2012 - The Year of Dickens, Goncharov and Napoleon's Russian Campaign

Chopin i jego Europa Festival (Chopin and His Europe) dragged into the icy depths now the National Chopin Institute has also struck a submerged rock.

2012-01-17T19:03:00.005+01:00

Chopin performing on a Pleyel pianino at a visionary Ball at the Hotel Lambert Paris (detail) Teofil Kwiatowski (1809-1891)

The observations in this post have been prompted by the forced and tragic resignation of Mr. Stanislaw Leszczynski, the brilliant Artistic Director of the Chopin i jego Europa Festival and Deputy Director of the Chopin Institute, Warsaw. He also pioneered the great recording initiative of The Real Chopin series of Chopin's entire corpus on CD recorded on original instruments, some purchased for the Chopin Institute under his expert guidance. He has a true passion for early keyboard instruments. Many of the finest Chopin interpreters living have recorded on the Institute's fine 1849 Erard or the superb 1848 Pleyel.

I am sure the explanation is a labyrinthine plot worthy of an Agatha Christie novel and I am not privy to the details but I am fully entitled as a musician to have a strong opinion on the matter.

Anyone who has read my literary travel book on the country A Country in the Moon will know the tremendous admiration I have for Poland, Poles and particularly the city of Warsaw. Granted, like many Poles I do not necessarily harbour a great love of the modern city but I do have enormous admiration for the inexpressible courage that rebuilt the ruins, admiration that the city exists at all after the horrors of the Second World War, a beautiful and wonderful city in the leafy summer months and in the winter under snow.

One of the great personal paradoxes for me as a foreigner aquainted with the country for many years is that sufficient and authentic political will to support culture does not appear to exist in this country. It is a scandal and a tragedy at once.

I am an Australian. We built one of the world's great opera houses in Sydney at a time when Australia was not considered a particularly 'cultured' country (considered quite the opposite in the UK – the film Crocodile Dundee was many things but 'cultured' does not spring to mind). Australia was not rich at that time and it was a country mainly obsessed with and outstanding at sport. But the political will to improve our image culturally speaking was there in abundance and look at the result - an iconic building in world terms that has brought immeasurable benefits both financial and in terms of world image to my country. Apart from revolutionising the performance of music (there is a 24 hour FM Opera Music Radio Station in Sydney) it continues to fuel tourism at a tremendous rate. Everyone in the world wants to see the Sydney Opera House and attend a concert or opera there.

Many older people of taste and refinement in Poland, people whose integrity I respect, have told me matters were far better in education and cultural support under Polish Socialism. Funds are at present constantly being cut to private orchestras; Polish musicians of great talents are passed over for foreign musicians who have more 'celebrity'; far more seriously, teachers in local schools lack the funds to properly musically educate wonderfully talented and enthusiastic Polish children.

At least Mr Leszczynski the former Deputy Director of the National Chopin Institute, the former Artistic Director of the superb Chopin i jego Europa Festival, was battling terribly hard to reverse this process and present us with unknown Polish composers and home-grown Polish musicians of enormous, world-class abilities. This was a festival of undoubted world class. The superb late-night concert with Martha Argerich and Polish musicians was a case in point. In 2011 he somehow managed to fund a visit here by the magnificent Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev and also the Orchestre des Champs-Elysees and Collegium Vocal Ghent under Philippe Herreweghe - all orchestras in the highest world class and reputation.

To quote the immortal Goon Show, a BBC precursor to Monty Python, after 1989 culturally speaking in music in Poland 'Suddenly nothing happened'. His was an uphill battle against lack of proper political will to truly and substantially financially support musical culture and musical cultural initiatives. Great things have been achieved, some quite extraordinary, in many areas of life in Poland since 1989 but culture, especially musical culture, is not convincingly one of them. This comment excludes the very fine classical music station Dwojka which I consider one of the most intellectually uncomprising and musically enlightening in the world - yes, really and I used to work in radio professionally many years ago.

The problem seems to me a question of the Polish temperament, lack of consensus concerning culture, perceived financial priorities and not having the political will to accommodate musical culture into life as a vital and civilised part of human existence.

Could not politicians put something concrete behind all this parading of Chopin as 'the great Pole', the great world composer. He was all these things but can we not see something solid (financial backing) to support all the fine words, all the window dressing ?

The secret of success in life surely is to think positively, work together in consensus and 'give it a go mate' to be Australian for a moment. It is how my great country was built, hewn out of the roughest bushland tens of thousands of miles from anywhere only a couple of hundred years ago.

After the fall of Polish Socialism in 1989 there is no-one left to blame for this scandalous neglect of cultural matters in Poland, a country that in the past prided itself on its many great world class pianists, conductors and composers. Why is there no political consensus on cultural priorities in 2012?

Mr. Leszczynski is to be heartily congratulated on his incredible courage and success in attracting foreign artists to the country. What a pity his great talent to persuade and attract many truly great artists cannot be significantly supported politically and financially. He has resigned his post in absolute and cruel frustration. It is a tragedy that must be reversed.

Arnold Schoenberg wrote a rarely-read excellent short essay entitled Franz Liszt - His Work and Being published in the interesting collection of his writings entitled Style and Idea. In the essay I quote an extract from which you may draw your own conclusions on its appositeness in the present case :

For musical life, for example, is certainly much the same in its essentials as it was before Liszt. It has a different colour, partly different forms, an above all new names. But the essence, the routine, the fashion, the ignorance and pettiness, the envy and intrigue, the success of the incompetent and mediocre, the failure of the truly important, the money-making of the adaptable and the poverty of the independent-willed - that has all stayed the same as it was before.....Musical life has its great ones on whom to model itself , and it honours them - but from a distance! (Faber and Faber, London 1975, p. 446)

Polemic over but the tragedy remains and what now of the future? Mr. Leszczynski must return with his festival, his great creation or the cultural loss to Poland will be incalculable.

The Franz Liszt 200th Anniversary Celebration Year closes...but his imperishable music continues to inspire...

2011-12-31T11:11:00.002+01:00

Click on photographs to enlarge

Franz Liszt and the violinist Armah Senkrah in Weimar 1885 (Louis Held Im Alten Weimar Fotografien 1882-1919, Weimar 2008)

Franz Liszt and some of his famous students in Weimar, 22 October 1884, his birthday.
From the left upper row: Moritz Rosenthal, Viktoria Drewing, Mele Paranioff, Franz Liszt, Annette Hempel-Friedman, Hugo Mansfield
Lower row: Saul (Sally) Liebling, Alexander Siloti, Arthur Friedheim, Emil Sauer, Alfred Reisenauer, Alexander Wilhelm Gottschalg
(Louis Held Im Alten Weimar Fotografien 1882-1919, Weimar 2008)

I must say I agree with Vladimir Ashkenazy when he was asked to 'comment on Mozart'. What an one possibly say on the subject? The infantile contemporary response so beloved of Facebook: Like - Don't like?

When I am confronted with the music of any of the great composers, so much has been written that anything I could say is bound to be redundant, bordering on the dull, pretentious or conventional. However this year there has been a sea-change in my attitude to the genius Monsieur F. Liszt.

I have heard this year many of his orchestral works for the first time including some great performances of the Faust symphony, symphonic poems, the late piano works and the rarely performed Via Crucis. Daniil Trifonov gave an unforgettable performance of the first Mephisto Waltz at Duszniki Zdroj reminding one what a great revolutionary he was in extending piano technique and the emotions capable of expression on the keyboard.

Concerning the keyboard works, the more Liszt I hear the more I feel he needs rehabilitation. He seems under so many flying fingers to remain the boisterous show-off, the cause of tinnitus, the breaker of pianos, the showman which in essence marked his virtuoso years and blighted his reputation as a serious composer. He abandoned this incredible concert career, a life of travelling that became an extraordinary journey in those days by coach and horse estimated at hundreds of thousands of miles. We have a different attitude now thank God to the inventor of the form of the Symphonic Poem, the author of the Faust Symphony. He spent so many contemplative years courageously composing yet suffered neglect and social exclusion in Weimar.

We really need to re-examine how he played, his effect on discriminating members of the audience. One lady in his audience described his eyes with mawkish hyperbole as being ‘like incandescent grapes’. I really think we have had enough of ‘the vapours’ whilst listening to Liszt.

We (the listening public) think we know this man in B movie terms but do we really? Take for example this remark by Moritz Rosenthal, his great pupil, on Liszt’s playing: “…the embellishments were like a cobweb – so fine – like the texture of the costliest lace.” Do we ever hear such things today except perhaps in historic recordings where tone and touch were paramount, not structure and form. Such precious remarks are ignored when we are ‘Down in the Quarry’ with too many pianists and their teachers.

Chopin once ironically confided to Liszt:

I am not suited to public appearances – the auditorium saps my courage, I suffocate in the exhalation of the crowd, I am paralysed by curious glances . . . but you, you can, since if you should fail to win over the audience you at least have the possibility of murdering them.

But more than these musical considerations I have come to have enormous respect for the man himself as a human being - his generosity of spirit, profound intellectual qualities, deep religiosity (yes, I believe this now after much reflection and thought) and his selfless dedication to the business of musical education of his fortunate students. This I gained through my long visits to the magnificent exhibition at Weimar and Bayreuth this year.

To gain a true perspective on Liszt's greatness it is absolutely indispensible to dive without fear into the three volumes of Alan Walker's exhaustive and rich musical biography.

Reading these volumes of his monumental Franz Liszt (London 1983-1996) this year changed forever my attitude to this great composer as both man and musician. Liszt remains a victim of his own celebrity status as a performer, perhaps one of the first in the current long list of casualties. He always found it difficult to be taken seriously as a creative force and we have inherited the residue of this prejudice. The account of his death in Bayreuth unfortunately and ironically in the midst of the Wagner festival, abandoned by so many of his family and friends to terrible illness and a lingering and painful conclusion of this life, makes grim and salutary reading on the vanity and emptiness of fame. One cannot help but reflect philosophically on the nature of death after this moving account of a man who was the first European 'superstar'.

Ever since the days of my youth I have considered dying much simpler than living he had written but discovered he was wrong as the ultimate moment of life approached.

Below are few photographs and observations not previously published on my Liszt blog this year.

A drawing by Friedrich Preller of the Altenburg in Weimar as Liszt knew it in 1848 when he lived there for over a decade. This house lay at the very centre of the Romantic Movement in Germany and attracted innumerable luminaries of all the arts from all over Europe.

The Altenburg in the Summer of 2011

A rare photograph of the interior of the Altenburg in the Summer of 2011. The interior, although no longer original, is normally closed to visitors.

A small detail from the astounding vast chart encountered on the exhibion wall of the Altenburg this summer. Pianistic influences are presented as a massive poster supplement to the book by Bernhard Bottner entitled Grosse Genelogie der Pianistik.

Bust of Franz Liszt outside the Liszt Museum, Bayreuth in the Summer of 2011

And so we bid farewell to the Franz Liszt 200th Anniversary celebrations at the Liszt Museum in Weimar as a sheaf of his music, which he carelessly left on the window-sill, is carried by a favourable gust of wind to the four corners of the earth....

A Polish Christmas and New Year's Eve - wishing 'the happy few' who read my ramblings a Happy Christmas 2011 and an optimistic New Year 2012

2011-12-25T07:58:00.000+01:00

A wanton, knowing and rather experienced Amor (detail) from the superb Baroque collection at the Augustinermuseum in Freiburg, Germany visited in the summer

At Christmas time the importance of the Polish family is ever-present - a force that holds this society together with affection and love. On Christmas Eve a wafer is broken by each member of the family and wishes made. The apalling history of loss meant the family was often the sole refuge from oppression. Here in Poland the family at Christmas is to be warmly embraced not fled in anguish.

I quote Chapter 27 of my book A Country in the Moon for a nostalgic account of Christmas and New Year in Poland at the turn of the millennium.

CHAPTER 27

A Yellow Sleigh for the
Departing Guests

Zosia drew me back to Poland many times over the years that followed.

But no visit was more moving and memorable than that at

the turn of the millennium. We spent Christmas Eve in Warsaw

under a heavy blanket of snow, the heaviest for many years. The

Vistula lay half-frozen under a crusted blanket of white ice. A group

of nuns were gathered around the swings in the park, giggling and

laughing in arcs of joy, their habits like the wings of bluebirds

against the snow.

Preparations for the last Christmas of an epoch were complete.

Zosia and her mother seemed to have been cooking for hours, days,

weeks. The tree was dressed and lit, piles of presents placed under

the branches and the traditional empty place laid at the table should

an unexpected wanderer call. The pets had begun to speak in

tongues (different languages) – well, that is the folk tale anyway.

Twelve dishes are served, symbolizing the twelve apostles. Red

barszcz (beetroot soup), carp in jelly, mushroom and cabbage

pierogi (similar to ravioli) and other dishes too numerous to list. The

blessed opłatek (Christmas wafer) embossed with a Nativity scene

was broken and shared among the family with good wishes for the

future. Presents were opened and carols sung.

‘Put some fish scales in your wallet, Michałku! It will bring you

luck and money!’

For that special New Year’s Eve we headed into the High Tatra

mountains in the south to stay at the great Renaissance castle of

Niedzica. This mysterious frontier castle, perched on its limestone

crag above a frozen lake had lured me to the region. The eyrie had

originally been built by the noble Polish–Hungarian Berzeviczy

family above the gorge of the wild Dunajec river early in the fourteenth

century.

The Castle of Niedzica in the Pieniny region of Poland in the south-east. The 'Ghost Room' is in the front pepper-pot tower on the right

Zosia and I spent the previous night listening to odd noises in our
room, the Komnata ‘z duchami’ or Ghost Room, located in one of
the corner towers of the castle, formerly a chapel. The irrational was
soon forgotten as the New Year’s Eve ball began with a sumptuous
feast. Opulent jewellery, bright in the flickering candles, rose and fell
on the low-cut gowns of women breathless with dancing and
amorous laughter. Polish mazurkas and polonaises together with
Hungarian gypsy music accompanied flurries of snow whispering
past the icy windows. A fierce fire burned in the fireplace below the
ballroom, the walls covered in antlers and artless Polish family portraits.

By midnight it had begun to snow heavily as we climbed the
castle keep with a bottle of champagne and sparklers. The spotlights
illuminating the turrets created remarkable effects on the clouds of
rushing snow. Champagne toasts were drunk and impossible Slavic
promises were made for another thousand years. I pulled my sheepskin
jacket over my dinner suit, made a brief excuse to Zosia, my
Polish princess, and wandered alone into the snowy courtyard
beneath the golden clock to smoke a celebratory cigar. At 2.00am
the heavy tapestry curtains of the entrance hall were suddenly flung
wide and three flaming piglets were wheeled in on silver trolleys.
Cheers filled the vault as carafes of vodka glowed once more on the
tables. Portions of the succulent meat were carved with a flourish.

The scintillating ball was meandering to its close as we emerged
into the night. A yellow sleigh was drawn up waiting for departing
guests, its curved sides decorated in crimson banding. A horse covered
in a rustic blanket munched some hay carelessly thrown on the
ice. Torches burned on either side of the driver, who appeared to be
asleep. Flames glittered off the steel runners as I leaned against it and
loosened my bow tie.

‘Have you seen the ghost of Umina walking by the lake?’ A disembodied
voice emerged from the recess of the driver’s fur-lined
hood. I could scarcely reply from the surprise of hearing a human
voice cracking the silence.

‘No. Umina? Who was she?’

‘Ah, a visitor who comes to the castle and does not know the
story of the haunting. Shall I tell you some of it? I used to be a guide
here. But now my legs . . . the steps to the dungeon . . . too old now.’

He pushed back the cape to reveal a weathered face, the face of a
mountain dweller. His Pieniny dialect was difficult to understand at
times, but the tale he told me on that millennium eve has fascinated
me ever since.

It was a confused account, as he delivered it, involving an impoverished
eighteenth-century Polish–Hungarian nobleman, his voyage
to Peru and marriage to the last princess of the Incas. The narrative
was rudely interrupted by the arrival of some fifteen sanie (sleighs)
with flaming torches for the kulig (sleigh ride) and bonfire in the
forest which would conclude that magical evening. Pale blue light
reflected off the moonlit snow, limestone crags and wooden cottages
as we bowled along, each sleigh a pool of warm light, the occupants
laughing and chattering as sparks from the bitumen torches flew
onto their clothing and lodged in their hair or fur caps. The torches
blew wildly in the wind and suddenly we were racing. Passing and
re-passing on the narrow icy road, the faces of the occupants bathed
in light were gleeful, urging the driver on to even greater efforts, the
excited horses’ hooves slipping, sparks from the torches speeding in
long trails now.

It was 5.00am when we finally passed under the stone cross and
crawled into bed in the ghost room of the castle. It was noon when
I awoke with Zosia in my arms and decided to move to Poland for
good. I could not have known then it would take another six years.

http://www.michael-moran.net/poland.htm

What I want for Christmas...

2011-12-23T16:08:00.002+01:00

Recently I received an interesting request from a new website to contribute a few thoughts on what I would like for Christmas. I know few of you will share my passion for classic cars but you may like to read these Christmas thoughts anyway. I quote:

At PostDesk, we celebrate Christmas with our ‘What they want for Christmas’ project. This year, it’s over at http://postdesk.com/christmas2011. There you’ll see what 200 high profile people in technology, gaming, business and politics would like for Christmas this year.

Among those who participated are 42 British MPs, alongside 65 high profile business founders, and many CEOs, journalists, bloggers, authors, web designers, typographers, musicians, and comedians. We also asked a number of television personalities and celebrities what they would like for Christmas. All in all – quite an eclectic mix, but the entire list makes for a highly interesting, and at times thought provoking, humorous and insightful read.

Here is what I wrote as my contribution:

Click on photos to enlarge

What I want for Christmas...Escape from care mainly...

In the Kampinoski Forest near Palmiry village about 30kms from Warsaw. The author is attempting to forget in his own way the place nearby where 1,700 Poles and Polish Jews were executed by the Nazis. This part of Aktion AB was intended to 'secretly' destroy the intellectual fabric and cultural base of the country - doctors, engineers, pilots, Members of Parliament, lawyers, mayors, actors, an Olympic athelete (a runner), priests, civil servants, policemen, students, scout masters, writers, even a chess grand-master were shot and buried in concealed mass graves here and in the forest round about.

The new museum very recently opened adjacent to the cemetery is both moving and informative concerning the executions. Many Poles and Polish Jews were previously imprisoned in the notorious Pawiak prison in Warsaw or tortured by the Gestapo in the basement of their headquartes in Aleja Sucha.

A visit here is indsipensible to understanding the miracle of Poland's present independent existence not only as a sovereign country but as a member of the European Union.

Period photographs taken by Nazis of their devilish work in Kampinoski forest near Palmiry - note the full face blindfolds

In a perverse way I am rather glad that petrol prices are forcing cars off the road and making people think twice about unnecessary journeys. I want to continue enjoying the pleasures of motoring as it once was, something almost forgotten in the hell, rage and pollution of our modern traffic treacle.

The photograph is of myself enjoying a late summer pic-nic with excellent provisions and wine one Sunday afternoon in a deserted Polish birch forest near Warsaw together with my 1949 MG TC and superb Polish lover (out of frame but certainly on the rug).

My fondest (albeit I agree shamefully hedonistic) desire for Christmas and the New Year 2012 is for more opportunities like this to enjoy the unique pleasures of the motor car as it used to be, a pleasure machine and an escape from care.

But fear not. I am not as superficial as all that. I have my reasons. Driving in the old style with the hood down and windscreen folded flat provides me with such a welcome, even forcible, distraction from the clinical depression that grips my heart as I view the disintegration of moral and ethical values within our society. As I motor through a cool green avenue of trees, adjusting the notorious Bishop's Cam steering of the TC this way and that, such a relief it is for a soul to forget, tortured as it is by the wilful ignorance and lack of respect for the cultural values of other civilisations as we huddle together nightly and shout at our little or large glowing screens. These the very screens that provide us with indelible images of maimed children, stinking death and the horrors of war. Oh how wonderful it is on the open road to feel the wind in your hair, breathe deeply the perfumes of Nature and hear the birdsong, fully preoccupied with the actual process of driving a beautiful and recalcitrant machine. What a welcome escape from the current Old Testament worries attendant upon the frankly boring, obsessive adoration of the golden calf, the ubiquitous emotions of financial envy, the crippling religion of economics that besets us.

Heeding the innocent call of the open road and more blissful escapist excursions in the fine weather of any season to pic-nic by stream or in forest or remote field, experiencing the careless joys of true motoring as it used to be…that is my Christmas wish this year.

Warsaw celebrates the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy

2011-11-29T10:03:00.001+01:00

Perhaps some of you will have noticed my silence these past months.

I am deep in researching the tumultuous 1930s period in Germany, London and the Riviera for the next chapter in my biography of the Australian pianist Edward Cahill. It takes something special to wean me away from writing in the morning and reading in the evening (mainly the marvellous Harold Nicolson, 'Chips' Channon, Duff Cooper and Diana Cooper Diaries of the period, Malcolm Muggeridge The Thirties and the 950 pages of the very recent brilliant and exhaustive study The Thirties: An Intimate History by Juliet Gardiner).

I have also been watching the superb documentary films of the period made by the GPO Film Unit directed by the brilliant Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti and other now forgotten directors. These largely negected masterpieces of the short form (viz. Spare Time and Night Train)  have now been made available by the British Film Institute together with informative booklets. Fascinating material.

For anyone who wishes to validate the profound and tragic erosion of British cultural and moral values over the last seventy years, these documentaries are indispensible. These glimpses of the past are a melancholic reminder of the present lamentable impoverishment of British cultural identity and self-confidence across all social classes.  They demonstrate how rich, demanding and spoilt we have become but also how living conditions and the environment have improved exponentially. Britain seems perenially a victim of its own acute social conscience, tolerance and good intentions...but enough of this.

A couple of days ago I learned that one of my favourite young pianists in the 2010 Chopin Competition, the Italian Irene Veneziano, would be playing at a private concert in the Royal Castle in Warsaw at an event mounted by the outgoing Ambassador of Italy to Poland, Signore Aldo Mantovani. The concert was to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy.

On a chill, windy evening I slid between the assembled ranks of black and silver Mercedes diplomatic cars to receive an embossed invitation pressed into my hand by a uniformed guard at the mighty entrance. This would turn out to be an all Italian evening with a vengeance.

The Ballroom of the Royal Castle is a superb musical venue and an aesthetically overwhelming room. Domenico Merlini, the distinguished eighteenth-century Italian architect from Brescia who brought Palladianism to Poland, designed it with the allegorical guidance of the Polish King Stanisław Augustus. New gold leaf glisters from every crevice in a blaze of mirrored chandeliers. A small orchestra made up of members of the Teatro all Scala Orchetra, I Virtuosi del Teatro alla Scala, together with their dashingly handsome conductor Massimiliano Caldi, had been especially flown in from Italy. The glamorous audience seemed to be made up of the entire Warsaw Diplomatic Corps, a testament to Signore Mantovani's popularity and the tremendous enthusiasm for all things Italian in the capital. The concert was accompanied by a very interesting photographic exhibition devoted to the Risorgimento and Unification. I was particularly taken with a photograph of Garibaldi's super tooled leather boots.

