as if without the hindsight benefits of tradition.

This can bring the rewards of freshness and it can sometimes make the musicianship sound almost gauche. Both effects were found in the six pieces of Brahms's Op 118, the second seeming brightly, even harshly, lit and wanting in tenderness, the aching quality of the sixth sounding stilted under such obviously tight control.

But elsewhere, in the command of the first, the lucidity of the third, the paradoxically clear but enigmatic fourth, the effect was often magical.

Chopin's Andante Spianatoand Grande Polonaise Brillantedidn't generate the kind of organic-seeming, cumulative power that is needed to hold the work together rather than allow it to sprawl. But the playing was urgent in expression - some of the low bass notes treated like an accented tuba part - and there was no underplaying of the florid writing.

It was actually the three encores that delivered the best playing of the evening, Liszt's Liebestraum No 3finely drawn, Mendelssohn's Spinning Songlight as you could wish, and some Carmenà la Horowitz played with almost implausible perfection.

When Horowitz himself undertook this kind of concoction he made it seem like a kind of dangerous black art. Kissin didn't. He's actually far too pure a musician for that. - Michael Dervan

Daan Vandewalle (piano)

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Goeyvaerts - Litany No 1. Gordon Mumma - Four Pack Ponies (from the Sushi Box). Perspectives. Alvin Curran - For Cornelius

Thanks to an invitation from the Association of Irish Composers, the Belgian pianist and new-music maestro Daan Vandewalle was in Dublin last weekend.

His recital at the Hugh Lane Gallery was short, sweet and stunning.

A 50-minute programme represented his compatriot, the avant-gardist Karel Goeyvaerts, and the genre with which Vandewalle strongly identifies, American experimentalism.

The Hugh Lane's fine atrium isn't friendly to all musical textures, and an opening acoustic caveat from the artist proved well founded.

Certainly, the gruff and sassy incantations of Goeyvaerts's Litany No 1(1979) had to sacrifice some of their essential brittleness to the boomy resonance. But there was no problem with the surroundings when it came to a sequence of miniatures by Gordon Mumma, for these pensive and delicate creations point the listener inwards rather than outwards.

With Alvin Curran's For Cornelius(1982), the venue had clear benefits on the sonorities.

This extraordinary memorial to the avant-garde English composer Cornelius Cardew opens with a kind of lopsided gymnopedie, and closes with a brief and cadaverous chorale.

In between, a slow-growing, quasi-minimalist tremolando occupies the player in nearly 10 minutes of incessant and extremely rapid reiteration.

Curran has remarked that this musical endurance test is supposed to exhaust the pianist.

It seemed, however, that there could be no exhausting Vandewalle, who rocketed through the programme with a combination of energy and precision that was nothing short of astounding. - Andrew Johnstone