United Kingdom Various: Leif Ove Andsnes (piano). Wigmore Hall, London, 20.11.2022. (CC)
Aleksandr Vustin – Lamento (1974)
Janáček – Piano Sonata I.X.1905, ‘From the Street’ (1905/6)
Silvestrov – Bagatelle, Op.1/3 (2003)
Beethoven – Piano Sonata No.31 in A-flat main, Op.110 (1821/22)
Dvořák – Poetic Tone Pictures, Op.85 (1889)
Leif Ove Andsnes has been taking this programme round Europe: and from the Wigmore Hall, he goes to Bruxelles (November 23) and thence Bordeaux (November 25).
Andsnes is likely one of the most clever pianists on the circuit proper now. It was clear how a lot thought had gone into this: the primary half made excellent sense because it moved in direction of a commanding efficiency of Beethoven’s Op.110. The tortured strains of the Janáček, the purity of the Silvestrov and the dolorous Vustin every examined features of emotional depth and ache earlier than the solace of Beethoven’s nice A-flat main Sonata.
The foundation of this primary half was what Andsnes himself has known as ‘frighteningly relevant’, with the Vustin and the Silvestrov appearing as prelude and postlude to Janáček’s astonishing sonata, written in response to the loss of life of a Czech employee in 1905 by the hands of Austrian troops who had been attempting to quell an illustration calling for a Czech college in Brno. Andsnes hyperlinks that to occasions when he wrote his personal programme notice in late September 2022, when younger Iranian demonstrators had been being killed in Tehran, ‘and brave Russians were out voicing their resistance to the devastating war that threatens their lives’.
Born in 1943, Alexandr Vustin (typically rendered as Wustin, typically Voustine), was a pupil of Grigori Samuilovich Frid (1915-2012). His music has been championed by Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Baltica. He was clearly fascinated by sonority – strive his impressionistic Musique pour l’ange for saxophone, cello and vibraphone, for instance. One can hear that side additionally in Lamento, with its ostinato left-hand and aching right-hand melodies. Even consonances appear inconsolable. Andsnes’s efficiency was completely judged, together with a spectacularly even trill.
The Janáček was elegiac and exquisite. Andsnes additionally understands the necessity for pulse on this music that may in any other case appear too diffuse. Worth noting, too, the standard of the instrument he was enjoying, a superbly ready Steinway, significantly in its higher registers. The second motion contained what can solely be known as a pianistic Urschrei; The response was Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Bagatelle, Op.1/3. The piece has a chic purity but additionally a way of melancholy that appeared to lengthen the Janáček whereas concurrently taking it heavenwards. The piece is successfully a four-minute sluggish waltz, out of which emerged Beethoven’s chic penultimate sonata. It was the timeless features of this that lodged within the reminiscence: the rapt, hymnic opening, the chic evenness of the arpeggiations, the blissful Adagio ma non troppo resulting in a fugue that reached organ-like grandeur.
How to comply with that first half? Well, Andsnes’s resonance with Czech music (he had a Czech piano trainer in Norway) continued with Dvořák’s 1889 set of 13 Poetic Tone Pictures. Andsnes’s new Sony recording of this can be a main achievement, convincing from first to final. Surprisingly, in an inversion of the anticipated, Andsnes was much less persuasive dwell, regardless of many moments of magic and a technical stage that was near-perfect. His contact in ‘Toying’ couldn’t be bettered. But maybe as a result of he has been touring this, the recording really sounds brisker. That is to not say there weren’t moments of supreme magnificence. Most spectacular was the penultimate piece, ‘At a Hero’s Grave’, huge in scope and really a lot placing me in thoughts of Liszt’s ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ from the Swiss 12 months of journey. But he might additionally convey a type of heady pleasure within the ’Peasant’s Ballad’ (No.5). We actually heard the excellence of the piano’s uppermost reaches once more within the eighth piece (’Goblin’s Dance’). The ’Bachanalia’ (No.10) had character and virtuosity (though, once more, extra so in his recording). Fascinating, too, how the ultimate piece, ‘On the Holy Mountain’, appears to seek advice from Chopin’s C sharp minor Scherzo in its alternation of sonorous chords and filigree. How becoming that the composer opts to shut the cycle in a meditative style – a cycle that, whereas containing some virtuosity, is as an alternative a superbly conceived complete that strikes by way of a multiplicity of moods in direction of this superb, glowing conclusion.
Leif Ove Andsnes did persuade us that we have to hear extra of Dvořák’s solo piano music, actually. And do get hold of the recording – it is rather particular.
Colin Clarke