The Ballroom in the Royal Castle, Warsaw

The concert began with a fine and brilliantly idiomatic rendition (not at all surprising in view of their origins) of the Overture to Verdi's Nabucco. The Teatro alla Scala Orchestra, is considered one of the world’s finest orchestras for opera productions and has reached an unassailably prestigious international position. The orchestra is also known for its symphonic activities. I was particularly struck by the rich and mellow sound of this small string band with its fine 'mahogany' cellos (the First Cello of the Teatro alla Scala Orchestra is a member of this group and a fine musician indeed). Maestro Caldi conducts in an exuberant, luxurious and sensual manner with a fine grasp of the Italian orchestral sweep that satisfies all one's imaginative flights of how a gifted Italian conductor ought to behave.

After the Verdi, the beautiful Fazioli concert grand piano was then wheeled across for Irene Veneziano to take the solo part in Fryderyk Chopin's E minor Concerto Op. 11. I was full of anticipation as I had been prevented from hearing her perform this work in the Chopin Competition last year as, in my humble opinion, the judges had inexplicably excluded her from the finals of the competition.

Elegantly dressed as ever, she began the Allegro maestoso in a noble and classically restrained manner, not overtly romantic but with a true understanding of the period Varsovian classical styl brillant so characteristic of this work. The influence of Hummel and John Field must never be overlooked in the sometimes irresistable temptation to over-romanticise the interpretation of Chopin. The Romanze (Larghetto) sang with the beautiful bel canto of Bellini so beloved by the composer. The radiant tone Veneziano extracted from the Fazioli instrument perfectly suited the nostalgic yearning of young love that so suffuses this music, a love song full of ardent emotion. She is never sentimental but plays with a Mozartian poise and refinement. This was much in evidence in the exuberant, dancing Rondo which concludes the work, so full of youthful charm and delight. At times Maestro Caldi conducted with, for me at least, rather stylistically inappropriate passionate romantic phrasing. I am sure the aristocratic Chopin would have found it faintly alarming. Occasionally I felt a slight mismatch of conception of the work between conductor and soloist. However these are the quibbles of my personal taste and it was a very fine performance overall as evidenced by the enthusiastic applause. As an encore she performed with great panache the technically demanding and highly entertaining Saint-Saens Toccata - Etude Op. 111 No.6.

Irene Veneziano performing the Saint-Saens Toccata in the Ballroom of the Royal Castle Warsaw, 28 November 2011

We then heard a stirring piece of Risorgimento music, the Romance for Clarinet and Orchestra, Lontano dalla Patria, by the Italian clarinettist and composer Ernesto Cavallini (1807–1874). The soloist, Fabrizio Meloni, who is First Clarinettist of the Teatro della Scala remained is clearly a fine musician. He also has an excellent sense of humour and self-control. Between movements of the work, the loose music sheets from which he was playing fell to the floor. Quite unruffled by this, he gathered them up during the hiatus in a beautifully controlled movement and with witty eye contact with the conductor, continued unabashed. A priceless moment.

The final programmed work was the delightful Rossini Sonata No.1 for String Quartet arranged for string orchestra. Only discovered after World War II, the compositionally fluent Rossini wrote six of these sonatas when he was a mere twelve years of age over a period of three days. They show the influence of Haydn and Mozart but also the seeds of his future operatic melodies and exuberant rhythms.

In some ways it was a night of surprises and unknowns - all terribly Italian. Maestro Caldi was so taken with the superb roses given him we suddenly heard a contemporary Italian work entitled 'Masks' in five movements (five masks) with the First Cello of the Teatro alla Scala Orchestra as soloist. The composer, Carlo Galante, was even in the audience and rose to the applause at the conclusion. This extra work was a complete surprise to everyone I think, including the Italian Ambassador.

Then followed yet another exuberant, demanding piece and yet another surprise. In the lively Allegrissimo Fourth Movement of Nino Rota's String Concerto, Maestro Caldi 'set the orchestra in motion' as it were like a clockmaker his mechanism and proceeded to walk away allowing them to perform alone. This was no doubt to confirm the tremendous virtuosic ensemble of this band and convince me ever more strongly that a conductor is scarcely necessary with musicians of this calibre. A remarkable gesture of self-effacement I thought!

A delightful evening altogether to remind us of the very best in the Italian temperament, their undoubted charm and joy in creativity. Quite a task in the face of the present media onslaught concerning so much that is less desirable in the Italian nature.

Chopin i jego Europa 2011, Warszawa (VII Chopin and his Europe Music Festival 2011, Warsaw)

2011-08-16T11:18:03.502+02:00

Franz Liszt in his travelling coat. Taken at the Liszt Museum, Bayreuth

I always very much look forward to this quite outstanding series of concerts in Warsaw which follows directly from the Festival in Duszniki Zdroj. The main intention is to place Chopin in the cultural context of the Europe in which he lived and composed. This cultural context is absolutely vital to a full understanding of the composer and his contemporaries. The festival also promotes outstanding historical Polish composers that have been neglected or forgotten. The subtitle of the festival is ‘From Mahler to Liszt and Noskowski’ reflects this intention.

One of the greatest attractions for me is the use of period pianos manufactured in the mid-ninetenth century by Pleyel and Erard. I have a restored 1844 Pleyel pianino at home which has been a revelation in sound playing Chopin from the New National Edition of his works overseen by Professor Jan Ekier.

The inaugural concert of the 7th Chopin i jego Europa (Chopin and his Europe) 2011 featured to my mind one of the great stars of the 2010 Chopin Competition, Evgeni Bozhanov. I wrote a very great deal about him and his style of playing in my posting on the competition itself so shall not repeat myself

http://www.michael-moran.com/2010/10/xvi-international-fryderyk-chopin.html

August 16 (18.00)

Fryderyk Chopin: Piano Concerto in E minor, Op. 11

Lutoslawski Philharmonic Orchestra under Jacek Kaspszyk

The Filharmonia was not packed out as I had expected but then it is the holiday season in Poland as elsewhere in Europe and many people are at the Mazurian Lakes or the seaside.

The concerto was written by Chopin in the styl brilliant of his model Hummel, but carrying within it his own unique voice. This concerto was often chosen by him in performance both in Warsaw and when travelling abroad to Vienna, Munich and Paris. I had not heard Bozhanov play it since the Chopin Competition and was struck once again by his range of tone colours, refined articulation, a very personal sense of rubato and subtle pianistic nuance.

However I really feel the expression of his unique pianistic and musical personalty is oddly hampered in concerto performances. I felt him oddly constrained. I felt this during the competition also whereas with Ingolf Wunder say, quite the opposite applies - he comes to life with an orchestra.

These remarks exclude the affecting Romance. Larghetto movement which was full of superb tone, refined touch, the individual rubato expressing young love and sentiment (much of the movement is solo playing). This was the Bozhanov we treasure. Naturally his playing was of an extremely high order in the two outer movements but lacking real youthful sparkle and joy on this occasion. Perhaps having to work with a conductor, another distinct musical personality, meant he had to make certain musical compromises in the concerto. Coming to a mutual detailed agreement on tempi, phrasing and so on with our modern short rehearsal times must be difficult for the unique and individual voice this enormous talent possesses.

Grigory Sokolov, for me the greatest living pianist, actually will not play concertos at all for this very reason. He states he cannot achieve sufficient common musical ground with any conductor, however close to genius the conductor may be. Krystian Zimerman formed an entire orchestra and trained it himself to perform Chopin's two concerti. Of course Bozhanov at his stage of development could not adopt such an attitude of exclusivity and continue to build an international concert career. Audiences love concertos.

Bozhanov's encore on the other hand supports my contention that his playing is at its absolute best when performing alone. He chose as an encore a significant work by Debussy, the L'isle joyeuse that was inspired perhaps by the rococo painter Watteau. A surprisingly large and extended work to choose for an encore it was accompanied by a transformation in the pianist's keyboard personality. The chains hampering his brilliance were removed. An absolutely superb interpretation with a wonderful range of impressionist tone colour, subtle nuance and refined touch. I very much look forward to his solo recital on August 19th.

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 10 in F sharp major, reconstruction Deryck Cook

Lutoslawski Philharmonic Orchestra under Jacek Kaspszyk

Gustav Mahler's last great 10th Symphony is a profound, meditative work on the nature of mortality. This performance was dedicated to the memory of Bohdan Pociej - Polish music critic, musicologist and author who passed away in March 2011.

The symphony was given a very fine performance this evening by an orchestra that possesses some outstanding instrumental sections particularly the brass, wind and percussion. Mahler's written notes betray a mood of ecstatic abandonment to the idea of death and transfiguration and an obsession with Dante and the Inferno from the Divine Comedy late in life. He only managed to orchestrate the first movement and twenty-eight bars of the the Third Movement Purgatorio. The orchestration of the rest was completed in 1959. This was a quite extraordinarily successful achievement by the English musicologist, musician and commentator on music for the BBC, Deryck Cook. Kaspszyk and the Lutoslawski Philharmonic gave us a spiritual and times terrifying reading of this late work. At the conclusion of the piece the conductor remained immobile at the podium for some minutes, not permitting the audience to break the powerful spell of the afterlife this long and monumental symphonic music had woven into the atmosphere of the hall.

I decided I had had enough meditiating at length on thoughts of death. I was spiritually exhausted by the Mahler and so decided not to attend the Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem in the Church of the Holy Cross later in the evening. I think dwelling on such huge pieces concerned with the nature of death at the opening of a music festival (a period of celebration after all) says a great deal about Polish preoccupations and the profound funereal concerns of this society in the midst of life.

August 17th

Written 02.15am on August 18th

Martha Argerich Special Chamber Concert

Martha Argerich (piano)
Lilya Zilberstein (piano) – winner of the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition in Bolzano
Bartłomiej Nizioł (I violin) – Polish violinist, winner of many prestigious international competitions
Agata Szymczewska (II violin) – Polish violinist, winner of the Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Poznań in 2006
Lyda Chen (viola) – chamber musician, member of the Interlude Trio, participated in the Festival Martha Argerich in Beppu
Alexander Neustroev (cello) – named best Russian cellist at the Rostropowitsch Contest in Paris

PROGRAMME:

W.A.Mozart: Fantasy in F minor, KV 608 version for 2 pianos written by Ferrucio Busoni

Juliusz Zarębski: Piano quintet in G minor, Op. 34 (with Martha Argerich piano)

Ferenc Liszt: Concerto Pathétique for two pianos S. 258

Warsaw has given me many unique musical experiences and tonight was certainly another of them. In what other country in Europe would a concert in the capital city's major concert hall with a great artist such as Marta Argerich begin at 11.15pm and end at 01.30am. Only in Poland could such an extreme thing happen where art and culture ride far above mere trade unions and administrative considerations.

What a great concert this was!

In the last year of his life Mozart wrote his Fantasy in F minor for organ and clock. Busoni augmented this classical work into a type of polyphonic baroque masterwork as he was to do with many pieces by Bach. Never overbown with dynamic, our two ladies gave a superbly synchronised and stylish performance of the work.

Next came Liszt's Concerto Pathétique for two pianos S. 258 which is actually a reworked version of his Grosses Konzertsolo of 1849. Liszt spent two evening in July 1854 at the home of the Belgian composer Kefferath where he performed his transcription for four hands of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with Anton Rubinstein. What a sight and sound that must have been! Liszt remarked: 'After dinner I sat at the piano and...played the Konzertsolo, my invariable etude....' The piece is a work of stunning virtuosity with many moments of intense introspection which reminded me of ominous themes embedded within the B minor Sonata and the Faust Symphony. Silberstein and Argerich were magnificent together in this work and one never felt that Liszt was simply showing off his technical prowess. The combination of two such pianists in Liszt was absolutely breathtaking and convinced me once again that it is the manner in which Liszt is played that can be so misleading as to the quality of the music. A grand nineteenth century piano work indeed that tells us so much about the mores of the century. These two magnificent lady pianists (is this the correct term?) gave two encores for four hands. A lovely Waltz for four hands by Rachmaninoff (not sure exactly which one) and Brazileira from Scaramouche by Darius Milhaud for 2 pianos Op.165b (1937). That encore was tremendous fun with these two and terrific festival fare. Wild scenes.

After the interval came perhaps the greatest work on the programme, Juliusz Zarębski's Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 34 (with Martha Argerich taking the piano part). This is clearly a masterpiece of the first order and a fascinating composer born in Zhitomir in Ukraine. To be listening to this passionate, almost possessed work, so full of soul searching agression and lyrical beauty at 1.00am in Warsaw with Martha Argerich and a group of brilliant young musicians is an experience not given to many and I shall always treasure this memory.

I shall expand more on each movement in the morning as it is now 3.00am and I am wilting.....mad scenes of enthusiasm in the Warsaw Filharmonia at 1.30am with mutiple standing ovations until a weary Martha Argerich kissed us goodbye. they have adored her here in Poland since she won the VII International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in 1965. She loves coming here too.

Poland...such a country of extremes....just love it.

For information and the full programme of events http://en.chopin.nifc.pl/festival/

August 19th

Evgeni Bozhanov - piano (18.00)

Bozhanov as well as Trifonov has had a glittering period of engagements since the Chopin Competition which simply indicates that even if you do not win the exposure you receive is of incalculable benefit to your career.

This evening's concert was entitled Let the Piano Dance and so he certainly did!

He opened his recital with the Chopin Barcarolle. It was a very fine performance but oddly lacked some of the unique pianistic characteristics I had come to associate with Bozhanov. Perhaps he was just warming up…

I have seldom heard a performance of this work that fully realises that Chopin would have associated it with a boating song sung on the Venetian Lagoon by gondoliers. It is a wonderful bel canto work that is deceptive in that it develops heated passions which subside, but not typhoons of stormy passion on the open Mediterranean Sea. It is the scale and relative dynamics that are important here. Chopin himself played the work in a number of vastly differing ways if reports are to be believed, sometimes forte and on one occasion the whole work located between piano and pianissimo.

The opening C# octave in the bass is almost invariably played as if the gondola crashes into the canal mooring before the dream begins. The French and German First Editions and the Mikuli edition have no dynamic marking at all for this octave. On a pastel shaded Pleyel instrument it would not sound as a insensitive thump either. It is simply a subtle gesture that indicates a gentle pushing off of the gondola from land before the lovers begin to sing. It also creates an impressionist wash of pedalled sound before the song proper begins. If this chord is thumped in a perfunctory fashion the rest of the work is rendered rather meaningless.

Taking a voyage across the Venetian Lagoon in a real gondola (although a frightful cost these days) is a very educational experience in how to approach this work. No, not a fanciful idea at all. I once attended a performance of Liszt’s symphonic poem Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo at a concert in Budapest. The organisers had actually brought a real singing gondolier from Venice in full costume to at first sing the original theme on which Liszt based his work before the symphonic poem itself was played. Liszt used the theme of the song of the gondolier "La Biondina in Gondoletta" (loosely: the blonde in the gondola) by Giovanni Battista Peruchini in his piano work Venice and Naples from the Deuxième Année de pélerinage: Italie and later in this symphonic transformation. A fascinating and imaginative idea by the concert organisers in Budapest.

However I think I am fighting an uphill battle to convince pianists of the opening of the Barcarolle. Nikolai Lugansky opened the Barcarolle as it should be done in Duszniki – but then our perfectionist in all things would do so. I am afraid that Buzhanov on this occasion…but it was a fine if rather conventional account.

He then gave a carefully structured performance of the demanding Chopin B minor Sonata Op. 58, one of the greatest of works in piano literature. Bozhanov perfectly maintained the difficult balance the pianist must maintain between the traditional classical sonata form and romantic expression. He sustained the long Largo movement with superb control of the cantabile line and beauty of singing tone. I remember so well his performance of this in the Chopin Competition in 2010 when the sound seemed to take wing and hover suspended above the audience.

The three Chopin Waltzes (op. 64 No.3 ; Op.34 No.3 ; Op.18) were elegant, graceful, stylish and danced all the way to the Chopin heaven. Wonderful. The opening repeated B flats of the E major Grande Valse Brillante was a wonderful ‘call to the floor’ for the dancing couples. Bozhanov plays this fanfare with great insight. No pianist plays the waltzes better than Bozhanov to my mind except very perhaps Garrick Ohlsson.

After the interval Schubert’s 12 Ländler D. 790 op. 171 again with a superb understanding of dance rhythms. In the Debussy La plus que lente and L’isle joyeuse Bozhanov showed his great command of impressionistic colour at the keyboard. A sensitive and rich palette. Certainly he created the rococo colours of the painting by Watteau that Debussy may have had in mind when composing L’isle joyeuse.

Jean-Antoine Watteau L'embarquement pour Cythère (1717)

He continued with the Scriabin Waltz in A flat major Op. 38 a piece I am not familiar with but so eloquently played by Bozhanov. Finally in the recital a powerful rendition of the Mephisto Waltz No. 1 by Liszt. This was a brilliant performance but as I had heard Trifonov in his demonic, possessed and electrifying performance at Duszniki less than a week ago…the greatest I have ever heard by any pianist…well..anything I say will be coloured by this… Bozhanov gave a marvellous performance too.

Was Bozhanov ever so slightly weary this evening? Pianists are not machines after all although they are expected by audiences to be on perfect form for every concert – an impossible and cruel demand. He received a tremendous reception with multiple standing ovations and ‘Bravos’ – perhaps it was me that was tired!

Well…after this particular Duszniki festival …who would not be a spent force.

Dorothee Mields (soprano)

Nelson Goerner (period piano Erard 1849)

21.00 In the Old Orangery Theatre in the Royal Lazienki Park

What an inspired idea to hold a concert of Chopin, Mozart, Moniuszko and Schubert songs together with Chopin Nocturnes in this enchanting theatre!

Miraculously this 18th century Court Theatre, the sole surviving one of its kind in Europe, escaped the sytematic destruction of Warsaw by the Nazis. The seating is of refined simplicity and the decoration is superb with a magnificent ceiling painted by Jan Bogumil Plersch representing Apollo driving a quadriga surrounded by Geniuses. It is a perfect example of the unique Stanislawian aesthetic in art and architecture evolved by that extraordinarily gifted but somewhat unpopular King of Poland, Stanislaw Augustus Poniatowski. Four medallions in each corner represent the world's greatest dramatists - Sophocles, Moliere, Racine and Shakespeare.

For me the most wonderful feature however is the trompe l'oeil paintings a la Veronese above the cornice which give one the impression of boxes filled with happy and festive spectators looking down at the stage and auditorium dressed in XVIIIth century Polish costume (that wonderfully decorative combination of the Sarmatian and the French rococo).

Royal Theatre (1788) in the Old Orangery in Lazienki Park, Warsaw, Poland

I think the last concert I attended here many years ago (my memory is not what it was) was a harpsichord and piano recital given by Elzbieta Stefanska and her mother, the Polish genius of Chopin playing, the sadly missed Halina Czerny-Stefanska. Lieder recitals have become so rare in modern times in comparison to instrumental concerts. This must come from the shocking decline of music-making in the home. In this recital I will not go into the performance of each of the many songs with their texts by great and more modest poets, suffice to say they were performed with great sensitivity, elegance and tact. Goerner is unsurpassed in his performance of Chopin Nocturnes on period instruments. In this setting......divine.

One of the most wonderful features of early instruments (I have a restored 1844 Pleyel pianino at home) is the exquiste pianissimo one can achieve - quite the opposite to the ear splitting forte that is the prime object it seems on Steinway and Yamaha D concert grand behemoths. Somewhat of a relief...

I can heartily recommend the new CDs in the Real Chopin Series made by these artists and others.

NIFCCD 016

NIFCCD 023

August 20th. (20.00)

Denis Matsuev (piano) – one of the most popular artists of his generation, winner of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in 1998

Russian National Orchestra – named Moscow's top orchestra, has been in demand throughout the music world ever since its 1990 Moscow premiere

Mikhail Pletnev (conductor) – awarded the Gold Medal and first prize at the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, artistic director and conductor of the Russian National Orchestra

Ferenc Liszt:

Symphonic poem Héroïde funèbre S. 102 (1850)

I can scarcely think of a more spectacular manner to be introduced to the Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev than with this work. Here Liszt's fascination with the percussion section of the orchestra is clearly evident and the first blast of that Russian brass section...it was as if the gates of Hades had opened to receive me!

In this work Liszt utilises four timpani, two bells, military side-drum (a fantastic atmosphere was created by this), gong, cymbals and bass drum. In Weimar where he wrote the work, Liszt had some brilliant brass players who could mange notes others could not. The composer and conductor Joachim Raff was closely associated with the orchestration and performance of Liszt's works at this time. He discovered that anyone who performed Liszt was in danger of jepoardising their own career so 'advanced' was his music considered by the 'conservatives' of the day. This was dramatic performance with an orchestra of superb ensemble and absolute emotional committment to the task in hand. They possess what might be described as terrific 'tightness' of rhythmic attack. Pletnev is tremendously authoritative in conducting style and extraordinarily precise in direction. A benchmark surely in orchestral playing and made one reconsider and overturn absurd 'received judgments' concerning Liszt's qualities as an orchestrator and symphonic composer - he invented the form of the Symphonic Poem after all.

Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major S. 124 (1855)

I love the piano concertos of Liszt and am always disappointed they are so rarely played in the shamefully restricted concerto repertoire one is usually offered these days - except this year of course. Think of the fabulous riches in the nineteenth century Romantic concerto repertoire - the Polish-Prussian composer Xaver Scharwenka for example - his 4th Piano Concerto in F minor is overwhelming in impact - if you can play it of course. His music is completely and unjustly neglected in Poland and elsewhere.

Liszt had trouble with the reception of his percussion writing in this concerto too. It involved that modest, even humble instrument, the triangle. He used to call the percussion section the canaille or 'the rabble' and was always striving after new orchestral sound effects. In one section of this concerto the triangle is given a solo role. In fact at the first perfromance when the triangle rang out a member of the audience shot up from his seat and shouted out in a derisive fashion 'Triangle concerto!' and sat down again, disgusted. How does one become a triangle virtuoso? Sounds fun. Liszt wrote in a letter to his pupil Dionys Pruckner 'In the E flat major Concerto I have now hit on the expedient of striking the triangle (which aroused such anger and offence) quite lightly with a tuning fork.'

The soloist Denis Matsuev, as one might expect of a Tchaikovsky Competition winner, had a huge tone and deep physical involvement with the music and the instrument itself. If one has ever studied the piano seriously, you have to remain speechless, stop breathing in fact, at what is demonstrated by such an artist to be actually possible at the keyboard. He paints with rich broad strokes of primary colour and power.

In Liszt's time pianists were divided between the 'thunderers' and the 'poets'. I think this still applies - only absolute dynamics, structure and stamina of the instruments to withstand the war being made upon them, change. If you have read my previous postings on music you will know I tend towards the 'perfect poets' approach rather than the raw power and absolute virtuosity of the Volodos brigade - sorry - but a man is what he is. Matsuev gave a great virtuoso reading with this astonishing orchestra but I felt there could have been more poetry than always bringing to bear such big guns. Liszt balances well the chamber music ensemble and soloist exclamation very skilfully in this dramatic concerto. Richter (with Kondrashin and the LSO in 1961) and Cziffra (with his son and the Orchestre de Paris in 1971) give more sensitive, poetic but equally electrical and virtuosic accounts. The premiere in 1855 in Weimar with Liszt as soloist and Berlioz conducting must have been a spectacle and an experience in sound!

Symphonic poem Orpheus S. 98 (1853-54)

In his Symphonic Poems Liszt usually deals with 'Heroes' (in the antique sense) that have to face impossible destinies. Probably in Weimar he felt himself to be facing similar intractable situations in music. Schumann warned about 'Programme Music' that it must be beautiful music first and then the 'programme' can follow. In the Preface to Orpheus Liszt states:

'I once had to conduct a performance of Gluck's Orpheus. During the rehearsals, I could not prevent my mind wandering....to that other Orpheus whose name hovers so majestically and harmoniously over one of the most poetic myths of Greece. I recalled an Etruscan vase in the Louvre collection, which represents the first poet-musician, clothed in a starry robe, his forehead bound with the mystically royal fillet, his lips open for the utterance of divine words and songs, and his lyre resounding under the touch of his long and graceful fingers.'

Was this the Thracian vase painting Liszt had in mind?

This was a truly beautiful performance full of sensibility and the two harps Liszt requires (the lyre of Orpheus) and the orchestra under Pletnev took us into a poetic, contemplative realm effortlessly. Liszt wrote that the work 'hovers quite simply between bliss and woe, breathing out reconciliation in art.' Wagner loved this work.

The Weimar premiere was part of the celebrations for the birthday of the Grand Duchess Maria Pawlowna, an amateur musician one of Liszt's rare supporters in Weimar. During my recent visit to Weimar for the present Liszt celebrations I viewed the restored early Erard piano originally built for her and displayed in the actual room for which it was designed in the Palace.

The elegant Erard piano commissioned in 1811 by the Grand Duchess Maria Pawlowna displayed in the Royal Palace in Weimar in the actual room for which it was designed

Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major S. 125 (1839-61)

Liszt's passion for Schubert extended beyond the fifty or so songs he transcribed for piano. He also greatly admired the Wanderer Fantasy and arranged the work for piano and orchestra. The seamless unification of the movements technically impressed him as a composer and he utilised this feature in this concerto - there are no breaks between movements. One movement is metamorphosed or transformed into another. Again Liszt wanted to protect his students from attack when performing such an avant-garde (for the day) work. He wrote:

'In case Bülow [Hans von Bülow] should make his appearance at the Philharmonic concert he will, on my advice, not play my A major Concerto (nor any other composition of mine) but just simply one of the Bach or Beethoven concertos.'

The premiere was in Weimar in 1857 with the composer conducting and one of his pupils Hans von Bronsart as soloist. We do tend to forget just how forward and abrasive these gound-breaking works would have appeared to contemporary audiences, especially in conservative Weimar.

That bohemian composer living in sin up there in the Altenberg on the hill.....the devil take him and all his works!

His son Daniel wrote in an unpublished letter to Cosima Wagner dated January 9, 1857

'The child from Raiding [Liszt], Mimi's lover [Marie d'Agoult], the one who sang 'What a pleasure to be Choco the Clown' and who wanted to become a priest, has portrayed himself perfectly in this piece [the Second Piano Concerto].'

(Quoted in Alan Walker Liszt Volume II : The Weimar Years 1848-1861 p.472n)

The RNO under Mikhail Pletnev with Denis Matsuev as soloist gave a very fine performance of this more meditative concerto with so much rhythmic detail and precipitate dynamism and 'attack'. Matsuev brought off the more virtuosic sections with leonine magnificence (I do wonder if Anton Rubinstein played and sounded like this - reports seem to justify this observation). I was again reminded of the Russian Soviet saying "The heavy hammer breaks fine glass but forges strong steel." The interpretation of any particular pianist is such a matter of personal taste...but one must credit what has been achieved to reach these fantastic heights even if it is not quite what you want to hear or how you think a work should 'go'.

I say once again:

Liszt is much misunderstood as a composer and virtuoso pianist and needs rehabilitation.

In his orchestral works Pletnev is going a long way to doing this with sensitivity and understanding.

The audience did not give a standing ovation at this concert until right at the very end when Matsuev performed a rather 'circus act' encore. I wonder sometimes if they fully realise what they are hearing and how incredible it is....

The sheer opulence of the sound of this orchestra is addictive. I cannot wait until tomorrow with Trifonov and the Tchaikovsky.

August 21st (20.00)

Daniil Trifonov (piano)

Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev (conductor)

Political Lip Service to Culture

If ever there was a case for a large modern concert hall in Warsaw with properly tuned acoustics and performance space tonight was it.

I first came to Warsaw in 1991 and accepted the Philharmonia as a decent enough concert hall in a country that had just emerged from under the clouds of the previous regime. It is now 2011 - twenty years later - and Warsaw, the capital city of Poland, still does not have a large modern concert venue. I think this situation shameful and hypocritical as the political establishment constantly speak of the great importance of 'culture' in Polish life, how cultured the best Poles are, how intellectual the best Professors are in the nation, what a brilliant city Warsaw is. Chopin is a soul not a brand.

Anyone who has read my book on the country will know the tremendous admiration I have for Poland, Poles and particularly Warsaw, not necessarily a great love of the modern city city but admiration for the inexpressible courage that rebuilt the ruins, admiration that the city exists at all after the horrors of the Second World War, a wonderful city in the leafy summer months.

Sufficient authentic political will to support culture does not exist in this country. It is a scandal. I am an Australian. We built one of the world's great opera houses in Sydney at a time when Australia was not considered a particularly 'cultured' country (quite the opposite in the UK - Crocodile Dundee was many things but 'cultured' does not spring to mind). Australia was not rich at that time and it was a country mainly obsessed with and outstanding at sport. But the political will to improve our image culturally speaking was there in abundance and look at the result - an iconic building in world terms that has brought immeasurable benfits both financial and in terms of world image to my country. Apart from revolutionising music (there is now a 24 hour FM Opera Music Radio Station in Sydney) it continues to fuel tourism at a tremendous rate. Everyone in the world wants to see the Sydney Opera House.

After the fall of Polish Socialism there is no-one left to blame for this scandalous neglect of cultural matters in Poland, a country that in the past prided itself on its many great world class pianists, conductors and composers. Why is there no political consensus on cultural priorities in 2011? When I speak of this, Poles simply look at the floor and mumble - the subtext of which mumble reads 'What would you know! You're just a foreigner and not even Polish. Don't tell us about our shortcomings and what we need. If you don't like it here, leave. Go back to Australia.'

This sort of attitude is supremely out of date and anachronistic in 2011. I see myself as a citizen of the world and not constricted by narrow constipated nationalism which is the source of so many of the world's woes today. Many older people of taste and refinement in Poland, people whose integrity I respect, have told me matters were far better in education and cultural support under Polish Socialism. Funds are at present constantly being cut to private orchestras; Polish musicians of great talents are passed over for foreign musicians who have more 'celebrity'; far more seriously, teachers in local schools lack the funds to properly musically educate wonderfully talented and enthusiastic Polish children.

At least Mr Leszczynski of the National Chopin Institute, the Director of this festival, is battling terribly hard to reverse this process and present us with unknown Polish composers and home-grown Polish musicians of enormous, world-class abilities. The superb late-night concert with Martha Argerich and Polish musicians was a case in point. He somehow managed to fund a visit here by the magnificent Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev and also the Orchestre des Champs-Elysees and Collegium Vocal Ghent under Philippe Herreweghe - all orchestras in the highest world class. And yet we are still rushing around Warsaw from venue to venue apologising for this or that shortcoming twenty years after 'freedom'. To quote the immortal Goon Show precursor to Monty Python 'Suddenly nothing happened'. His is an uphill battle against lack of proper political will to truly and substantially support culture and cultural initiatives. Great things have been achieved, some quite extraodinary, in many areas of life in Poland since 1989 but culture, especially musical cuture, is not one of them.

The Philharmonia in Warsaw has a fairly good acoustic for piano recitals (many competitors in the Chopin Competition commented on this) and for orchestral works that require small forces. Basically it is a small, not unnattractive but now old-fashioned nineteenth century design with plaster and marble walls and a vaulted plaster ceiling which does nothing for unwanted 'hollow' reverberations. The Chopin concertos, Mozart and Baroque works utilise relatively small forces after all compared to Mahler, Tchaikovsky or Wagner, even Liszt in say the Faust Symphony - his masterpiece which I had hoped to hear on this festival. However tonight I watched Mikhail Pletnev forced to painfully thread his way uncomfortably through cluttered music stands to the conductor's podium on too small a stage for the large forces of the Russian National Orchestra. He and Trifonov stumbled back to the front for their applause, then one of them tripped over a music stand and the sheets of music went flying, the girls carrying flowers stumbled. Do not Poles find this sort of thing deeply embarrassing? Poland at present holds the Presidency of the European Union for goodness sake - a miracle if you know anything about Polish history.

Many of my friends sitting downtairs (I was in the balcony) complained 'The orchestra was too loud'. The orchestra was not too loud I replied, but rather the hall is too small for a modern orchestra of virtuoso technique playing the great works of Western music.

The Warsaw Filharmonia - elegant and beautiful, a noble building but no longer adequate in 2011. In addition we need an alternative, large modern venue somewhere in Warsaw.

I notice there is no problem in finding the money to rebuild a vastly expensive football stadium with a limited future for the World Cup in 2012. No doubt Warsaw will soon be bidding for the Olympic Games. I am not against sport - my father played cricket for Queensland, I was quite a good spin bowler and I regularly work out at a gym. But it is time something was done about this lack of a large proper modern concert venue with modern facilities in Warsaw. Yes, some money has thankfully been found for the renovation and construction of a small venue in the Warsaw suburb of Praga for the use of the fine orchestra the Sinfonia Varsovia. Although very welcome indeed, this is not the type of thing I am referring to at all. Even small provincial cities in Germany and Scandinavia all have large modern state of the art concert venues, some of them quite magnificent. Take for example the Gewandhaus in Leipzig - and this city also laboured under the draconian former regime.

The Great Hall at the Gewandhaus, Leipzig. Seating for 1,900 and the organ loft can be modified to accommodate a chorus of 300 singers

If you would like to see what facilities such modern concert halls can offer in 2011 click on:

http://www.gewandhaus.de/gwh.site,postext,panoramic-views,artikel_id,293.html?PHPSESSID=2d748019fbcc65797ebee05dc5112174

Why cannot we have something like this in Warsaw? Perhaps not as grand but something better as an alternative to the Filharmonia at least! Lack of money, problems over land acquisition, I hear you cry. It is a question of the Polish temperament, lack of consensus concerning culture, perceived financial priorities and having the political will to accommodate musical culture into life as a vital and civilised part of human existence. Could not politicians put something concrete behind all this parading of Chopin as 'the great Pole', the great world composer. He was all these things but can we not see something solid to back up and support all the fine words, all the window dressing.

I dare not even mention the great concert houses of Berlin, London or Paris. The Artistic Director of the superb Warsaw Chamber Opera, Stefan Sutkowski, that courageous and outstanding musician, intellectual and gentleman who has done immeasurable good for Poland's cultural image abroad, has had his own funding reduced or cut. He once showed me very detailed plans for a large modern concert hall in Warsaw that he had been working on with architects for years but has (at least to my knowledge at present) found little political support but only resistance to implementation and a series of obstacles. In life there are always plenty of reasons not to act.

I suppose if politicians saw there was serious money to be made personally from facilitating the building of a proper world-class modern concert venue in Warsaw we would have one. Altruism is thin on the ground today in the new Poland of rampant capitalism. Mr. Leszczynski is to be heartily congratulated on his incredible courage and success in attracting foreign artists to the country. What a pity his great talent to persuade and attract some truly great artists cannot be significantly supported politically and crowned with a proper large modern arts and concert facility.

Arnold Schoenberg wrote a rarely-read excellent short essay entitled Franz Liszt - His Work and Being published in the interesting collection of his writings Style and Idea. In the essay I quote an extract from which you may draw your own conclusions on its appositeness in the present case :

For musical life, for example, is certainly much the same in its essentials as it was before Liszt. It has a different colour, partly different forms, an above all new names. But the essence, the routine, the fashion, the ignorance and pettiness, the envy and intrigue, the success of the incompetent and mediocre, the failure of the truly important, the money-making of the adaptable and the poverty of the independent-willed - that has all stayed the same as it was before.....Musical life has its great ones on whom to model itself , and it honours them - but from a distance! (Faber and Faber, London 1975, p. 446)

Polemic over but the scandal remains.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No: 1 in B flat minor Op. 23

This concerto is so well-known by just about everyone, musical and non-musical, every great pianist and those not so great having recorded it, just peforming it must be a daunting task. Trifonov gave the first public performance of the work since recently winning the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. In fact it is not generally known that he played the piano with an orchestra for the very first time here in Warsaw last October in the Chopin Competition. What a miraculous flowering of talent this last year has been for him and us to witness. Remember this concerto was at first considered 'unplayable' by the lion of the keyboard, Anton Rubinstein.

Although I consider him a poet of the instrument rather than a thunderer Trifonov produced a magnificent full-blooded and athletic tone from the very first bars. Pletnev, being such gifted pianist himself, conducted this magnificent orchestra with great sensitivity towards his young compatriot. It is too easy to forget just how young Trifonov actually is (20) to be playing this enormous work in such an accomplished manner. Together they adopted a true moderate molto maestoso tempo in the opening movement with superb attention to detail in all sections of the ensemble. The brass and woodwind and in particular the horns miraculously on perfect pitch all the time. How do they do that?

Trifonov as ever is a transformed being when the spirit of music takes hold of his soul. Matters became occasionally ever so slightly rhythmically unstable in the Andantino simplice but Pletnev controlled and steadied the vast forces of his orchestra superbly to assist this young tyro of the instrument to stay in synchonisation. He knows the piano part so well himself. The final movement Allegro con fuoco again was packed with strong forward rhythmic drive and overwhelming authority.

I have always felt this is not a young man's concerto in the way Chopin's concerti spring to life with the vigour of youth and the styl brillant. Tchaikovsky wrote the first draft when he was 34 and revised it finally when he was 48. Chopin wrote his concerti when much the same age as Trifonov - 20.

Trifonov communicates his love of the music as opposed to love of his own virtuoso performance (an all too common failing today) directly to the heart of the audience. We know and feel this musical integrity instinctively. All men are equal confronted with Beethoven semiquavers - it is what happens to them when one actually begins to play that is important.

It was a great performance and deeply satisfying musically and emotionally.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky:Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36

Tchaikovsky wrote this work around the same age as he wrote the concerto - 37.

The first movement again gave the incredible brass and woodwind sections of this orchestra the opportunity to shine, to blaze really. The fortissimo explosions were like lightening flashing over the Russian steppe. The oboe in the second movement (Andantino in moda canzona) was very affecting in its melody and gave the strings a chance to show their wonderful ensemble and cohesive qualities in a beautiful swaying ostinato. Their virtuosity was displayed in the Scherzo which is played entirely pizzicato ostinato so perfectly synchonised the effect was quite uncanny.

Pletnev is as mathematically accurate in his rhythmic directions as Pierre Boulez but possesses a characteristically Russian broadness of rich panoramic sound like a great descriptive literary passage by Leo Tolstoy when the occasion requires it. Tchaikovsky offers the conductor many such lyrical opportunities. In the final movement Allegro con fuoco the 'Russianess' of the famous Russian folk song, "In the Field Stood a Birch Tree" was marvellously caught. The strings were passioante in their dancing folk rhythms - wonderful it was. The sound at the conclusion of the movement was indescribably opulent and exciting - large percussion (cymbals and triangle too) and the brass section (including four horns, three trombones and a tuba) left me wrung out like a wet rag. I am only just recovering this afternoon...

I am afraid if you missed this concert, weep...

August 22nd (18.00)

Irene Veneziano

I felt many of the same positive vibrations about Irene Veneziano's playing as I did during the Chopin Competition. See http://www.michael-moran.com/2010/10/xvi-international-fryderyk-chopin.html for my notes on her.

The first half of her recital was devoted to Chopin. She carefully chose the Etude in C sharp-minor Op. 25 No.7 which is a far more reflective and thoughtful piece than the majority of his etudes. She performed it with a refined touch, nuance and tone of great sensibility. The Scherzo in B flat-minor op. 31 was a musical and civilised interpretation that never bordered on the hysterical which is so common among young players today. She presented the music in all its extreme shifting moods and not simply as a vehicle for her own ego as a virtuoso pianist.

This is such a relief after being pounded into the ground this month by too many young pianists who use the music only as a platform to show off their lightning fingers and thunderous sound. Veneziano never does this and allows the music to speak for itself - presumably the music is what the audience have come for and not a circus act (and I will not mention the names of our well-known pianistic circus performers - you know them).

In the Polonaise in F sharp minor I noticed her very skillful pedalling, a feature of the entire concert. In Chopin she uses very relatively little pedal which is absolutely right to produce the sort of 'classical clarity' that he always desired to reveal his inspired counterpoint and inner voices. She rarely uses the 'soft' pedal except for colour when many use it to lazily reduce the dymnamics. The long section of repeated 'miliary' octaves in the left hand in this Polonaise can become intolerable, inflated and absurd if over-pedalled. On a Pleyel instrument of Chopin's day the bass is not so dominant as on a modern instrument and consequently the repeated phrase on a Steinway must be under-pedalled and detached. She achieved this perfectly. Chopin himself once commented 'The study of the pedal is a study for life.' It is vital in interpreting his music on today's instruments.

The Ballade in G minor, op.23 remained a cohesive musical narrative that never became melodramatic - another unpleasant feature of so many performances of this work that strain for effect rather than musical expression. This exaggeration is very much a modern phenomenon and Veneziano is not a victim of it - neither is that superlative Swiss-Italian pianist Francesco Piemontese. I want to seduced by music not assaulted by it.

After the interval we moved onto El amor y la muerte, the fifth piece in the Goyescas cycle by Granados. Technically this is a very difficult work and showed that Veneziano has all the power and digital dexterity needed for works that require it. She showed the relaxed improvisational feel and mastery of mood swings which this work requires. This being the Liszt year she then turned to the composer and chose a Schubert transcription he made of Standchen (Serenades) S. 560. Veneziano played it ardently with very affecting poetry (a text from Shakespeare's Cymbeline) and such cultured elegance of touch and tone with the dynamics of the 'echo phrases' beautifully controlled. A beautiful atmosphere of sweet fading nostalgia was created that is so characteristic of Schubert. The final work in her concert was the Liszt Rapsodie espagnole S. 254. If anyone is in any doubt of her virtuosity and power when required then this performance displayed it. Fully of energy and fire, nobility and power - also the Spanish dance rhythms and the folia were excellent.

She had thought about her encores and produced the music for a virtuoso arrangement by the Polish composer Henryk Melcer of of the popular Polish song Prząśniczka ('The Spinning Girl') by the nineteenth century Polish composer Stanislaw Moniuszko. She followed this by the terribly demanding and highly entertaining Etude Op. 111 'Toccata' by Saint-Saens. Incidentally Melcer's two piano concertos are magnificent examples of the late Romantic piano concerto, full of stirring Polish nationalism, and unjustly neglected (and difficult to play!).

The communication this pianist has with the audience is always emotionally warm and affectionate. She always presents herself to the eye so elegantly too. It is clear Irene Veneziano loves music rather than self-serving display and brings a welcome breath of modesty, culture, charm, refinement, poetry and dare I say it, the sensibility of the feminine to her fine playing which we are desperately in need of in these days of so much crude pianistic exhibitionism. Such qualities undoubtedly contribute to her fine qualities as a chamber musician in addition to being a soloist.

August 23 (18.00)

Khatia Buniatishvili

Perhaps I had looked forward with too much anticipation to this recital as the wonderful television channel Mezzo had praised her Liszt B minor Sonata to the skies.

Except for a beautiful and almost moving Marche funebre. Lento from Chopin's B Minor Sonata Op. 35 I found this recital unacceptably exaggerated - either insinuatingly piano or brashly triple forte without much in between in terms of dynamic or articulation. Too much over-pedalling for my ears. She played Prokofiev's Sonata No. 7 op. 83 in B major, the Ballade in F minor by Chopin, the Liszt Mephisto Waltz No. 1 (what a canyon of understanding between her simple virtuoso idea of it and Trifonov's profound and unsettling reading) and finally 3 sections from Stravinsky's piano version of Petrushka (lately supplanting Pictures at an Exhibition in many young pianists' repertoire to pound us with).

I am tired of this all too common violent constant physical assault on the instrument and so is my soul. And it is not only this young, clearly brilliant, young artist who really needs to exercise some self-discipline of her immense talents. There are now a group of such pianists who use the music of the master composers merely as a personality platform. Clearly if such pianists, all 'geniuses' we are told from daylight till dark, gain the impimatur of the legendary Martha Argerich and the Lugano Festival, the Musikverein, the Verbier Festival, famous conductors, famous orchestras, Decca, EMI...or are winners or 'Laureates' of any competition you care to name in the farrago of competitions that beset us, then everything must be musically perfect and I am wildly wrong in my judgements. There must be something wrong with you Michael and your musical judgement. Would you expect me to admit this? Depends who tells me. I am perfectly open to discussion and change my mind if I think I am misguided. Well, music is a business after all, the entertainment business and if that is what people want give it them if you aspire to a brilliant and financially successful career.

However I can personally no longer respond to only digital pyrotechnics. Is this a sign of age? Probably. There is a considerable and in many ways alarming lack of charm, poetry and sensibility in the vast majority of young performances except of course the ones I have praised so highly at Duszniki and at this festival.

It seems I am out of step with modern 'star' demands and music teachers' priorities (they too have careers launched by successful competition students). A moderation in dynamics with an instinctive feeling for the size of the hall would be welcome. It might be merciful on the audience to grade the dynamics. All halls are not Carnegie Hall although you might be forgiven for thinking so.

I am clearly anachronistic and 'old-fashioned' in my wish for evidence in the playing of some cultural and stylistic context for the piece, a beautiful tone, refined touch, musical understanding and having something musical to say as well as poetry, charm, sensibility, love and above all the ability to move the heart.

I am obviously entirely at variance with what the vast majority feel and want from piano 'stars' and players today - the instrument to be played as loud as possible, as fast as possible and as egocentrically and exhibitionistically as possible. Liszt has given such people a wonderful opportunity to betray him.

Buniatishvili is outstandingly sensual, stylish, talented and dramatic in appearance at the instrument but...well, maturity will come. If I could play as well as this brilliant virtuoso I would probably play in exactly the same way and stretch my colourful wings.

Tant pis...

Nelson Goerner (21.00)

My mood and optimism having been altered by the above recital I am not sure I can judge my reactions accurately. Goerner is one of my favourite pianists for Chopin on early instruments and his recordings for 'The Real Chopin' series are justifiably praised to the heights.

He opened with the Mozart Sonata in E flat major K.282. Although interesting structurally I found it rather slight and wondered why he chose it - certainly it was brought off with due reverence to stylistic considerations.

He then embarked on one of my favourite works of romantic piano literature Kreisleriana Op. 16 by Schumann. In this great masterpiece he brought out much of the quixotic mercurial temperament of Schumann's personality and the literary elements of this series of 'fragments' (as the nineteenth called what we might refer to as 'miniatures'). Inspired by literature as ever - in this case E.T.A Hoffmann - Schumann dedicated the work to Chopin. The polyphonic nature of much of the piece might well indicate a deep understanding of Chopin's own style. Goerner was marvellous in some sections but adopted too fast a tempo (for me, for me) in others clouding the different voices and skating over detail. My reaction always coloured by Vladimir Horowitz who I consider unsurpassed in this work. Not fair to compare....I know.

He ended his recital with the complete cycle of 24 Preludes Op. 28 by Chopin. The composer would never have dreamed of performing them complete but it is customary today. I found Goerner strangely conventional in his approach to the collection and felt he had nothing much to say to me about them. Very odd as I have always been moved by his Chopin. Must have been me and my own state of mind...

August 24th (21.00) Polskie Radio Concert Hall

Yulianna Avdeeva

After yet another magnificent recital what doubt could possibly remain in anyone's mind that Adveeva was by far the most worthy winner of the International Chopin Competition in 2010. 'In a different league altogether' as someone commented to me after her recital at the recent Duszniki Zdrój festival. All of my comments made during the competition on this blog stand untouched. In fact I felt she had improved enormously even in the short ten months of international engagements since her win. Her upright contained posture at the instrument helps her create this wonderful sound. She is so utterly committed physically and intellectually to every note she plays it is deeply involving for the listener in the audience. This recital, as all of them, was absolutely prepared down to the final nuance. In all the greatest performances there is nothing left to say, simply to leave the hall in silence.

In the Chopin group, the two Nocturnes Op. 62 were ravishing with superb control of touch, tone and pianissimo playing. The Scherzo in B minor Op. 20 was incandescent in its articulation, glittering tone and variety of dynamic, the central contrasting lyrical section so moving in its ardent yearning. I always feel that Chopin was contrasting the bustle and activity of normal life with that of his very own dream world in this piece. The four Mazurkas op. 33 were full of Polish indigenous rhythmic variety and subtleties. No: 4 in B minor was absolutely superb and the finest interpretation of it I have ever heard. Finally in the Chopin group, the Polonaise-Fantasie contained all the troubled emotion and desire for strength in the face of the multiple adversities that beset the composer at this late stage in his life. She grasped that difficult and complex structure completely - a profound interpretation to my mind. I felt this Polskie Radio performance superior to Duszniki for some reason – the musical unfurling of emotion somehow more coherent…crude words cannot describe Chopin’s music!

However it was the Liszt that she continued to reign supreme for me. She chose three late Liszt works that are extraordinarily forward-looking in their adventurous harmony and invention. They were also written at a time when Liszt was facing the reality of death quite apart from its theatrical Gothic aspects which had so attracted him in his youthful Byronic phase.

The La Lugubre Gondola II of 1885 is a profoundly disturbing and dark work reminding one that gondolas on the Venetian canals were likened by more than one Romantic poet to black coffins - even Mme de Staël discoursed on this dark subject. Liszt was fascinated by Venetian funerals and the coffins set on gondolas, the black ostrich feathers and the silent oarsmen on pellucid water. This work was composed by Liszt as a type of premonition of Richard Wagner’s death two months later in Venice in 1883. The piece eloquently evoked the future water-borne funeral procession by gondola of Richard Wagner body from Palazzo Vendramin to the railway station on its way for burial in Bayreuth.

Avdeeva followed this with Liszt's Nuages gris of 1881 and she gazed into the heavens as if seeing the grey clouds hovering there, clouds without silver linings, her superb touch giving an impressionistic feel to the sound like a painting by Monet or a piece of Debussy. Liszt wrote this rather morbid work when suffering from various illnesses and accidents which impinged on his sense of continuing in life. The work anticipates the Viennese school of Mahler and Schoenberg and he clearly saw a way forward out of what many regarded as the prison of cadential resolutions. Avdeeva created an extraordinary atmosphere with this work.

She then embarked on the Bagatelle without tonality (Waltz Mephisto IV) which to my mind are the melancholic reflections of an old man beset by reminiscences of his past life, compositions, echoes, shadows of his virtuosic past that haunt like grotesque spectres that flit about in this quite astonishing and deeply expressive work. The work ‘hovers on the brink of atonality’. Hugo Mansfeldt, one of Liszt’s pupils from San Francisco, describes the occasion it was first performed at the Altenberg in Weimar, Liszt’s home.

‘He then went to the piano to play it [the fourth Mephisto Waltz ohne Tonart] for us [gathered together were the great pianist Moritz Rosenthal, Hugo Mansfeldt, the great pianist and composer Emil Sauer and A.v. Siloti]. When Liszt had finished it we all stood in respectful silence. I dare say none of us were very enthusiastic about the piece…Liszt turned to us and said: “Let’s play whist.” Two of us sat down and Liszt turned to me saying “Mansfeldt, take a hand.” I replied that I did not know the first thing about cards. Liszt then said to me “Then you can be a critic."

(Quoted from an unpublished letter in Alan Walker Franz Liszt Volume 3: The Final Years 1861-1886 p. 446)

Debussy in his music used some of the same harmonic techniques of suspended tonality. The work was so advanced that it was not actually published until 1956. Avdeeva was really able to penetrate these mysteries with her complete technique. This group of pieces and the way Avdeeva interpreted them gave me real cause to question my sometimes all too superficial judgement of the great composer and pianist Franz Liszt.

Her recital concluded with by far the finest account of Liszt's transcription of Wagner's Overture to Tannhauser I have ever heard, a much earlier work. Her commanding technique enabled her to create a full orchestral sound with all its variety and clarity. She was able to terrace the melodic line wonderfully beneath the complex lacey filigree of ‘strings’ that play above it - astounding really and so exciting. For me the performance was more than a little moving having just returned from a pilgrimage to Weimar and Bayreuth investigating the complex friendship between Wagner and Liszt. A piece of ivy from Wagner’s grave is now growing strongly in a beautiful ceramic pot on my terrace in Warsaw. At the age of 14 this Overture was the first music that ever moved me to the authentic depths - I remember this moment as if it was yesterday.

Avdeeva received a tremendous reception in the Polskie Radio concert hall. She played as an encore Tchaikovsky Méditation, Op.72 No.5. More frantic applause and then the Paderewski Krakowiak Fantasy followed by a Chopin Mazurka.

I have always felt Avdeeva is the most outstanding young female pianist of her generation. Then there was all that kerfuffle in Warsaw over her Chopin competition victory. All very mysterious to me...how personal a thing is musical taste! Liszt’s aphorism on taste: ‘Taste is a negative thing. Genius affirms and always affirms.’ (Liszt meant by this that ‘taste is defined by what it excludes, whereas genius is defined by what it includes’) (Ibid. p. 445)

To my mind this aristocratic player with her majestic, slightly severe profile and almost regal posture at the instrument, is a master of the control of emotional passion, its containment and expression - tensions and relaxations being the very breath of musical life. She is in the process of becoming a very great artist indeed and we are privileged to witness this growth.

I greatly look forward to her concerto performance on an historical instrumant later in the week.

August 25th. (21.00)

Jan Lisiecki

The first item on the programme was the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major. K 216. The Sinfonia Varsovia was conducted by Augustin Dumay. This famous French violinist is another unassailable icon of music - the last perhaps of a great past tradition of violin playing in the Grimaux mould. He has had one of the most eminent of careers and received wonderful notices. I am rather fond however of the more modern 'classical style', short phrased approach to the Mozart violin concertos and found his interpretation rather over 'Romantic' and sugar-sweetened with a great deal of vibrato and even a few portamenti. I have nothing against this way of seeing Mozart and going back in time can be very instructive. I have begun to listen again to the magnificent recordings of Karl Richter and the Munich Bach Orchestra with such large forces and also Adolf Busch and the Busch Chamber Players. What a shock to realise how differently we play Bach today! Some things the older players do is marvellous too and we can learn a great deal from historic recordings.

Dumay then conducted the Mozart Symphony No.29 in A major K. 201. This symphony shows many developments in Mozart as he began to technically explore the cusp between the romantic and classical styles and the associated conflicting emotions.

The Polish-Canadian Lisiecki chose to play Mozart's dramatic and yes 'Romantic', in fact almost mythical, Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor K. 466. In the work there is quite a struggle between soloist and orchestra (a 'romantic' trop if ever there was one) and Lisiecki managed this passionate dialogue extremely well. The nineteenth century thought this often performed concerto 'daemonic' and the tragic element was maintained by conductor and soloist until the end. The whole reminded me more of a symphony with piano as it pushes the classical form to the limits. Lisiecki showed us he is a born Mozartian. Great depth of feeling was evident in this ground-breaking work that gave piano concertos (and the far smaller instruments they were written for) acceptance on a par with the classical symphony. What a wonderful flowering talent is laid before us here. He has a wonderful sound, seductive touch and instinctively tailors his dynamic range to the size of the hall. How rare these days.

As an encore he gave probably the finest performance of the Chopin Waltz in C# Minor op. 64 No: 2 I have ever heard.

At my age I must have heard and played this piece a million times but I was so moved – absolutely wonderful – perfectly simple, elegant, refined and ‘classical’ (no tricky internal voices emphasised or sentimentalisation), a glowing tone, perfect dynamic range, velvet touch….it had everything Chopin requires and more.

Some enthusiasm - no standing ovation although his performance certainly justified it even if the conducting by Augustin Dumay was precise in direction but rather eccentric and entertaining to watch and for me a musically rather old-fashioned Mozart. It really doesn't matter what 'style' you perform in I suppose if you recognize true music is being made - something which can never be in doubt when it actually happens.

August 26th (20.00)

Leonora Armellini

This sensitive and charismatic young Italian pianist gave a near perfect performance of the Chopin E minor Concerto Op. 11 with the marvellous Sinfonia Varsovia under Jacek Kaspszyk.

For me everything seemed to be in its right place - the joy of youth, the assertive self-confidence of the Allegro maestoso, the feeling in the Romance. Larghetto movement that in young love like Juliet in Shakespeare 'Good night, goodnight. Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow.' and the final unaffected joy expressed in the Rondo. Vivace. I really could not fault this reading in any way and am more than ever convinced this youthful styl brillant work of Chopin's youth (he was such a joyful young man) is played best by pianists of his own age when he composed it (20).

She has a refined tone and touch which never broke through the ceiling of the instrument and natural musical phrasing that was always affecting in its nuanced expression. Music seems to flow from her in a completely natural and unforced way - being Italian she understands bel canto singing well and maintaining a cantabile legato which is so important in this concerto.

She received a rapturous reception as she was one of the strongest audience favourites in the 2010 Chopin Competition here in Warsaw. As an encore she played the Chopin Tarantella with the same spirit and verve she showed in Duszniki. Trifonov also gave this as an encore piece in Duszniki with a similar youthful spirit and abandonment - even a few smudged notes in his joy to play!

Khatia Buniatishvili
Brahms Piano Concerto No: 2 Op. 83

What a contrast with Armellini in the second half!

Listening to Khatia Buniatishvili play arguably the greatest of all Romantic piano concertos is rather like drinking a great wine like Chateau Latour far too early in its life – all the component parts have not yet come together in a harmonious whole. There were brilliant aspects but maturity over time is necessary before such a monumental and complex work can be fully mastered and presented musically. Brahms was a mature 48 when he wrote the concerto - a huge piece of musical architecture that must fit together cohesively - and an accomplished symphonist having written his first and second symphonies. Having 'learnt' this work Buniatishvili now has the notes fairly well in her fingers (a great achievement in itself). It is terribly important she gains experience playing it before an audience with an orchestra as fine as the Sinfonia Varsovia. Her musical ambitions are clearly incandescent just at present.

Look, if I was as young and beautiful as this sensual Georgian girl, had as much cascading hair and could play the piano in this darkly dramatic, passionately intense virtuosic manner, I too would fall into the same trap of ‘giving it the maximum’ too much of the time just as she does now. When I began writing books I was intolerant, an arrogant creature and wanted to show off all my powers – all young people of talent want to do this. Nothing wrong in it at all. Vanity and self-confidence, but above all a charismatic personality are indispensible qualities if you wish to achieve something in this life of increasingly fierce musical competition and the adoration of image over substance. In music, and in particular piano playing, the competition must be frightful. Making a mark today requires something very special and flamboyant indeed in one’s character and she has done that. In my late teens I thought would be the second James Joyce. Well, now I am rather older, wiser, grumpier and living in Warsaw and have a much clearer idea of my actual capacities and am still learning where they need to be disciplined.

As a young pianist there is tremendous personal physical exhilaration (for her) in playing like Buniatishvili can and does. Her jazz singer dress sense has quite an impact at least on the males in the audience. However there seems little point in me bringing detailed critical apparatus to this performance when I have seen and heard the greatest pianists in the world play this work – and they have all recorded it with the greatest orchestras and conductors – Gilels, Richter, Arrau, Rubinstein, Horowitz, Serkin….the list goes on and on. It is not fair to compare this charismatic blossoming talent from Georgia to such mature artists. Perhaps she will mature into greatness given time and a degree of objective self-criticism. One must listen to oneself and analyse what one is actually doing with the sound one is producing.

Who am I to argue with the protégées of Martha Argerich? Merely an Australian literary travel author who has achieved modest success in literature and loves music to distraction. I studied the piano and harpsichord seriously in London for many years but simply lacked the talent or ruthlessness for a career. However the study taught me to be a good listener (I hope) and that is really invaluable although not pleasant sometimes for my friends who accompany me to concerts.

Suffice to say I thought at present the work was interpretatively quite beyond her. The extreme tempos meant so much polyphonic internal detail was lost and Brahms 'imprssionist' use of tone colour and layered chordal structure entirely lost. More speed does not express more passion - often quite the opposite. I felt she has little sympathy or any understanding of the psyche and musical spirit of Brahms as she occasionally does with Liszt. The performance was clearly and probably unavoidably, through time considerations, under-rehearsed and I am not even sure that Sinfonia Varsovia and Jacek Kaspszyk, despite being very fine musicians, were deeply familiar with the work either. On various occasions, to paraphrase the Irish poet Yeats, ‘Things fell apart; the centre could not hold’.

Wild scenes and a standing ovation - it seems this is becoming quite a popular activity in Warsaw but shows little musical discrimination by the audience. Does it really matter? Probably not - certainly not to the artists who need the approbation after all the work - like life blood to them.

The Chopin Prelude in E minor as a lacklustre encore seemed small change in the Polish hand.

A truly great contemporary performance of this work, by any standards past or present, is by Nicholas Angelich and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Jarvi. (Virgin Classics 50999 266349 2 0)

A monumental and profound 'historical' performance (1963) is by Claudio Arrau with the Scottish National Orchestra under Sir Alexander Gibson. (BBC Legends BBCL 4125-2)

The Brahms House in Baden Baden visited on my recent research trip. It is the only original dwelling that survives associated with the composer. During her concert tours Clara Schumann discovered this beautiful resort and her presence drew him to this rented two-room accommodation in Lichtental. He lived here during the summer months from 1865-1874 and completed large parts of the Deutsches Requiem here and the First Symphony, the draft of the Second Symphony as well as many chamber works. Composers and students may stay here to absorb the atmosphere and vibrations, work and study during the summer months.

Brahms' 'unsurpassable' view from his composition study window at the Brahms House in Baden Baden

Brahms was a relatively young man when in Baden Baden and in a condition of unrequited love for Clara. Despite this he was very happy here and loved to take long inspirational walks in the magnificent forests that surround what he called 'the beautiful house on the hill.'

Brahms modest sleeping arrangements in the two rooms he rented at Lichtental

August 27th and August 28th

I was unable to attend the recitals of Pawel Wakarecy and Janina Fialkowska as I was attending a wedding outdside Warsaw. If you know anything about Polish weddings you will realise why it involved two full days and the fact I am only now recovering. Much gorale music and singing.

I was terribly disappointed to miss the recital by Janina Fialkowska. She belongs to the 'Great Tradition' of late nineteenth century, early twentieth century performance. She is deeply musical, a great soul and a great artist as well as being a tremendously courageous human being. I met her in Duszniki a few years ago and we discussed music at length while walking beside the bubbling mountain stream that runs through the town. For me she is a great interpreter of Liszt and Chopin. Try to buy some of her recordings and you will understand what I mean.

I also missed the chamber music concert on Sunday night which sounded fun and was made up of works by Mozart and rarely if ever heard works by Polish composers.

August 29th (18.00)

Dimitri Alexeev

This eminent and distinguished pianist began his career winning the 1975 Leeds Piano Competition and now lives in London and teaches at the Royal College of Music in London. I lived in London a stone’s throw from the Wigmore Hall for thirty years before coming to Warsaw in 2004 and attended many of his recitals. This may appear naive but for me he does not play in the clichéd manner of ‘a Russian pianist’ – tremendous tone and bravura - but has a truly poetic and elegant approach to his interpretations. I felt in this recital we were taken into various different dream worlds of the nineteenth century inhabited by different creatures of varying temperaments.

At first we explored the mercurial world of Schumann and his whimsical fluctuating nature. Blumenstück Op. 19 opened the recital. This was written during at the conclusion of a lyrical compositional period when the composer was a young man of 26 and discovering and exploring the powers of his musical imagination. It is often associated with the popular Arabeske in C Op. 18. The piece depicts various flowers associated with the nature of love and is a much underestimated brief composition of sweet and charming interrelated episodes and variations. Schumann himself did not have a particularly high opinion of it (‘for the Viennese ladies’) but his wife, the concert pianist and composer Clara Wieck, thought it one of his finest pieces and often included it in her concert programmes. Alexeev gave a beautifully simple and graceful performance with fine tone and a cantabile that almost turned it into a song. His nuance and expressive rubato was much in evidence together with what one might term ‘the feel of experience’ in allowing harmonic progressions to breathe, something youthful vigour too often forgets.

The perfect cat - but I think too sweet to be a Kater Murr - a 'Growler' - in a window of a dilapidated house in Ladek Zrdoj near Duszniki Zdroj, Lower Silesia, Poland.

Alexeev then embarked on one of Schumann’s greatest piano works, Kriesleriana. Madness or insanity was a notion that throughout his time on earth simultaneously attracted and repelled Schumann. At the end of his life he was cruelly to fall victim to it. Kriesleriana was presented publicly as eight sketches of the fictional character Kapellmeister Kreisler a rather crazy conductor-composer who was a literary figure created by the marvellous German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffman. The piece is actually based on the form of a marvellously inventive grotesque satirical novel Hoffmann wrote called Growler the Cat’s Philosophy of Life Together with Fragments of the Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler from Random Sheets of the Printer’s Waste. The fictional author of this novel Kater Murr (Growler the Cat) is actually a caricature of the German petit bourgeois class. In a theme rather appropriate in our times of gross financial inequalities, Growler advises the reader how to become a ‘fat cat’. This advice is interrupted by fragments of Kreisler’s impassioned biography. The bizarre explanation for this is that Growler tore up a copy of Kreisler’s biography to use as rough note paper and when he sent the manuscript of his own book to the printers, the two got inexplicably mixed up when the book was published. An excellent wheeze Mr. Hoffmann! Such devices remind me of Laurence Sterne in that great experimental novel Tristram Shandy.

Schumann was attracted to composing a work in ‘fragmented’ form in the structural manner of this novel, the use of the device of interrelated ‘fragments’ being beloved of the Romantic Movement in poetry, prose and music. Kreisler is a type of Doppelgänger for Schumann and the episodes in the piece describing his emotional passions, his creative art and his tortured soul alternate with lyrical love passages expressing the composer’s love for Clara Wieck. He used and transformed one of her musical themes in the work.

It is a very difficult work to present as a coherent structure and Alexeev succeeded in making the thorny transitions form wildness to lyrical love dream with consummate skill and moving poetry. The extreme shifting of moods in this Schumann piece were captured through his appropriately controlled tempo and dynamic which allowed the polyphonic nature of the various pieces to emerge. At the conclusion, in a beautiful fading pianissimo he allowed the drama to leave the stage and to simply dissolve into the mists of the forest like a phantom or spectre. Schumann advised Clara not to play the work too often as the passions aroused and nostalgia would be too strong to bear.

After the interval I expected to hear Balakirev’s arrangement of Glinka’s The Lark indicated in the programme. Did Alexeev play this? If he did I must have been asleep or thinking of another piece! Oh dear.

Then to the hectic dream fantasy world of Scriabin. Stravinsky wrote of him “…Scriabin…Where does he come from? And who are his forebears?”

I thought this one of the most atmospheric parts of the recital and ravishing in terms of the tone quality and inspiring improvisational approach he brought to the ‘performance’ if you could use such a restrictive term. It was not as if Alexeev was ‘performing’ a notated piece of music at all – he was improvising or creating this sound world for us - it was as if we were in some type of enchanted sensual world of Huysmans, overpowering perfumes, hints of an exotic world beyond the velvet of which we know nothing, seduced into opulent rooms unresisting. His liquid touch and kaleidoscopic colour palette was absolutely extraordinary. Scriabin associated colours with keys and one could hear or even see this. He chose to begin with the rarely heard four Preludes from Op. 22. The Quasi-waltz in F major Op. 47 was not familiar to me but an fine title to deal with the unfamiliar. This was followed by 2 Poèmes op.69 – the febrile, neurasthenic character was captured so well and was existentially unsettling. One was reminded throughout of the fleeting visionary brevity of Chopin’s Preludes. Finally Etudes No: 4 in F sharp major (late night in a smokey jazz club in New York with Bogart and Bacall) and No: 5 in C sharp minor (the passionate rhapsodic nature of this work always reduces me to quivering emotional wreck).

Now to the group of Chopin mazurkas. We tend to forget that amidst the ‘angst’ and ‘suffering’ that Chopin is usually associated with, almost half his output was dance music. Even many of those works not obviously dances contain dances within them. People forget Frycek was an ebullient young man and excellent company with a sharp sense of humour, fond of practical jokes and with an immense talent for caricature and mimicry. He could easily have become a professional actor. On rumbustious holidays in Szafarnia he produced an amusing parody of the Kurier Warszawski newspaper which he called the Kurier Szafarski. On 20 October 1824 he reports: ‘At Obrów a harvest festival was held. The entire village gathered in front of the manor and amused themselves greatly, particularly after vodka, and the girls, in squeaky, false semitone voices sang 'Przede dworem kaczki w błocie, nasza pani w samym złocie...'

He loved the rough violin and open-throated folk music of Mazovia and was an excellent dancer, often playing the piano into the small hours at parties for the whirling couples, flowers resplendent on their folk costumes, performing the Mazur. This was one reason he had to go into ‘rehab’ at Duszniki Zdrój suffering from physical exhaustion (not consumption at that time). The young Chopin was a bit of a 'party animal' and immensely popular on the aristocratic party circuit in the Warsaw of the 1820s.

The mazurkas in particular, with their mobile rhythms of Polish folk music – the notorious tempo rubato – are the unique outcome of an artistic sublimation of the music of his beloved Mazovian countryside. But even more importantly for Chopin interpretation, his mazurkas and waltzes are a reflection of the urban dancing tastes of the Warsaw of his youth. Warsaw was besotted with the ‘Mazurka Mania’ that took hold of society at that time. The polonaise, mazurek and waltz dominated the passion for ballroom dancing.

Some in Poland criticised Chopin for sentimentalising the mazurka, even causing it to be ‘crucified’ in the common world. But hundreds of composers were writing thousands of mazurkas in the nineteenth century. Despite what many think however, a few of Chopin’s waltzes and mazurkas were danced in Warsaw while he was living in Paris (according to information from his sisters letters to him). Some were fancifully considered by his biographer Marceli Antoni Szulc, (in comparison with those of Chopin) to be as ‘a dirty oil wick to the solar disc.’ Wonderful hyperbole.

Alexeev did not approach this group of mazurkas as energetic dances Chopin wrote inspired by memory. They are often played ‘healthily’ here in Poland in what might be considered the 'Polish style'. Is there any other approach to this exclusivity and nationalist possessiveness? Alexeev convinced me there are other viable alternatives. He chose his selection carefully. He played them rather as dreams of the past, nostalgic phantoms recalled at night through the prism of reminiscence. Fading memories of his life as a happy youth in Poland. This way of reading the mazurkas was so beautiful and unexpected and deftly removed all the rather foolish discussion I hear about whether anyone other than Polish pianists can really play a mazurka.

The recital by this mature, 'finished' artist who allows music to breathe and reveal its inner detail (such a welcome change from headstrong and unbridled youth) concluded with a spirited rendering of the Chopin A flat major Polonaise.

Encores by Rachmaninoff and Horowitz’s favourite Scriabin encore, the magnificent Etude Op. 8 No: 12.

Daniil Trifonov and Howard Shelley with Sinfonia Varsovia (21.00)

The concert began with Schubert's charming Symphony No: 3 in D major D. 200. So full of Viennese gemutlich, folk dances, student songs and marked absence of the shadow of death which hovers about so much of Schubert's writing. Wonderfully undemanding on the ear and mind.

Then a rarity. The Piano Concerto in E major (1830) by the Polish composer Jozef Krogulski (1815-1842). He was a true Wunderkind and genius of composition who died tragically young of consumption. This decorative work was clearly written in the styl brilliant so popular at the time and inspired in many ways by the brilliant Hummel. Howard Shelley gave a fine, accomplished reading of it from the piano, music before him, turning pages and conducting all at the same time. The premiere in Warsaw at the Grand Theatre in December 1830 by the fifteen year old Kogulski playing his own rather long composition must have caused quite a stir.

I found it rather too 'tinkly-winkly' in the upper register of the instrument for my taste with so many repeated phrases I lost count of them. I would never have compared the boy to a young Polish Mozart or Polish Liszt (as he was) even on this prodigious feat of youthful genius. Utterly brilliant for his age of course.

Franciszek Lessel and Feliks Dobrzynski wrote far finer concertos. These have just been released on a really lovely new CD in the Chopin Institute's new 'Music of Chopin's Time' Series with Howard Shelley and the Sinfonia Varsovia. NIFCCD 101.

An engraving of the young Liszt I photographed at the Liszt Museum, Bayreuth. Remind you of anyone?

As everyone knows, the final work on the programme, Chopin's F minor Op.21 Piano Concerto, was actually written before the E minor and in a mood somewhat more 'classical' and with possibly more of the styl brillant in evidence than the E minor.

Daniil Trifonov has when required has an extreme delicacy of touch, underplays luminously (what a relief) and an improvisatory quality to his playing as if music was being created as he played - which it is of course. He possesses superb control of touch, tone and is a deeply musical personality. In the Larghetto his eloquent 'singing cantabile' was very moving. His voice is authentically individual, his Chopin fioraturas have the delicate strength of Bruxelles lace.

The noble opening Maestoso first movement possessed great energy and a lustrous cantabile of the most refined feeling one could imagine. Again I felt he is a particularly sensitive pianist reminiscent on occasion of Dinu Lipatti. Trifonov harnesses his virtuoso technique to achieve moments of extreme delicacy of touch and tone heightened by his glorious phrasing and affecting rubato. His effects have all the finesse and the poetry reported of Chopin himself at the keyboard. He maintained good ensemble and entered his own adolescent dream world taking us with him. Chopin was considered the 'Ariel of pianists' (the disembodied spirit character in Shakespeare's The Tempest). Sometimes I felt this pianist close to a spirit of nature. Trifonov is transformed by music, possessed by it completely the moment he sits at the instrument. Is it too fanciful to say he actually appears to become a medium for the music? He communicates the ultimate in musical integrity and intimacy with his audience - a gift or conviction that escapes so many pianists.

The Larghetto second movement performed by Trifonov after the preparation of the first was a ravishing love song with all the character of what might be considered a Chopin nocturne - in many ways it might be considered Chopin's first nocturne. He rendered it in a heartfelt, lyrical and beautifully executed manner. In a letter to his friend Tytus Woyciechowski, Chopin wrote that the movement had been inspired by his adolescent love of, perhaps infatuation with, the singer Konstancja Gładowska (I have read somewhere she preferred the company of some smartly dressed and dashing young Russian officers which must account for the bitterness interwoven with the sweet nostalgia). A cloudless and illusioned love before the tigers of experience begin their feast. The simplicity of Trifonov’s delivery was striking, never seeking solely to impress us with his keyboard skills...

The Allegro vivace was just that, a brilliant, lively and energetic dance. He varied the tempo convincingly with great joy and concluded it up tempo with tremendous youthful exuberance and élan, utilising his full formidable technical resources. Notes cascaded like a waterfall reminiscent of such past masters as Hofmann, Godowsky and Rosenthal. But he maintains his own unique voice.

For me this performance expressed a perfect understanding of what a musicologist might term 'the Chopin aesthetic’. Chopin’s best pupil Princess Marcelina Czartoryska advised the performer to intuitively immerse himself ‘au climat de Chopin’. Trifonov does this with a similar refinement and aristocratic phrasing to reports of the composer’s playing.

In modern interpretations and pianism there seems to be a movement to eclipse or at least diminish the 'feminine' aspect of the soul from Chopin. This is absurd and impoverishing and comes from our current preoccupation with the physical and crudely 'powerful' in life, the clichéd view of 'masculinity', the 'macho' male. Chopin was one of those rare individuals who managed to balance his masculine and feminine natures - a quality ever present in his music and something Trifonov seems to be profoundly aware of.

Tremendous reception and many encores - Liszt's arrangement of Schubert's The Trout and two Etudes from Chopin's op. 25 set.

August 30th (21.00)

Alexei Lubimov and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Vladimir Jurowski

Brahms Piano Concerto No: 1 in D minor Op. 15

Ferenc Liszt Faust Symphony S. 108

On 28th October 1853 Robert Schumann wrote of Brahms “Here is man of destiny! Seated at the piano he began to disclose wondrous things.” Within a year Brahms’s new friend had lost his reason and attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine. Brahms reaction to soul-crippling grief at the news was to begin composing a large sonata for two pianos. Soon he slowly began to realise this was actually a ‘symphony in disguise’. His reworking of the sonata eventually became the first Piano Concerto in D minor op. 15. It took him some five years to complete. The premiere (1859) at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig and subsequent performances were not a success – quite the opposite in fact – the music critic Bernsdorf said the work was ‘utterly beyond hope...retching and rummaging, this straining and tugging, this tearing and patching…’ Yes, it was revolutionary work for the time. Schumann had said that the piano would be too limited a medium for Brahms vast conceptions. He was right as ever. The composer completed a monumental conception in this concerto that confused almost everyone.

The artists assembled for this performance in Warsaw were indeed a select group of the finest musicians in Europe. The soloist Alexei Lubimov is renowned as a pianist and harpsichordist who has a consuming passion for playing period instruments and has a large collection. He actually introduced baroque instruments into the Moscow Conservatoire when musicians, owing to political and ideological walls of one sort or another, had been separated from the great Early Music Renaissance which took place in England, Austria and the Netherlands in the 1960s and early 1970s. I remember them as great days of fierce excitement and it was then I bought my first harpsichord at ruinous expense. Lubimov is also a champion of the most modern music such as works by Stockhausen (an increasingly neglected genius since his death) Boulez, Ives, Cage and Ligeti. He has performed with every modern orchestra and conductor of note.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment scarcely needs an introduction as one of the finest English orchestras. In having the Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski in Warsaw we were indeed privileged. This great musician is an outstanding opera conductor and is the Music Director of the fabulous Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and guest conductor of the Russian National Orchestra and Berlin Philharmonic. And I was about to hear him conduct Liszt’s Faust Symphony which he had given at the London Proms just a short time before!

For this first half of the concert Lubimov played a Steinway of c. 1875 which he commented in an interview on Dwojka (Radio 2) was not ideal for this work of Brahms. The composer himself was vastly more interested in early music than one might imagine and actually edited an edition of the music of Francois Couperin – a very unlikely project I think for this man who utilised such massive orchestral forces. Brahms in fact specified a Steinway Centennial D instrument (similar to the instrument used in this performance) for the premiere of the concerto with himself as soloist and his friend Joseph Joachim conducting the Gewandhaus orchestra.

I do not particularly want to write in the following fashion but feel I must if I am to remain honest in my feelings and honest towards my readers.

I realise there are serious practical considerations of organisation and venues with the Chopin i jego Europa festival and it is a miracle Mr. Leszczyński can mount this festival at all at this level of quality. However once again I felt the scandalous lack of a decent modern concert hall in Warsaw when we are fortunate enough to have attracted artists to the city of the very highest calibre. As the Filharmonia was ‘not available’ the musicians were again seated on the ‘Grand Stage of the Polish National Opera’. Sounds impressive does it not, sure does, but in reality despite its chic industrial minimalist ambience and chic divided audience seating ‘in the round’ on back-breaking pic-nic chairs, the sound simply disappears into the vast cavernous space of the fly tower tens of metres above us happily joining the music of the spheres.

With period orchestral instruments, especially pianos, the effect is a serious emasculation of the sound. If you are fortunate enough to be seated in Sektor A in front of the orchestra and soloist (along with the more select members of the audience) it is not too bad I suppose. However anyone seated in Sektor B or Sektor C is at a cruel disadvantage with much diminished piano sound and unbalanced orchestral sound. ‘I am in Sektor A’ various people said to me with enormous pride. Great for them but it is not a constructive remark or democratic. I was in Sektor A for this concert as it turned out but for Avdeeva I was lost in Sektor B hence my remarks. The piano lid was open on this occasion but attached to the instrument – in previous festivals it was removed completely. I have no idea of the difference in sound projection but the lid certainly excludes large numbers of the audience from hearing the instrument properly and possibly some members of the brass and woodwind section of the orchestra seated at the rear.

I will not repeat what I have said at length earlier in this post about the crying need for a proper concert hall in Warsaw…I suppose financial rationalisations, committees, reports, tenders and Byzantine political ‘explanations as to why not’ à la Polonaise will go on till the crack of doom.

Lubimov approached this formidably difficult piece with great élan. The restoration of the proper balance of sound between the soloist and orchestra was clear from the outset – something that is wonderful about using early pianos in concerti. They preserve the original structural intentions of the composer in terms of sound balance.

I had never thought much about the use of authentic instruments in Brahms but certainly the long Maestoso first movement was well integrated and the piano absorbed as an integral part of the symphonic structure. Jurowski was spirited in his tempos, broad, passionate and inspired and it was clear the orchestra love playing under him. This unfortunate acoustic diminishes the bass of an early instrument dramatically and Lubimov had to pound a bit to be heard in the tutti writing. The extremely heartfelt Adagio was much more successful - the instrument with this pianist produced a beautiful tone and touch with a great deal of poetry, almost religious feeling and profound melancholy (felt by Brahms at the onset of insanity for Schumann). Earlier instruments do shine in piano and pianissimo passages but less successfully in this acoustic in the forte and fortissimo passages where they simply clatter under the stress. The final Andante con moto was full of infectious dance rhythms and the fugato brilliantly managed by Jurowski and Lubimov. A fine performance and a great achievement. The above reservations have nothing at all to do with the superb playing.

After the interval, the Liszt Faust Symphony did not disappoint – it was a fantastic and brilliant reading even without the final Chorus Mysticus for tenor and male choir. A magnificent account which left me as limp as a wet rag.

The gestation of this symphony is of particular interest for English listeners. Of course it is the great masterpiece from Liszt’s Weimar period (if you love Liszt and recognise his immense influence on Western music you simply must visit Weimar before the end of the year). Berlioz had introduced Liszt to Goethe’s great poem Faust around 1830 and of course Weimar itself is soaked in memories of Goethe and Schiller. For Liszt, the character of Faust seemed to haunt the town at every turn of the cobbled streets. But he was paralysed by compositional indecision when confronted with Schumann’s Scenes from Faust and Berlioz Damnation of Faust quite apart from the great poem itself. He wrote to Princess Carolyne: ‘Anything connected with Goethe is dangerous for me to handle.’ It was not until the arrival in Weimar of the great Victorian English novelist George Eliot (real name Marian Evans) with her lover and companion George Henry Lewes in August 1854 that Liszt was galvanised into a frenzy of composition. Lewes was writing a biography of Goethe and was visiting the Weimar to do research. They visited Liszt at the Altenburg on a number of occasions discussing Goethe and his position in German literature. This was when Liszt began this great work and completed it at white heat between August and October 1854 - a mere two months!

Partitur-autograph by Liszt of Faust 'Gretchen' movement, 1854, Szechenyi Nationalbibliothek, Budapest

The full title is A Faust Symphony in Three Character Sketches after Goethe: (1) Faust, (2) Gretchen, (3) Mephistopheles. This was a very early attempt to portray the inner psychology of the three main characters in the Goethe poem in pure music. Wagner of course expanded this idea enormously in his later operas. Liszt presents Faust first as magician and thinker in a ‘theme’ which is an extraordinary historical precursor to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone row. Faust then ponders without direction until the ‘Passion’ motif which many musicologists feel was the ‘Faust’ chord ‘appropriated’ by Wagner and transformed into the immortal ‘Tristan’ chord. ‘This is not the first time that Liszt cheated history by stealing from the future of music.’ (Alan Walker Franz Liszt: Volume II The Weimar Years 1848-1861 P.331). A fantastic trumpet theme presents Faust as hero.

The Gretchen movement was extremely beautiful and is considered ‘flawless’ as a composition, one of the finest nineteenth century works for orchestra. Liszt scored this lyrical heart-breaking music as if for small chamber groups within the orchestra. The orchestral players were able to show their deep musicality almost as soloists. Jurowski was very fine in this. The final Mephistopheles character is presented not through new themes but through angular and at times frightening distortions and ghastly mutations of Faust’s own music – an inspired idea of Liszt - for me the insidious hints of the Mephisto Waltz No: 1 lie here too. Jurowski and the orchestra managed this mocking and devilish parody quite brilliantly as Faust is drawn further and further into the circles of Hell. Gretchen remains untouched, her theme intact, unsullied. The Chorus Mysticus for tenor and male choir which concludes the symphony was omitted which was a great shame as the work concludes with the Redemption by the Eternal Feminine in Goethe’s words: Das Ewig-Weibliche, Zieht uns hinan (The Woman-soul leads us Upward and on).

A brilliant, deeply moving and thrilling account of Liszt’s masterpiece by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Vladimir Jurowski. This work is only now receiving the recognition it deserves. If you were not there, you really missed something I am afraid…I stumbled out into the night in another world altogether to this one.

August 31st (20.00)

Yulianna Avdeeva (period piano)

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

Jacek Kaspszyk (conductor)

Carl Maria von Weber
Overture to Der Freischütz

Fryderyk Chopin

Piano Concerto in F minor , Op. 21

Piano Concerto in E minor Op. 11

The 1849 Erard No: 2118 belonging to the Fryderyk Chopin Institute Collection

The master tuner Mr. Szymon Jasnowski tuning the Erard between concertos

I am afraid this concert came as somewhat of a disappointment to me, one of the very few in this festival.

It opened with Weber’s Overture to Der Freischütz which sounded marvellous on original instruments, particularly the natural ‘hunting’ horns so prominent in this work. The conductor Jacek Kaspszyk is famous and highly praised for his opera direction and this was clearly in evidence in this lively and atmospheric interpretation. One was lost in the misty forests of the North…

The main problem for me in both Chopin concertos was that seated in Sektor B I simply could not hear the piano properly and was sitting directly behind the violin and bass section who dominated the sound spectrum for me personally. The rest of the orchestral sound appeared ‘distant’. Avdeeva adopted quite a different stance at the instrument to her normal posture, seated at an inward angle to the orchestra. During both concerti she tried to engage in a real dialogue of eyes, sound and gesture with various sections of the players. On occasion she even attempted to conduct them herself. As there was a conductor on the podium this set up a certain three-way tension which was not really ideal.

I think (but how can I really know) that Avdeeva may have felt that the players at the back of the orchestra (horns and woodwind) may not have heard her entries clearly enough and so indicated them with a head and sometimes hand gesture. I must say these ‘duos’ or dialogue say with horn or solo woodwind came off superbly. Her solo sections in the two Larghettos were as ravishing and heart-felt as usual (you already know how I love her playing). The Erard lived up to its promise in piano and pianissimo passages. Much in these slow movements is solo playing and you could hear the instrument and its refined, elegant tone properly. But in the virtuoso tutti outer movements of both concertos I simply could not hear sufficiently what Avdeeva was doing in detail above the orchestral sound to form any useful judgement. Certainly she seemed to be handling the instrument remarkably well and with her usual total commitment to the music - body, soul and mind.

I cannot say the same for Jacek Kaspszyk unfortunately. He seemed on this particular evening, from my point of view, to have little real musical communication with the orchestra and adopted too big a beat – long late-romantic rhapsodic lines and slowish tempo do not suit these concertos written in the bubbling, energetic and joyful styl brilliant of the period of Hummel. Stylistically it was the completely wrong approach - well for me anyway. Being a famous and much respected Polish operatic conductor I thought Chopin would have been second nature to him. However he spent much of the time looking into the score and only fitfully engaging in eye contact with the players – all rather strange. Avdeeva seemed somewhat frustrated, distracted by external matters, her passion held back but that may have been in my imagination I suppose.

The orchestral players themselves did not play either of these concertos with the authority and commitment that would indicate a properly detailed knowledge of the score. The performance seemed quite under-rehearsed. The performance was almost completely lacking in ideas and interpretative detail. It was rather like an excellent champagne that had gone flat the morning after the party. Still quite good but troubled by lack of any sparkle or sustained interest. This coupled with the ethereal piano sounds from my unfortunate listening post made for an unsatisfactory evening altogether – one I had been looking forward to with the greatest anticipation.

If you ever wanted to turn people away from period pianos or rather fail to impress them (perish the thought) this evening went some way to doing that – use of the instrument seemed to have had only novelty value which is so far from the truth. This was so unfortunate as I am convinced of their superiority in many ways to modern instruments for certain types of music. I have a restored 1844 Pleyel pianino (No: 11151) at home for goodness sake...

The Festival Director Mr. Leszczyński has done such an immense and persuasive amount to change people’s ideas of period pianos with all the wonderful Fryderyk Chopin Institute ‘Real Chopin’ recordings with fine artists and many, many concerts over the years. But these instruments must be played in the right context, setting and acoustic for them to show their superb qualities. People seated in Sektor A will probably not understand my opinion of this concert at all….but you just try another position next time round and listen.

September 1st (21.00)

Church of the Holy Cross, Warsaw - A special concert for victims of the Japanese earthquake

Camerata Silesia with Jakub Waszczeniuk (trumpet) Ursula Kryger (mezzo-soprano) Adam Szerszen (baritone) Jaraslaw Kitala (bass) Not announced (period piano)

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)

1. Paths in Memoriam Witold Lutoslawaski (trumpet solo)
2. The Rain-Tree Sketch (piano)

Ferenc Liszt

Via Crucis, les 14 stations de la croix (soloists, mixed choir and piano)

What an extraordinary manner in which to end a music festival and what inspiration lies here.

The venue for the concert was the beautiful and historic baroque Kościół św. Krzyża (Church of the Holy Cross) in Warsaw. It was built between 1679 and 1696 by Giuseppe Simone Bellotti. There are a large number of monuments to famous Poles here including the novelist Bolesław Prus, General Władisław Sikorski but above all, on the first pier on the left, a portrait bust of Fryderyk Chopin and an urn containing his heart brought back to Poland by his sister Ludwika.

Kościół św. Krzyża (Church of the Holy Cross) in Warsaw, Poland

The concert was dedicated to the victims of the recent Japanese earthquake. The first piece to ring out from the organ loft through this magnificent space was Toru Takemitsu’s Paths in Memoriam Witold Lutosławski (1994) for solo trumpet. Takemitsu met ‘Luto’ in Warsaw in 1992 and never forgot the experience. The work is intended to depict a listener wandering along meandering garden path. An arresting seemingly aleatoric fanfare with echo ‘answer effects’ from the trumpet with mute – created a reminiscence of the cornet Hejnał interrupted by the Tatar arrow and sudden death of the player that sounds from the tower of the Mariacki Church over the city of Kraków on the hour. Then a piano piece entitled The Rain-Tree Sketch (1982) which was rather like a musical Haiku depicting a tree that collects water in its leaves until the drops fall to the ground. Influenced by the music of the magnificent composer Olivier Messiaen.

Franz Liszt arrived in Rome in September 1878 and took up residence in the Villa d’Este. He lived a simple life here rising with the lark, attending mass at the church at Tivoli and then composition. It was here shortly after arrival that he heard news of the death of his close friend Baron Antal Augusz – he wrote that they were ‘of one heart’. One outcome of his grief was the extraordinary sound world he created of the Via crucis, les 14 stations de la croix which I heard for the first time tonight. The Church of the Holy Cross is the most suitable setting imaginable for this sacred work and its acoustic is splendid. The work is in fourteen short movements with texts selected from the Bible by Liszt’s companion, Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. It was written for mixed choir, soloists and piano or organ.

In his official foreword to Via Crucis Liszt wrote:

‘Devotion to the “Way of the Cross’ is very widespread among Catholics. Many churches feature images of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, which in Good Friday, the faithful follow with an officiating priest. I have participated in this ceremony, notably at the Colosseum in Rome, steeped in the blood of the holy martyrs. In the pages of music which follow I have attempted humbly to express my devout emotion.

O crux, ave, spec unica! [Hail, O Cross, our single hope!]

(from the previously unpublished foreword quoted in Alan Walker Franz Liszt Volume 3 the Final Years 1861-1886 p. 381-2)

This was one of the most extraordinary pieces of music I have heard for a very long time. At the time it was composed it must have been shocking indeed it is so forward-looking in its atonality and avant-garde ‘harmonies’. Refused by publishers it was not performed until fifty years after it was written on Good Friday, 1929 in Budapest. Liszt himself said he ‘was quite shaken by it.’ Not only is the pain of Christ himself depicted but also the suffering of the witnesses, especially his mother.

An Albrecht Durer engraving in his Great Passion series (1497-1510)

The Prelude began with an old plainchant but this is a false indication of the astonishing music that follows. The piano has a heavy, simple phrase as Jesus staggers between Stations on the way to Calvary. He falls thrice. None of the Liszt pyrotechnics in evidence at all. Gone. Subdued. Sublimated into true religious feeling. ‘Jesus meets his mother’ was an absolutely heart-rending Stabat Mater by female voices. I have only ever felt this extraordinary devotional emotion scored for small forces in a performance at Versailles of Francois Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres. The unfocused chromatic irresolution of ‘The Women of Jerusalem mourn for Jesus’ and then ‘Do not weep for me, but rather weep for yourselves and for your children’ – the grief seemed almost unbearable in light of the Japanese tragedy and our own ghastly situation of horror, death and mutilation that pertains across world cultures just now. The Crucifixion music was of extreme simplicity and all the more effective – such a surprise when you think of what Liszt might have written of it in his dramatic youth. I kept hearing Wagnerian chromaticism throughout. Liszt’s great biographer Alan Walker comments on this work ‘A work of outcries, whispers and laments….His music not only made history; it had a history of making history.’ (Vol.3 p. 383-4)

At the conclusion of this profoundly moving work I did not want to hear applause, I simply wanted to remain silent and meditate. The profound spiritual impact of this rarely performed music of Liszt in this unsurpassed setting was something I shall never forget until I too am taken away.

And so this marvellous Chopin i jego Europa (Chopin and his Europe) closes for another year and Mr. Leszczyński, the Festival Director of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, remains an inspiration to us all in his imaginative and exploratory music programming. He must also be heartily congratulated for persuading such fine artists as we have heard to come to Warsaw in the year of Liszt – no mean feat.

I wish to make a general observation on the playing of young pianists in the festival. Despite their undoubted technical brilliance in general they are becoming more and more obsessed with speed to the point of absurdity. On this point I would like to quote the great pianist Claudio Arrau:

'It is a grave mistake to to associate passion with speed. In music conceived as relatively slow, speed is the very opposite of passion and generally results in a loss of intensity.'

The pillar where Chopin's heart lies

Kościół św. Krzyża (Church of the Holy Cross) in Warsaw

Of all the pianists I have heard this season so far, the most remarkable in terms of their individuality have been Daniil Trifonov, Denis Kozhukhin and Francesco Piemontesi all at the Duszniki Zdroj Festival (see posting) and Trifonov again in Warsaw. Try and obtain recordings of all (Chopin Institute - Trifonov; Claves - Piemontesi; MP 3 Downloads - Kozhukhin) or try Youtube (but please listen only on excellent reproducing equipment).

66th International Chopin Piano Festival, Duszniki Zdroj, Poland (RV)

2011-08-15T23:53:00.302+02:00

The Dworek Chopina Duszniki Zdroj where most of the piano recitals take place

The superb 2011 copy by Paul McNulty of one of Franz Liszt's favourite instruments by Boisselot & Fils, Facteurs du Roi, Marseille. The original instrument won a Gold Medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1844. This instrument is exhibited as part of the Franz Liszt - A European in Weimar series of exhibitions in that remarkable town. It is part of the Kosmos Klavier exhibits in the Palace Museum.

Click on all photographs to enlarge (taken with Leica D-Lux 4)

I will be keeping my customary blog of the outstanding pianists performing at the 66th International Chopin Festival at Duszniki Zdroj from the evening of August 5th to the evening of Saturday August 13th.

It promises to be a particularly remarkable festival this year with so many prize winners performing. Wunda opens the parade of brilliance, Trifonov closes it and in between Avdeeva, Lugansky, Armellini, Bonatta, Goto (winner of the 2011 Utrecht Franz Liszt Competition), Geniusas and Kozhukhin. The Master Classes will be taken by the charming and deeply musical German-Austrian pianist Prof. Jan Gottlieb Jiracek von Arnim, the quite amazing Chopin and Beethoven world authority, Polish musicologist Prof. Irena Poniatowska and the outstanding Italian pianist and conductor Prof. Andrea Bonatta.

One can walk in the morning in the invigorating pine-forested mountains of the former Silesian Bad Reinerz or attend a Master Class followed by a late afternoon and evening recital. The romantic Nokturn event by candlelight lies mid-way and of course each day one approaches in trepidation the Chopin Spring to take the waters with a draught from the traditional spouted drinking cup...rare moments of bliss and oblivion ahead in this crazy and violent world of ours.

Join me if you wish...

Thursday August 4th

The drive from Warsaw to Duszniki yesterday was fairly horrendous. There was an alarm malfunction at my flat which delayed departure until 12.00 noon. Almost gridlocked traffic on the two routes out of Warsaw in a southerly direction. There are major roadworks on both parts of the Krakow or Wroclaw route. Anyway it took around 9 hours with vast trucks and crazy white van drivers everywhere. To bed exhausted.

Long walk in the pine forest this morning to set me up for the inaugural recital this evening. The festival this year is focused specifically on Liszt and Chopin and the relationship between them. Later next week Professor Irena Poniatowska will give a lecture on this concentrating on Liszt's biography of Chopin and its fraught history. Most of the participants are playing Liszt but only Lukas Geniusas has had the courage to tackle the Sonata in B minor - to my mind one of the greatest works in Western piano literature. I recently heard the Alfred Brendel interpretation of this work (many have forgotten he was a renowned Liszt pianist and the final work he played before retiring from the concert platform was by Liszt). He lifts the work to great heights of spiritual intensity and profundity eschewing the surface viruosic rhetoric of most interpretations. A monumental reading which you really must hear on CD before the close of 2011.

The inaugural recital at Duszniki will be given by the very popular Ingolf Wunder who many people (especially Poles) feel should have won the 2010 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He was awarded joint Second Prize with Lukas Geniusas, who is also performing at this festival. However I remain of the Trifonov camp...

You may like to read some of my report from last year's Duszniki Chopin Festival 2010 as Denis Kozhukhin has returned this year.

http://www.michael-moran.com/2010/08/brief-report-on-65th-international.html

Friday August 5th

The 'main men' of the Duszniki Festival in happy mood about to lay flowers at the Chopin memorial at the opening ceremony. Lt to Rt. Piotr Paleczny (Artistic Director), Stanislaw Zielinski (Yamaha Europe) and Andrzej Merkur (Festival Organisation)

Ingolf Wunder (20.00)

Wunder opened his recital with Chopin's Bolero in C major Op. 19. He captured the rhythm of this 18th century Spanish dance very well and it was festive way of opening the festival. It has always been my favourite among Chopin's less serious works. The Ballade in F minor op. 52 was sensitively thought through as a narrative, even opera, in absolute music but as Chopin once commented himself in a rather tantalising way 'In an otherwise excellent performance the Polish element was missing.' Would I really know not being born Polish but I did imagine I felt this lack. The Andante spianato and Grand Polonaise Op. 22 is clearly a favourite work for Wunder as he often performs it. For me (and such matters are intensely personal - we all have our own concept of how a Chopin piece ought to 'go') his interpretation of the polonaise lacked sparkle and accuracy. If one has studied the art of dance in the 19th century the opening bars of a traditional danced polonaise are a true 'summons to the dance floor' for the assembled company. Although Chopin' s polonaises are not obviously intended to be danced, this earlier work clearly has all the hallmarks of the dance and I was simply not rhythmically carried away. The Polish pianist Wojciech Switala is magnificent in this work if you can obtain a copy of the rare recording he made for Katowice Radio some years ago as a young tyro.

By the interval it was clear that Wunder appeared rather tired and not on top of his form for some reason. The Mozart Sonata in B-flat major KV 333 was a fine restrained 'classical' performance but lacking a little in the refined elegance, and underlying conversational, operatic aria nature of so much of Mozart's keyboard music. Staying in Vienna Wunder then took up the Liszt/Schubert arrangement of his Soiree de Vienne No. 6. This is such a beautiful work my heart rises with nostalgia for a more civilised past every time I hear it. Wunder's performance was subtle and refined with all the organic understanding of the Viennese dance forms one could expect from an Austrian pianist. However this piece was often played and recorded by the giants of nineteenth century pianism such as Josef Hofmann, Leopold Godowsky and perhaps the greatest recording of all by Josef Lhevinne. I have many of these historic recordings and of course having become a spoilt brat musically I am unreasonably demanding whenever I hear anyone at all play this work other than such titans.

The final work was Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No.6. The Gypsies had held Liszt in thrall since childhood and his own written account of his visits to their camps is a brilliant piece of descriptive travel writing. Seated on a pile of fur skins eating meat and honey offered by wild men and wilder women, rings and bangles glinting in the firelight, he observed: 'Flying to their violins and cymbals, they began a real fury of excitement. The friska ('fast') was not long in rising to a frenzy of exultation, and then almost to delirium.' Wunda certainly adopted a demanding tempo and in many ways brought off a pretty abandoned performance. I noticed what I thought were the sound of castanets clicking away in perfect rhythm to the music. 'Now that's odd' I thought. 'How is Wunder producing a castanet accompaniment? What a wonder!' Then I noticed the little elderly lady sitting in front of me tapping the heels of her sandals in time to the music on the wooden floor of the room. Click-clack went her feet and her tiny grey head bobbed up and down in abandonment to the rhythm and melody. 'Ah yes' I thought 'The great F. Liszt still weaving his popular magic across two centuries!'

Saturday August 6th

Masakata Goto (16.00)

As he had just won the 2011 Liszt Competition in Utrecht I had high expectations of this pianist but they were only satisfied to a limited degree. He began with Beethoven as I imagine he wanted to point out the profound influence Beethoven had on Liszt. He chose the Sonata No. 30 the E major Op. 109. This is an ambitious choice for such a young pianist and although digitally it held no terrors, his control and variety of dynamics, articulation and inner structural harmonic meaning could have been more representative in the 'classical' sense. Beethoven, despite his revolutionary nature and inadequate instruments that only just coped (and sometimes simply did not) with the demands of his musical imagination, he did belong to a tradition. The Rondo in G major op.51 although not lacking in period charm, suffered similar problems of depth and variety.

He chose the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No.13 which was a particularly discriminating choice. Not a warhorse by any means, it is a piece full of sad Gypsy yearning with many anguished intervals typifying the lassan or 'slow' type of Gypsy improvisation. This was a fine peformance of the work to my mind only slightly in need of more cultural bridges to a fuller understanding of the music of these passionate wandering people. His technique was quite breathtaking in the last and 12th. Transcendental Study Chasse-Neige (literally translated as 'snow plough'). This superb and difficult piece of musical narative describes in sound the inexorable build up of a covering of snow over the landscape from those first tentative swirling flakes of white.

Of course if one can play the piano like this digitally (a miracle in its own way - a gift of God surely this inexplicable natural degree of fantastic brain hand co-ordination) teachers have a responsibilty to provide a deep and proper cultural and historical context of both composer and piece for the student. So few teachers do this - pressure of time, guiding the student's technical mastery, structural analysis (the bete noir of our times), competition preparation, their own careers also on the line. This lack could not have been clearer in the Polonaise No. 2 in E major which showed little understanding of the nobility and slow commanding grace of this dance with its military bearing - the movement of the cloth of the kontusz and zupan (traditional items of Polish costume in the nineteenth century), the smoothing of the moustaches with an aristocratic gesture, the arrangement of the sabre. Every young pianist should watch the final scenes of Andrzej Wajda's film of the Polish literary epic Pan Tadeusz, in fact the whole film, before playing polonaises. I also feel they should actually learn to dance as well - it is so helpful in sorting out rhythm and beat emphasis and feeling the dance in your body - indispensible. The fact many polonaises, mazurkas and waltzes were not intended by composers to be danced is irrelevant to an understanding of the danced source.

Masakata finally and courageously chose to play the relatively rarely performed operatic paraphrase Reminiscences de Norma of Bellini. His lack of dynamic variety and understanding of bel canto song made the work a tremendous piece of virtuoso piano music but it remained mired in its magnificent display. Norma is such a superb tragic opera. Before attempting a Liszt paraphrase one should study not only the operas of the period and their cultural traditions but in the case of Norma listen to Dame Nellie Melba's rendition of the aria Casta Diva which made her so famous and the Tsar and Leo Tolstoy weep. Such an historic recording is thin in sound, alarming even to our modern high-fidelity ears, but it is a cultural link, however tenuous, with past traditions of bel canto. Chopin, a master of ravishing melodies, advised pianists to learn to sing as the only way to make the piano itself sing. He also loved Bellini. One cannot help but agree but do teachers really apply this principle to their students rather than merely referring them to Eigeldinger's book?

We are losing contact with the source of so much nineteenth century music and its meaning for composers of the time in our search for physical dominance of the intrument. Some feel this loss is not important as every age interprets the past through its own filters and obsessions. One ventures too far from the source at one's peril - the outline of the ship is fading fast as it passes over the horizon of time - it glides by the reef.

Denis Kozhukhin (20.00)

I had heard this artist last year at Duszniki and was terribly impressed with his brilliance and natural musical gifts. He had just won the 2010 Queen Elizabeth International Music Competition in Brussels. This year was no exception except that I was even further overwhelmed by the extraordinary nature of these gifts. He has attracted the finest of teachers (Bashkirov, Fou Ts'ong, Rosen, Berman, Staier, Frankl....Masterclasses with Tureck, Fleisher and De Larrocha).

He began what turned out to be a remarkable musical evening with the Haydn Sonata No. 59 in E flat Major Hob. XVI: 59. It was in a beautifully honed and immaculate 'classical' style and with just enough Sturm und Drang to tell us that the Romantic Movement was on its way. The Finale. Tempo di Menuetto was full of infectious humour with an elegance and wit that had me chuckling at Haydn's manly and robust character.

He next chose the enormous musical scope, power and giant structure of the Brahms Sonata No. 1 in C major Op. 1. I had never heard this sonata performed live and only ever heard it once or twice in recordings. The second sonata in F sharp minor (my favourite key) is better known (Sokolov has given us a mighty performance of it on Opus 111). Dedicated to the great violinist Joachim and published in 1853 the first was actually written after the second but Brahms thought it was a finer work. In the 1850s Brahms had spent 6 weeks as Liszt's guest in Weimar but actually preferred the musical life of Gottingen and soon returned there. Schumann played a major role in the publication of the sonatas of Brahms. I had visited the Brahms House in Baden-Baden on my recent trip and felt his innate modesty as a man and integrity as a musician. I could also not help thinking of the young Brahms and his frustrated love for Clara Schumann especially in the Andante and throughout this towering youthful performance of the fiery, romantic and joyful early work of a young exuberant man. Kozhukhin clearly revels in his 'discoveries' as last year he performed a piece by Ligeti.

The final part of the concert was devoted to seven of the Liszt Transcendental Studies. What tempestuous, commanding and poetic performances they were! From the great announcement of the Preludio (1) we moved on to the A minor (2). Ferrucio Busoni felt that the piece resembled rockets being launched where the right hand almost leaps from the keyboard. Paysage (3) conjures up the idea of countryside and Arcadian scenes - Liszt as a young man apparently was inspired during a train journey to write the piece. Certainly from his colourful travel writing Liszt was was often inspired by the nature of travel itself, a sense of not remaining in the same place for too long. The bravura of the etude named Eroica (7) followed this peaceful work. Then the well-known Etude in F minor (10) where Kozhukhin pushed the limits of drama and passion to their utmost but without breaking through the sound ceiling of the Steinway. In the small room of the Dworek Chopina it was tremendously loud but never harsh or uncomfortable. A physical/musical experience of a high order of magnitude and sheer excitement indeed. Kozhukhin's interpretation of Harmonies du Soir (11) was one of the great musical experiences of my life. He understood so well the harmonic avant-garde forward looking nature of this piece. It was a desperately moving moment as the central melody resolved itself and soared carrying one's heart and soul. This was Liszt the poet, the true Romantic spirit and Kozhukhin took us on a flight the like of which is rarely experienced in the concert hall.

He closed the group with an earlier etude from the set, the terribly demanding and technically awesome No. 4 Mazeppa. Liszt was tremendously influenced by literature and opera as were most composers of his day. In this he was probably inspired by Victor Hugo's poem concerning Mazeppa. However Lord Byron's poetry and scandalous life also had an incalculable influence on the creative artistic Europe of the time. His magnificent and haunting transcendental poem Mazeppa is a case in point. Every pianist should also read Byron's poem on the subject to accelerate their imaginations beyond the keyboard.

Kozhukhin adopted a far more moderate pace than many of the nineteenth century titans who played this piece as a repertoire warhorse. I think the work benefitted from this in power and poetry. He did not simply play it as a vehicle for virtuoso rhetoric which of course it is but only in part. One must remember that the Polish page Mazeppa was tied to the wild horse naked and facing backwards when it was galloping across the Ukrainian steppe and this gives the limping rhythm such authenticity. If one has ever ridden a horse, the idea of it galloping when one is tied to it facing backwards...oh and naked....the torture for both animal and man is too ghastly to contemplate. Mazeppa's apparent death and exhaustion were deeply moving but in the finale his triumphant spirit lives on when he survives and becomes a prince or king.

This recital was a fine and upifting human experiece of the highest order of technical and musical achievement.

Sunday August 7th

In the concert shell in the Spa Park a 'Piano Marathon' began at 10.00am. The Japanese pianist Yukio Yokoyama, who in 1990 won Third Prize at the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw at the age of 19, is playing 5 hours of Chopin. This is a charity event to raise funds for the victims of the recent East Japan earthquake. 'I believe that, as a musician, what I can and should do in response to this disaster is continue to devote myself each day to a sincere and diligent approach to music.' In Tokyo recently he actually played all 212 works of Chopin in a single day.

Add Yukio Yokoyama playing in the 'Piano Marathon' in the Dusznki Zdroj Spa Park

Gintaras Janusevicius

Kozhukhin has blonde hair and wears it in a tidy pony-tail while this pianist has a wild unruly mop and 'artistic' short beard - more of the jazz pianist type seen across a smokey crowded club in the small hours in Vilnius. Although born in Moscow he began his studies in Klaipeda. I have been to this region known in Lithuania as the Curonian Spit and it is truly a glorious part of the Baltic and a very historic city. Thomas Mann had a summer house at Nida and there wrote Jospeh and his Brothers. Nature is ever present in Lithuania and in many ways the country is exactly as I had imagined Poland to be but was not before I first came to Warsaw in the early 1990s. Undeveloped, rural with magnificent pine forests, wooden cottages painted yellow ochre, deserted beaches with huge sand dunes and most importantly hardly any unregulated, crude advertising hoardings which mars so much of the Mazovian plain and beautiful landscape elsewhere in Poland. Superb architecture in magnificent Vilnius and the most beautiful flaxen haired girls I have ever seen. One would not expect an artist hailing from this environment to be ultra sophisticated and he was not - a truly refeshing change from academic super-correctness and civilised elegance.

He began with a Prelude by the extraordinary Renaissance man, composer and symbolist painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis. I visited the museum in Kaunas entirely devoted to his works - there is a room for listening to his compositions and a huge gallery displaying hundreds of his paintings, letters (mainly written in Polish not Lithuanian) and other memorabilia. A remarkable genius, so unjustly neglected in Western Europe. The museum gives one a great insight into what Lithuanians see as the historical colonisation of their country by Poland. I think if one wants to have a complete picture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth one must visit this beautiful country.

This prelude was not in the programme so he then spoke to the audience and explained it as well as elucidating the reasoning behind his choice of programme. " I am so full of happiness and honoured at being asked to play in this place so connected to the spirit of Chopin." My great uncle, the Australian pianist Edward Cahill, used to speak to the audience and explain in the same way and it builds an immediate sympathetic connection between artist and listener. He began with an unbridled reading of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata Op. 53. I liked this 'undisciplined' account very much - a great rush of powerful, raw energy. The professors in the audience were clearly troubled by it. However it made me think about our concept of Beethoven as a man and whether he really was, as so many superb pianists such as Brendel and Barenboim, present him - an immaculate classicist cascading into Romanticism. This account reminded me of Furtwangler's glorious pushing of the limits of acceptance in his unfettered account of the symphonies. I remember visiting the Beethoven birthplace house in Bonn where as a young man I was astonished to see that the keys of one of his pianos had been worn through the ivory capping down to the wood beneath. Yes, Beethoven was going deaf later in life but this really gave me pause for thought in addition to the wild nature of his written manuscripts. Hm...

The Chopin group was less successful to this treatment I felt although the Barcarolle had some lovely periods when I believed the boat was on a disturbed Venetian lagoon or Italian Lake (as Chopin surely conceived it) rather than a lifeboat tossed in the midst of a typhoon in the Atlantic - an all too familar reading. The group of Schubert/Liszt songs did not seem to reflect much listening to Fischer-Dieskau. Liszt loved Schubert's music to distraction and readily understood the refined and melancholic lyricism in the shadow of death that threateningly hangs about these works like cobwebs from the eaves. The Erlkonig arrangement suffered rather badly from being dynamically over-inflated. The music of the transcription of Tristan and Isolde always moves me dramatically as it takes me back to a more passionate youth of love madness and his performance was excellent. The final work was the Liszt Dante Sonata which always makes my hair stand on end no matter how it is played. For me it is the absolute apex of Romantic expression, a magnificent musical structure second only to his Sonata in B minor expressing a true fear of death and the Christian horror of losing the throw of dice and being thrown into the Inferno. However perhaps one must be a true believer to enter this piece and have at home a skull on the mantle as a momento mori of what is in store for all of us. Dante and Milton combine here in terrifying substance....

In short, for me but not for all, a completely refreshing and natural, almost wildly passionate approach to the piano, a very personal statement and so making both friends and disagreement. I think we need to take care sometimes in our super-academic, 'correct' musicological approach to music prevalent these days. It can drain the rich red life blood of music. Those who know me will find this amusing as I play Chopin at home from the National Edition on an 1844 Pleyel pianino. However it is good to be reminded of the untutored source of music in pagan magic once in a while.

Yulianna Avdeeva (20.00)

A not particularly wonderful photo of Avdeeva at the conclusion of last night's recital

After this magnificent recital what doubt could possibly remain in anyone's mind that Adveeva was by far the most worthy winner of the International Chopin Competition in 2010. 'In a different league altogether' as someone commented to me last night. All of my comments made during the competition on this blog stand untouched. In fact I felt she had improved enormously even in the short ten months of international engagements since her win. Her upright contained posture at the instrument helps her create this wonderful sound. She is so utterly committed physically and intellectually to every note she plays it is deeply involving for the listener. This recital was absolutely prepared down to the final nuance. In all the greatest peformances there is nothing left to say, simply to leave the hall in silence.

In the Chopin group, the two Op. 62 Nocturnes were ravishing with superb control of touch, tone and pianissimo playing. The Scherzo in B minor Op. 20 was incadescent in its articulation, glittering tone and variety of dynamic, the central contrasting lyrical section so moving in its ardent yearning. The four op. 33 Mazurkas were full of Polish indigenous rhythmic variety and subtelties and the final Polonaise Fantasie contained all the troubled emotion and desire for strength in the face of the multiple adversities that beset the composer at this late stage in his life. She grasped that difficult and complex structure completely - a profund interpretation to my mind.

However it was the Liszt that she reigned supreme for me. She chose three late Liszt works that are extraordinarily forward-looking in their adventurous harmony and invention. They were also written at a time when Liszt was facing the reality of death quite apart from its theatrical Gothic aspects which had so attracted him in his youthful Byronic phase. The La lugubre gondola II of 1885 is a profoundly disturbing and dark work reminding one that gondolas on the Venetian canals were likened by more than one Romantic poet to black coffins - even Mme de Stael discoursed on this dark subject. Avdeeva followed this with Liszt's Nuages gris of 1881 and gazed into the heavens as if seeing the grey clouds hovering there, clouds without silver linings, her superb touch giving an impressionistic feel to the sound like a painting by Monet or a piece of Debussy. Liszt wrote this rather morbid work when suffering from various ilnesses and accidents which impinged on his sense of continuing life. The work anticipates the Viennese school of Mahler and Schoenberg and he clearly saw a way forward out of what many regarded as the prison of cadential resolutions. Avdeeva created an extraordinary atmosphere with this work. She then embarked on the Bagatelle without tonality (IV Waltz Mephisto) which to my mind were the melancholic reflections of an old man beset by reminiscences of his past life, compositions, echoes, shadows of his virtuosic past that haunt like grotesque spectres this quite astonishing and deeply expressive work. Avdeeva was really able to penetrate these mysteries with her complete technique. Finally the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 17 in D minor seems (at least to me) a type of anger at the transient nature of mortality. This group of pieces and the way Avdeeva interpreted them gave me real cause to question my sometimes all too superficial judgement of this great composer Franz Liszt.

Her recital concluded with by far the finest account of Liszt's transcription of Wagner's Overture to Tannhauser I have heard, a much earlier work. Her commanding technique enabled her to create a full orchestral sound with all its variety and clarity - astounding really - and for me more than a little moving having just returned from a pilgrimage to Weimar and Bayreuth investigating the complex friendship between Wagner and Liszt. At the age of 14 this Overture was the first music that ever moved me to the authentic depths - I remember this moment as if it was yesterday.

Avdeeva received tremendous applause and an instant standing ovation. The audience begged and begged for encores the last of which was a scintillating piece of Scarlatti. And yet after the concert I spoke to a few members of the audience who thought Avdeeva was a 'cold' and an uncommunicative player. One referred to what she described as a sheet of glass that seemed to be erected between the pianist and the audience. Many women (I am not being sexist here, just observant) simply cannot empathise with her at all, perhaps the most outstanding young female pianist of her generation. Then there was all that kerfuffle in Warsaw over her Chopin competition victory. All very mysterious to me...how personal a thing is musical taste!

To my mind this aristocratic player with her majestic, slightly severe profile and almost regal posture is a master of the control of emotional passion, its containment and expression - tensions and relaxations being the very breath of musical life. She is in the process of becoming a very great artist indeed and we are privileged to witness this growth.

Monday August 8th

Click on photos to enlarge

A highly expressive morning Master Class with the Austrian academic and outstanding pianist Professor Jan Gottlieb Jiracek von Arnim. He was working on the the Piano Sonata (1948) of the acclaimed modern French composer Henri Dutilleux with Yumi Palleschi who had courageously chosen to learn this fiendishly difficult work.

Leonora Armellini (16.00)

And so we began a Liszt-free day of Italian charm, seductiveness, grace and fine musicianship.

The sweet, young (19) Italian Leonora Armellini was immensely popular with the audience during the 2010 Chopin Competition in Warsaw and many were shocked when she failed to progress beyond the second stage. This lovely girl on the cusp of womanhood, her winning smile and superb playing got me thinking about the immense importance of a concert pianist's personality and the ability to communicate muiscal thoughts directly to the heart and mind, especially today with our general glorification of image over substance. Artur Rubinstein went so far as to believe that an electromagnetic emanation came from the pianist which suffused the audience more or less powerfully. This is of course completely absent in recordings. I do feel there is something in his unprovable theory and can think of numerous examples when it has been demonstrated. Certainly the Duszniki Festival permits one to see such a power in operation and observe its effects. The Alexander Gavrylyuk phenomenon is a case in point.

She began with an excellent account of the early Beethoven Sonata in C major Op. 2 No. 3. Her velvet tone quality, sure technique and charm as well as complete grasp of the classical style (the sonata was dedicated to Haydn) were clear throughout. The virtuosic first movement displayed her complete command of the keyboard. This was followed by Clara Schumann's Variations on R. Schumann Op. 20. I am not over-familiar with this piece but it contains great charm and an evident love of Robert's music by one of the most renowned pianists of her day. Leonora captured the sentiments well. The Novelette in D major Op. 21 No. 2 was an excellent choice. These pieces by Schumann are not so often performed in modern programmes today although they were popular a few decades ago in concert programmes. My great uncle and many other concert pianists played them often between the wars. She brought off the immense character, rather mercurial nature of Schumann's writing very convincingly.

The Chopin group of pieces began with his first two Ballades. I felt she did not allow the dense narrative structures of these two pieces to breathe sufficiently and rushed the detail. I felt that her superb technique and youth seduced her into an impetuous response to these mature compositions of Chopin. Many young players in the competition were prey to a perfectly understandable revelling in their own extraordinary digital dexterity. I recall another remark by Artur Rubinstein when asked why he played an obviously virtuosic passage so slowly. He replied revealingly 'Because I can.' As I watched her in the competition I felt this 'out of breath' feeling too I remember.

However in the Tarantella these so-called 'faults' worked to her tremendous advantage and it was one of the most convincing accounts of this piece I have ever heard. The victim of the poisonous spider bite (by the Tarantula) traditionally became well and truly beside himself, increasingly and madly so by the triumphant conclusion under her fingers at a super tempo. I just loved it. The Nocturne Op. 48 No.2 was sensitively thought through and her soft tone and seductive touch suited the piece perfectly. Then came a complete surprise. How can a young girl produce a noble and majestic account of the A flat-major Polonaise I thought before she began. She achieved this nobility magnificently to my mind and gave us a reading that was full of heroic sentiment and noble miltary resistance in the face of the great Polish nationalist adversity. The famous inexorable repeated left hand octave passage was brilliantly brought off with perfectly controlled depth of tone and degree of detachment which powerfully summoned up the cavalry. A great performance of a piece I have heard how many times by how many pianists since living in Poland?

Oddly enough one of least satisfying performances I have heard was in Warsaw by the great Daniel Barenboim, whom I admire to the stars as a musician, conductor and pianist, when he came to Poland in 2010. He was tempted by an absurdly overblown theatricality in his performance - a cliche. Ah, the complex secrets of playing Chopin well....ask a Pole about how a Mazurka rhythm should 'go' and watch the smile of satisfaction when you inevitably get it wrong! Remember Chopin's violent argument with Mayerbeer on this very question?

Francesco Piemontesi (20.00)

I do not usually have time with all this research and writing I do to follow the careers of developing young pianists and the loss is all mine. At the age of 28 the Swiss-Italian Piemontesi has already had an illustrious career and played in some of the most prestigious concert halls in the world including the Musikverein in Vienna, Martha Argerich's Lugano festival and the BBC Proms.

He began with the 1905 Sonata by Leos Janacek, a work I was entirely unfamiliar with. As it stands now it has two movements - Foreboding and Death. One might think this work was certainly not 'a laugh a minute' but actually the sound palette is so adventurous, so restless and the sense of anger so strong one tends to overlook the titles of the movements. There are some interesting reasons behind its composition. Janacek wrote the work as a fierce protest against the murder of a carpenter, Frantisek Pavlik, who had been killed with the thrust of a bayonet on the steps of the main Meeting House in Brno. He was supporting a proposed new seat of learning, a university in the Czech city. A furious Janacek immediately wrote this as a three movement work but destroyed the third movement, a funeral march. Some time after the premiere he tried to destroy the rest by throwing it into the Vltava River, likening the manuscript to white swans as it floated away. Fortunately a pianist familiar with his volatile temperament had made a copy. I will need to hear it more than once to come to any significant judgement on Piemontesi's reading but it was certainly an unusual way to begin a recital containing mainly Viennese classical works. The work established an atmosphere of reflective poetry over the entire evening which never evaporated but simply became increasingly intense as his recital progressed.

He then played or rather made an extraordinarily successful transition to the Chopin Prelude in C sharp minor Op. 45 and the first two Mazurkas from Op. 59. This moving Prelude was played with immense poetry, almost as a quiet meditation on what had gone before and the Mazurkas reminded me of the tone quality and spirtually aristocratic restraint achieved by Michelangeli.

The period Piemontesi spent with Alfred Brendel became clear from the very opening bars of Beethovens' Sonata in A Major, Op. 101 and yet it was is own voice. This emotionally affecting work is Beethoven at his most intimate and sensitive. Piemontesi brought a classical poise to the work, wonderfully married to warm emotional life.

From the outset it became apparent that he is a deeply sensitive musician, a true poet of the instrument, who has cultivated a refined tone, a far lower level but much wider range of expressive dynamics and articulation than many young artists. Too many young players begin so loudly and choose such fast tempi they literally have nowhere to go when they require it, finding themselves trapped in a cul de sac of sound entirely of their own making.

The entire second half of the concert was taken up with the Sonata in A major D. 959, one of the last sonatas by Schubert. This was a truly great performance and a profound emotional experience for the entire audience here at Duszniki. The pianist collected us around his soul. The range of expression was remarkable, the movement from one reality to another or one dream to another, the flashes of memory and sense of bleak alienation produced an atmosphere in the hall the like of which is rarely experienced in a public concert. The silence was palpable - one could hear pin drop even between movements - not a sound - for the entire long duration of the sonata.

The silences within the work itself, within the harmonic and rhythmic structure (so important in Schubert's last sonatas and all music for that matter) were deeply utilised by this pianist as 'blocks of sound' full of meaning. They were such pregnant silences, silences that expressed the deeply troubled, febrile yet poetic spirit and soul of Schubert - a man searching for a secure anchorage as his life slipped away.

Piemontesi did play encores - a charming piece of Francois Couperin and so, so appropriately for this entire recital, the last piece in Schumann's Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) Der Dichter spricht (The Poet Speaks) in one of the most sensitive performances I have ever heard. Reduced me to tears (no, not common).

As someone mentioned to me later, his playing moved one in a similar way to the spiritual refinement, modesty, musical commitment and sensitivity of Dinu Lipatti. This will be one of my most memorable musical experiences - there are only a few - almost there with Richter playing Beethoven Op. 111 in Blythburgh parish church at the Alderburgh Festival by the light of a single tiny lamp so many years ago now.

The audience at Duszniki stumbled out into the damp dark night moved as rarely before...

Tuesday August 9

Lecture by Professor Irena Poniatowska (11.00)

Concert by the Prima Vista Quartet and Recital by Karolina Nadolsk

The amazingly energetic and irrepressible Professor Irena Poniatowska gearing up for her lecture on Chopin and Liszt

This was a highly entertaining as well as informative lecture on the relationship, both personal and musical, between Chopin and Liszt. It was peppered with amusing anecdotes and musical illustrations. She spoke of Chopin arriving in Paris from Warsaw fully formed as a composer even though he was rather young. He absorbed no further musical influences. Liszt on the other hand continued to absorb influences from many sources and developed as a composer throughout is life particularly during the Weimar years. She recounted an incident where Chopin was playing a piano in a Paris salon and one of the linkages on the pedals broke. Liszt was reputed to have crawled under the instrument and operated the pedals while Chopin played the keyboard. She played a quite phenomenal historic recording of Paderewski playing Liszt's La Leggierezza and the Consolation No: 2

Andrea Bonatta (16.00)

Andrea Bonatta in rather a noble mood whilst taking a Master Class with Piotr Novak on Chopin's 'Heroic' Polonaise Op. 53

He is one of the most renowned of Italian pianists and among a long list of illustrious accomplishments is Artistic Advisor to the Liszt Competition in Utrecht. He designed a very interesting programme as well as taking Master Classes at the Dusznilki festival. The Harmonies poétiques is one of the most important cycles of pieces Liszt wrote in addition to the Annees de Pelerinage. The work was partly written at Woronince (1845-51) the Polish-Ukrainian Estate of Princess Carolyn von Sayn-Wittgenstein née Ivanowsky. Other earlier choral works were transcribed and reworked for the cycle. However the collection, inspired by the French poet Lamartine, was finally assembled in the form we recognize at Weimar. For me it is the beginning of an authentic attempt by Liszt to reconcile his catholic spiritual aspirations and his worldly nature – a battle fought within by many artists in their attempt to be ‘good’ – well at least in far more religious nineteenth century Europe. The sincerity of Liszt’s religious convictions is still misleadingly questioned in the light of his worldly career as a travelling cosmopolitan virtuoso, his brilliant keyboard pyrotechnics coupled with a rather amoral bohemian life style as a young man.

The rarely performed Invocation is prefaced by these ecstatic words of Lamartine:

Rise, voice of my soul,

With the dawn, with the night!’

Bonatta interpreted this as a grand chorale for piano and the contrast with the simplicity and spiritual contemplativeness of the also rarely performed Ave Maria was particularly effective in this ornate baroque church with the piano placed right on the altar before the tabernacle - a theatrical and religious gesture Liszt would never have been able to achieve in his own day but may have imagined. Unique.

We then heard as a type of interlude in the cycle three interesting late works rather unfamiliar to me. The Trauervorspiel und Trauermarsch (1885), Petöfi Szellemének (Dem Andeken Petofils) In Memory of Petöfi (1877) and the Bagatelle without tonality (IV Waltz Mephisto) of 1885. Sándor Petöfi was a great Hungarian poet and political agitator whose poems inspired the 1848 Hungarian revolution. Friedrich Nietzche, who was an amateur composer, set some of his poems to music. I felt that Avdeeva’s account of the same Bagatelle was superior however and more haunting.

The Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil and the Miserere d’après Palestrina from the Harmonies poétiques. The Hymne de l’Enfant (1845) is actually an arrangement of a piece for female choir with piano and harp to text by Lamartine. Rarely heard - most beautiful and meditative. The Miserere was based on a melody from a motet that Liszt heard at the Sistine Chapel which I believe was not actually by Palestrina at all. Another rarely performed and interesting work. We then heard La Lugubre Gondola. Liszt was fascinated by venetian funerals and the coffins set on gondolas. This work was composed by Liszt as a type of premonition of Richard Wagner’s death in Venice in 1883. The piece eloquently evoked the future water-borne funeral procession by gondola (the boat itself likened to a coffin by Mme de Staël and others) of Richard Wagner body from Palazzo Vendramin to the railway station on its way for burial in Bayreuth. Bonatta’s recital concluded with piece from the an appropriate and carefully chosen piece from the Harmonies poétiques the great masterpiece of Western piano literature the Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude. This is perhaps the greatest in the collection together with Funérailles. Again prefaced by poetry from Lamaratine whom Liszt had met

Whence comes, O God, this peace which overwhelms me?

Whence comes its faith with which my heart overflows?

In this setting of the church the serene spirituality and rhapsodic contemplation of the mystical is almost unsurpassed in nineteenth century piano music. It reminds one of an extended conclusion to the celestial closing bars of the B minor Sonata.

This was a wonderful and carefully considered recital by a mature pianist who has no need to hysterically display keyboard prowess, but a man who has gone beyond the notes to a different world of contemplation.

The Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, Duszniki Zdroj, Poland

The piano placed on the altar at the church of Sts. Peter and Paul Duszniki Zdroj, Poland

The extraordinary baroque pulpit in the form of a whale in the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, Duszniki Zdroj, Poland

NOKTURN (22.00)

This candlelit evening with participants in the festival is always a delight. This year the musicologist and teacher Elżbieta Artysz supplied the interesting commentary that precedes the playing of each piece. Most of the audience make an effort to dress up particularly the ladies and wine is available thoughout the evening. I will not go into each work performed and the performer himself as many works are repeated in solo recital. I would however wish to single out Jan Gottlieb Jiracek von Arnim who was involved in the Master Classes (pictures above in action). He gave a superb account of Schubert’s Imromptu in A major Op. 142 No 2. What a superb pianist well as teacher he is. Karolina Nadolska played two wonderfully sentimental pieces by Paderewski –the Chant d’Amour in G major Op. 10 No. 2 and the Polonaise in B major Op. 9 No. 6.

If Paderewski had been writing for films he would be the most outstanding composer for the cinema ever – and this is not at all a criticism. Wonderful music that I find so moving on less demanding human intellectual level to the great composers. For the first time in my experience at Duszniki we also had a baritone singing songs by Koczalski, Karlowicz and Chopin. This was most affecting and a reminder of the incalculable loss of music-making in the home with the upright piano which was such a feature of unnumerable middle-class and aristocratic families in Europe up to the arrival of television and computer games – the death knell of family life to my mind (the family who watches together does not stay together). It is the source of so many of our contemporary parenting and educational troubles.

The 'Top Table' at the Nokturn

Wednesday August 10

Aleksandra Swigut (16.00)

An interesting aspect of the Duszniki is watching young pianists develop over time. I watched Aleksandra Swigut when she was a student attending Master Classes here. She was always a distinct personality that stood out and her choice of programme indicates she has very clear ideas of what she loves to play.

She opened her recital with Haydn’s Sonata in C minor Hob. XVI/20 which she despatched with wit, verve and a clarity of articulation, minimal use of pedal and ‘classical’ short phrasing that was a pleasure to listen to – balanced, poised and elegant. This was followed by a similarly elegant account of the Bach French Suite in C minor BMW 813. The absolute joy and delight in playing this music that suffused her features was quite affecting – profound pain, sweat and suffering is the usual countenance that distorts the face young pianists I note! This sort of thing is hard to empathise with as a member of the audience when you are not actually playing the work yourself. So we all felt happy for once. Again the rather percussive (not so much as the great ‘War Sonatas’ of course), angular nature of Prokofiev’s early Sonata No. 2 op. 14 seemed to suit her playful temperament terribly well.

After the interval she set about the late, psychologically and musically complex Chopin work the Polonaise-Fantasie in A flat major op. 61. Oddly I felt she was not really at ease with this work and that it did not chime with her sunny outlook on life and music. I suppose like many foreigners I think all Polish pianists must love Chopin and play him with unique insight. Rather a foolish idea. A young pianist must perform such works before an audience to gain experience of coherently presenting this tremendously difficult huge structure under stress.

Cleary the Szymanowski Scheherazade from Masks Op. 34 was much more to her liking. He wrote that he intended the pieces in Masks to be in ‘quasi-parodistic’ in style and this delightful mercurial, sometimes oriental atmosphere was brought to the fore very successfully by Swigut. She finished with a rather demanding contemporary piece I had never heard before by the really quite extraordinary half-Russian half-Tartar composer Sofia Gubaidulina (1931- ) called Chaconne (1961). It owes something to J. S. Bach and the composer’s devotion to him and the Russian Orthodox Church throughout her life.

Aleksandra Swigut playing the the Nokturn

Lukas Geniusas (19.00)

This young Russian-Lithuanian pianist was much anticipated in Duszniki as he had been awarded joint second prize with Ingolf Wunder at the 2010 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He was particularly popular among discerning members of the audience. In this recital he would perform a huge programme. The first half devoted to the complete Chopin Études Op. 10 and op. 25 and the second half to Liszt’s B minor Sonata.

However I hope you will excuse me if I begin with a quote from a travel article I wrote for The Australian newspaper following my first visit to the great country of Lithuania. I think it illuminates the sort of spirit that animates this tremendous pianist and to a slightly lesser extent his Lithuanian compatriot Gintaras Janusevicius. Both were born in Moscow but…

Along the Amber Shore

‘A mighty thunderstorm broke over the remote village of Perloja. Bolts of lightning fitfully illuminated the stern features and powerful armoured chest of the Grand Duke, sword drawn and cape thrust over one shoulder. The village had withstood the Northern Crusades in 1378 and the plague of 1710. High on a burgundy-coloured plinth strengthened with steel railway ties to foil its destruction, the stone guest gazed beyond a legendary horizon above an inscription in a language related to Sanskrit “Vytautas the Great! You are alive for as long as there is at least one Lithuanian”. Fortified by domestic military units under the protection of its emblem, a bison with golden hooves and horns surmounted by a Christian cross, the villagers fought Poles and Bolsheviks. The fiercely independent settlement declared its own Republic and joined partisans to battle the Soviets. A decidedly cinematic scene saw me standing in a tempest beneath that monumental effigy of the last great ruler of Lithuania.’

I cannot in the limited space analyse his approach to every etude but each one was considered as a masterpiece of the form in itself and given the concentration each demanded as such. No-one in their right mind would have contemplated playing both sets in a recital in the nineteenth century so here we have a demonstration of the extraordinary progress we have made in the simple mechanics of mastering the notes let alone the psychological and physical stamina required to play them. He shed new light on each one, not always successfully but in the main a revelation of really individual thinking and the pleasure that he has something unique to say about each one. Inner voices were revealed (not simply for ‘show’ but inherently structural), rhythms explored and a remarkable coherence emerged for each set of etudes, a distinct character that made each distinct as a collection. He has a complete technique that is quite breathtaking.

In the Liszt B minor Sonata I felt he was far less successful. Just to have this vast work in your fingers is a massive achievement but what you do with this is another matter altogether, what you have to say about this work. This is a profound work, too often played as some type of hectic fantasy or dream fantasy when it is actually in many respects a philosophical dialogue between different fundamental aspects of the human spirit as symbolised by Faust, Mephistopheles and Gretchen. Liszt was tremendously influenced by literature and poetry in his compositions and in particular Goethe’s Faust, the dramatic spiritual battle between Faust and Mephistopheles with Gretchen hovering about as a seductive, lyrical feminine interlude. And it is a far more complex musical and structural argument than that rather trite account would indicate.

The more Liszt I hear in this festival (and we have heard tremendous amounts in a short period of time and will still be doing so today and tomorrow) the more I feel he needs rehabilitation. He seems under so many hands to still remain the boisterous show-off, the cause of tinnitus, the breaker of pianos, the showman which in essence marked his virtuoso years and blighted his reputation as a serious composer. He abandoned an incredible concert career, travelling an extraordinary journey in itself in those days by coach and horse estimated at hundreds of thousands of miles. We have a different attitude now thank God to the inventor of the form of the Symphonic Poem, the author of the Faust Symphony. He spent so many contemplative years spent composing and suffering neglect and social exclusion in Weimar.

We really need to re-examine how he played, his effect on discriminating members of the audience. One lady described his eyes as being ‘like incandescent grapes’. I think we have had enough of ‘the vapours’ whilst listening to Liszt. We (the listening public) think we know this man in B movie terms but do we really? Take for example this remark by Moritz Rosenthal, his great pupil, on Liszt’s playing: “…the embellishments were like a cobweb – so fine – or like the texture of the costliest lace.” Do we ever hear such things today except perhaps in historic recordings where tone and touch were paramount, not structure and form. Such precious remarks are ignored when we are ‘Down in the Quarry’ with so many pianists and their teachers today.

Chopin once very ironically confided to Liszt:

Lukas Geniusas gave us a monumental reading of the B minor full of fire, volume and tremendous virtuosity but understandably lacking in the depth one must find as a pianist in this profound work. I am sure his interpretation will deepen in time – he is so young and has such ‘genius’ to make a very obvious link with his name. It is not fair to compare such a young artist with mature pianists who have had years and years to think and come to deeper conclusions. Alfred Brendel is not a pianist one immediately associates with Liszt but his early career was in some ways built on his playing of the Hungarian. His account of the sonata is one of the finest as he eschews much virtuoso display and the usual virtuoso rhetoric we have come to associate with this piece. Claudio Arrau held me spellbound by the almost Beethovenian depth of his reading in the Festival Hall in London many years ago. Horowitz summons up the sulphur of Hell, one’s hairs stand on end, from the very opening notes of his 1936 recording. Perhaps one of the very greatest however is the more recent recording by Krystian Zimerman, a perfectionist and man of the greatest musical integrity. All of these Liszt readings possess an uncommon depth.

This was a great recital and thought-provoking in so many ways. The Chopin was staggering and all that time ahead to develop and mature in the Liszt – wonderful!

Oh…and if you want to read the complete article about the wonderful country of Lithuania and why you should visit it

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/travel/world/along-the-amber-shore/story-fn30267p-1225828798097

Thursday August 11th

The Duszniki Zdrój festival need not all be about music. There are some particularly interesting nearby towns in Lower Silesia to visit. The main one is Kłodzko but on this occasion I decided to spend the morning exploring a once famous spa town known as Lądek Zdroj. It is about 50 kms from Duszniki. Founded in 1498 it has a superb baroque spa building that dates from the late seventeenth century. Famous intellectual luminaries such as Goëthe and European royalty of the order of Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm II & III, Polish Kings, Tsar Alexander I of Russia and even John Quincy Adams the 6th President of the United States frequented the town to ‘take the waters’ through the centuries.

The Rynek or Market Square, Ladek Zdroj, Poland

A perfect cat who hapened to be siting in a window at Ladek Zdroj as I passed by

The baroque Wojciech Spring building at Ladek Zdroj, Poland

Interior detail of the baroque cupola at the Wojciech Spring, Ladek Zdroj, Poland

Thursday August 11th.

Eduard Kunz (16.00)

The BBC Music Magazine included the Russian pianist Eduard Kunz in their ‘10 great future pianists’ list. The quality that brought them to this judgement was evident in his outstanding recital. He opened with a group of four Scarlatti Sonatas which I thought were superbly rendered with a complete understanding of the period style and sonority modified for a concert grand piano of 2011. The Bach/Busoni Chaconne in D minor BMW 1004 was far less successful to my mind. The dynamics were far too greatly ‘Busonised’. Although I feel Kunz was attempting to transform the piano into a great seventeenth century Thuringian organ it did not really come off well and mere thunder replaced the 16’ stops.

At the Nokturn he had played the eloquent Evocation from the Iberia Suite of Albeniz and performed it again with equal sensitivity and sensibility. I was also very taken with the Paderewski Nocturne in B major Op. 16 No. 4. I really must learn this piece myself – it conjures up that period in Europe before the horrors of disillusionment with humanity and its nature that followed in the wake of the Great War. Ah….the sensibility and cultural refinement we have lost….

He followed these with a particularly lyrical Rachmaninov Etude Tableaux Op. 33 no. 2 ‘Lilacs’ and two of his Moments Musicaux Op. 16 Nos. 3 & 4. He closed his blissfully short (compared to other listening marathons this week) recital with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C minor. It was excellently played (as our modern tradition and contemporary teachers conceive of Liszt) but we were all looking forward to the Schubert Sonata in A major Op. 120 D 664 he had originally intended. I think we could have all done without the broad strokes of this rhapsody in view of the extreme sensitivity and colour that had gone before.

A wonderful artist from whom I would to hear some Chopin – he plays with a similar restrained dynamic that the composer is reported to have used - so uplifting and full of sensibility. Perhaps being born in Siberia has definite geomagnetic effects on the musical spirit.

Nikolai Luganski (20.00)

I have always thought that the costume in which a concert pianist presents himself on stage gives us some indication of how he will approach the music, particularly if this is extreme in one way or another. This was certainly the case with Nikolay Lugansky. He is clearly a perfectionist of a high order. Today where audiences and pianists dress in any way they feel suits them rather than in the manner of Castiglione’s Courtier, in a manner that will give refined pleasure to the spectator, Lugansky was superb. He wore a full tailored white tie outfit with tails, the entire ensemble of clearly expensive fabric that moved as only such expensive fabrics do. The shirt studs that closed a freshly laundered marcella formal shirt were discreet mother of pearl set in gold. A perfectly tied white bow tie closed a detachable wing collar starched to a glistening sheen as is absolutely correct. This ensemble was completed with a white silk cummerbund and patent leather shoes.

He is rather tall and handsome and his whole aristocratic appearance immediately reminded one of Chopin’s own refined discrimination and elegance of dress. Such care indicated a close understanding of the composer, his own elegance and expense of dress as well as respect for his refined compositions. It also indicated his feeling this the Dwor was special place to be playing Chopin. ‘Absolute rubbish!’ I hear you cry. ‘Michael raving about cosmetic aesthetics again that have nothing to do with classical music! Many great pianists dress dreadfully.’ But, sorry, this is not exclusively so. Love of music shows itself in respect and a sense of ceremony one aspect of which is a high degree of care in dress. Consider in this light the Cherubino almost en travestie costume selected by Avdeeva and her commanding and powerful almost ‘masculine’ interpretations. ‘More nonsense Michael!’

Lugansky did not disappoint musically. He opened with a finely toned and sensitive Chopin Nocturne in F major Op. 15 No.1. The Barcarolle did not begin with the terrible thump as if the boat had crashed heavily into the wharf at the beginning of the voyage as is usual with this work. The lake become agitated in the course of the piece but poetic reflection remained and it was never absurdly overblown by cyclones and typhoons. The Prelude in C sharp minor op. 45 was very moving in an entirely unsentimental way. As the recital progressed I came to feel I was actually listening to a recording so perfectly were these pieces presented in terms of sound quality, touch and restrained ‘classical’ sensibility as is appropriate with so much of Chopin. The great Scherzo No. 4 in E major op. 54 was ‘painted’ with wonderfully controlled balance of texture and colour so important for this less hectic scherzo that contains so much glorious bel canto song – Lugansky made the instrument sing so affectingly and sensitively I was reminded more than once of Artur Rubinstein. This was followed by more singing in the D flat major Nocturne Op. 27 No.2 and a lovely control of the inner voices. The Ballade No. 4 in F minor Op. 52 one of the greatest pieces in piano literature was also a very fine performance of an absolute musical narrative except the conclusion where I felt he rushed the narrative and was surprisingly overtaken by virtuosic considerations.

Now to the Liszt. Lugansky began with that immense work the Vallée d’Obermann from the Années de Pélérinage Première année. Suisse. I adore this work, Liszt inspired by literature once again – the novel Obermann by Étienne Pivert de Senancour.

‘The vast consciousness of Nature, everywhere overwhelming and everywhere unfathomable, universal love, indifference, ripe wisdom, sensuous ease – all that the mortal heart can contain of desire and profound sorrow, I felt them all.’

(Obermann from Letter 4)

I have been in love with the work since my teens. Lugansky gave it the fullest mystical impression of grand Swiss landscape one could ever imagine in one’s mind’s eye – a magnificent interpretation to my mind. Horowitz was fond of this work and his interpretation at his 1966 Carnegie Hall recitals was always the greatest to my mind. Liszt himself wept on hearing it again later in his life – the memories it evoked for him were so strong.

Lake Geneva and the Alps from Glion above Montreux taken on my recent research trip to Switzerland. The Chateau of Chillon so beloved of Lord Byron is in the bottom left-hand corner

Lugansky then played the impressionistic Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este from the Années de Pélérinage, Troisième année. His control of glistening tone, articulation and colour were quite superb. Liszt would gaze for hours at the play of the waters in fountains and elevated this work into his own personal mystical realm by quoting in Latin in the score Sed aqua quam ego, dabo ei, fiet in eo fons aquae alientis in vitam aeternam (loose translation: ‘But whoever drinks of the water I shall give him, shall never thirst but shall be a well of water springing up into everlasting life’). Nothing else remotely like this work was written until Ravel wrote his own Jeux d’eau. Liszt has the last word on ‘fountain music’ to my mind.

The beautiful Sposalizio (‘Betrothal’) from Années de Pélérinage, Deuxième année came next, much of this second volume inspired by Liszt’s first powerful contact with Italian Art in the form of poetry, painting and sculpture. The impact of my first demolishing encounter at the age of 26 with the art collected in the Uffizi in Florence has never left me. Liszt was inspired by Raphael’s painting The Marriage of the Virgin which depicts the marriage of Mary and Joseph and is in the Brera Chapel in Milan. A reflective interpretation indeed.

The final two works in his programme were two Etudes d’exécution transcendente. If a pianist is to play these works convincingly he must have complete and utter command of the keyboard and rise above the virtuosic elements until the simple structure beneath is revealed. Few pianists can actually do this without communicating a sense of exhaustion and ‘fabulous difficulties successfully overcome’ to the audience. Not at all what these studies are about. Lugansky gave a phenomenal performance of No:12 Chasse-Neige in B flat minor. Towards the end of the work there is a final huge flurry of snow or perhaps avalanche that builds from deep in the bass of the instrument and roars up the keyboard like an unstoppable cataract of Nature into the treble. Lugansky produced a sound the like of which I have never heard before on the piano – a tsunami of sound - quite fantastic and terrifying at once – like a great swell on the organ without the feeling of separate notes – an incredible sound. What a performance that was…

Between these two pieces a remarkable incident occurred that demonstrated the extraordinary emotional control, nervelessness and collectedness of this pianist. One of the bevy of beautiful Polish usherettes who assist at the festival came in mistakenly early after Chasse-neige to present him with a bunch of roses. From the stage where he was bowing and spying her out of the corner of his eye, he made a beautifully discreet gesture in her direction with his finger that it was ‘not yet time’. She retreated much covered in confusion. When he did finally complete his recital and she now came robustly forward, the audience smiled and chuckled good naturedly, the lovely girl as crimson as a stop light at an intersection.

Then to complete this recital No: 10 in F minor which Liszt had reworked from an earlier juvenile study. The reminiscences of Chopin seemed to be incontrovertible in this work but I felt Lugansky could have been more abandoned emotionally by the wild passion of it – like the wild Tzigane Gyorgy Cziffra in his monumental monophonic Angel recording of the Transcendental Etudes many years ago.

I thought this an absolutely magnificent recital by a finished artist of the highest quality. Olympian in achievement, not sensationalist. And yet…and yet…the audience seemed slightly held back although incredibly enthusiastic. Why was this? No standing ovation but great enthusiasm and many encores. Have we heard too many ‘immaculate’ studio recordings of piano music and are becoming blasé at the keyboard miracles young pianists are actually achieving these days?

I have always thought him a very special pianist and more importantly, supreme musician. I had first heard him many years ago in Warsaw playing Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring in the Myra Hess arrangement. Not usually a work to make one actually tearful…

Friday August 12th

Sara Daneshpour

In many ways for me this was the most surprising recital of the entire festival. I knew little of this lovely young lady, of Iranian family background but musically educated in the United States. I knew even less of her career or brilliant playing despite her winning the First Prize in the International Russian Music Competition in 2007 and First Prize at the American Beethoven Society Competition in 2003. Here is a true rising star of the keyboard with a tremendous grasp of fluctuating emotional moods and the precipitate attack of energised musical phrases as employed by Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. She has great musical integrity and is absolutely committed to what she is playing in an almost unsettling degree. This commitment communicates the musical intensity of a composition directly to one's heart and soul.

She began (as many have this season) with a charming Haydn Sonata – the one in F major Hob. XVI/23. Excellent control of the classical style in the Moderato, affecting sentiment in the Adagio and seductive appeal and great rhythmic elegance in the Finale. Presto. She then gave a truly wonderful account of the Schumann Variations on the name ABEGG Op.1 The almost childlike simplicity, playfulness, mercurial mood swings in the variations and wonderfully light articulated tone she achieved made it such a delightful piece. The mysteries around the name ‘Abegg’ remain but perhaps Schumann was simply playing one of his popular word games with titles. Literature and particularly characterisations were of immense importance to him throughout his compositional life.

Only now however, in one of the three so-called ‘War Sonatas’, the Prokofiev Sonata No. 7 in B flat-major Op. 83, did we gain an insight to what this pianist was capable of in terms of rhythm, control of dissonance, percussion, anger, attack, articulation and colour. So often the work is performed in a rather meaningless style leading up to a farrago of virtuosity in the final Precipitato movement. It was premiered by Sviatoslav Richter in Moscow in January 1943 and of course his recording and that of Grigory Sokolov are inescapably in one’s inner ear whenever this is performed. She captured the atonal nervousness and unsettling neurotic tempos, nay quasi-savagery of the ironic Allegro inquieto quite brilliantly. The Andante caloroso (at a walking pace but still animated and warm) was full of sentimental opulence but preserved the plaintive and icily barren sense of loss and isolation of the heart and soul in the repeated interval towards the end that swings like the pendulum of fate. This movement was truly heartfelt and deeply moving. The Precipitato final movement was as inexorable as Stalinism (Soviet Russian proverb: The heavy hammer breaks fine glass but forges strong steel ) crushing the bourgeoisie and snuffing out life. On and on it pounds building in percussive intensity until the final resolution in powerful repeated tonal chords. Sara Daneshpour was tremendously convincing in this movement but for me lost a little of the rhythmic sharpness by occasionally over-pedalling the movement – it came across as slightly muddied as a result but magnificent all the same. These are quibbles hardly deserving attention. Her sheer penetration and actual speed of rhythmic attack, like a scorpion, is something I have rarely experienced with pianists.

The two Scarlatti Sonatas were rather too romanticised for my taste with too much pedal. Not much period style there or real sense of guitars, garlic and castanets. But then I am ‘an authenticist’ so not much point in talking to me. I felt Eduard Kunz understood how to play Scarlatti on the modern Yamaha behemoth perfectly. Next the César Franck Prelude, Chorale and Fugue. This masterpiece of cyclical form was a late work of Franck (1884). Sara brought her complete keyboard technique, sense of polyphony and great mastery of legato line to this monumental work. The culmination of the Fugue where all the themes combine at once was a great moment in her recital and in fact in keyboard music as a whole. The musical fabric is so dense however I think one needs repeated listening to do the Belgian composer justice and truly enter this work.

I found her performance of the Rachmaninoff Etudes-Tableux op. 39 (Nos 1, 2 and 6) absolutely extraordinary, bringing a rhythmic verve I had never heard ever before in performance. She fell upon certain phrases like lightning flashing over the Russian steppe. This was an extraordinarily exciting performance. She closed her recital with the Prokofiev Toccata in D minor Op. 11. Simpy fantsatic in its control of chromatic leaps, crossed hands and complex figuration. A spectacular finish to a brilliant recital. Her intensity at the keyboard is awesome and she received a standing ovation and pleas for many encores. Another rising star in the firmament of young pianists and a very special person indeed.

Liszt at the piano, wearing his Hungarian sword of honour. Le Journal pour Rire, 12 May, 1855

Giovanni Bellucci (20.00)

There is normally a drama at Duszniki of some description which always adds to the excitement and often the entertainment. Last year it was Jean-Marc Luisada and Ewa Kupiec (see http://www.michael-moran.com/2010/08/brief-report-on-65th-international.html ). This year it was this Italian gentleman.

His biography opens with the statement that ‘he is one of the most influential pianists of our time’ and ranks him ‘just behind’ Argerich, Arrau, Ciccolini, Cziffra, Kempf and Zimerman. He has made CD recordings of the 32 Beethoven Sonatas with Decca. We were full of anticipation.

Bellucci had taken on the gargantuan task of performing all 19 Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies. Like Luisada he appeared with the scores and a page turner but in his case it was a beautiful, young Asian girl. His performance aroused many fundamental questions concerning these works.

Despite an instinctive reaction against the idea, there is a case for performing all of the rhapsodies as a cycle. The notion comes from Liszt himself. I mentioned his fascination with Gypsies earlier in this posting. As he began the task of transcribing the music he found being played in the camps he noted: ‘I gradually acquired the conviction that in reality these detached pieces were parts of one great whole – parts disseminated, scattered, and broken up, but lending themselves to the construction of one harmonious ensemble….a Bohemian epic.’ He began writing an ‘Introduction ‘ to the rhapsodies which by publication became a vast two volume work entitled 'Des Bohémiens et leur musique en Hongrie'. The fate and usefulness of this interesting work is too complicated to go into here but eventually, after the usual literary augmentation by Princess Carolyne von Wittgenstein, his whole enterprise became an embarrassment and he was even accused of anti-Semitism (she had interpolated a chapter comparing Gypsies to the Wandering Jew much to the justified dissatisfaction of the Jews). In many ways the rhapsodies have retained this somewhat low esteem in the minds of even distinguished pianists as ‘just showpieces’.

Signore Bellucci tried to present them as forms of improvisation as one might hear in a Gypsy encampment with all the imperfections that such ad hoc improvisations sometimes have. Playing faster than you really can manage and ubiquitous risk-taking occasionally without success. He arranged them carefully in a particular order which was announced (but of which I could not fathom the logic).

The Duszniki Zdrój festival was absolutely the wrong context to play the piano in this fashion. Audiences here tend to be very discriminating, rather critical (there are many distinguished professors here every year with their brilliant students) who are, like most academics, rather conservative in their interpretative threshold. I think they felt he actually had not learnt the pieces completely or fully mastered them, but then what pianist other than perhaps the great Australian Lisztian Lesley Howard has all the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies in his repertoire and in his fingers? At the first interval many in the audience did not return to the hall. Then Professor Bonatta, an acknowledged authority on the composer, stood up and made a public point of dissatisfaction by walking out during the second half. Even less returned to the hall after the second interval and by then all the piano students had left, their empty chairs gaping in accusation.

I felt a wave of sympathy for Bellucci as I felt his ‘incorrect’ certainly somewhat rough approach to the rhapsodies had been much misunderstood. Yes his dynamic was often outrageously loud and wild but I am sure Gypsies do not consider dynamic control or accuracy when they play – most cannot read music and play by ear anyway. Yes he breezed through phrases (but with tremendous digital virtuosity) and whipped them off with nonchalance, missing notes, stretching rhythms, over-pedalling and blurring matters but I often wanted to jump up and dance the rhythms and raw passion were so infectious. However the type of smoky, winey nightclub atmosphere in Budapest where the unsurpassed Gyorgy Cziffra was discovered and where Bellucci should have been performing the set was absent in this pristine Dworek, 'a grove of academe' if ever there was one in Poland. The recital never got off the ground, never got airborne. A po-faced attitude to this type of abandoned, un-academically correct, improvisatory playing meant that his whole approach, although justifiable in some ways, was unfortunately in completely the wrong context. When the beautiful usherette approached him with flowers he brushed them away with a brusque gesture of annoyance – oh dear – a crime to refuse flowers in Poland and an audible gasp rose from the remainder of the audience. Nie! Nie! they cried.

I think Bellucci is to be congratulated for trying to learn and then perform all those fiendishly difficult rhapsodies in one concert. The audience could have risen to the occasion in realising this. Perhaps he should not have agreed to try such an ambitious idea. It was obvious what his approach and standard of performance was going to be after the first couple of rhapsodies. As the audience did not enter into the spirit of the thing, an atmosphere arose which became as thick as pea soup with desultory clapping every now and again. Agonisingly embarrassing. But with the stamina of the Good Soldier Svejk he did ‘keep on keeping on’. We should have jumped up and applauded on many occasions, not because it was good pianism (sometimes it was genuinely ‘terrific’) but because of what Liszt was actually doing – incredible and sometimes hilarious at once. Great foot-stamping Gypsy stuff, sometimes deeply reflective. Alfred Brendel wrote of them ‘Above all, the Rhapsodies come to life through the improvisatory spirit and fire of the interpreter; they are like wax in his hand like few other pieces in existence.’

There were no encores. This meant that Signore Bellucci could not ‘redeem’ himself. We never did hear what else he could do with say a Beethoven Bagatelle, a Chopin Mazurka, a Scriabin Prelude or a Scarlatti Sonata. I felt sorry for this clearly cultured man who had such an unfortunate experience and misjudged his audience completely. Anyway despite all the ‘faults’, if you will call them that, I enjoyed the whole concert in the spirit in which it was offered and heard many rhapsodies one never hears live at all, ever.

With the right attitude on the part of the audience it could have been such fun! Let's hope he has more success with them when he performs them before the French in Paris at the Louvre in two recitals quite soon.

Saturday August 13th (16.00)

Marcin Koziak and Paweł Wakarecy

I shared the high expectations of Koziak (along with many others) when we heard him perform in the semi-finals of the 2010 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He seemed to be to be a far superior Chopinist and pianist in many ways to so some others who negotiated the musical hurdles to go through to the finals. I remember his clarity, articulation, virtuosity, beautiful tone colour and touch, moreover a complete understanding of the difficult Chopin idiom known in the nineteenth century as le climat de Chopin.

In this recital he began with Nocturne in F-sharp major Op.15 No. 2 which was sensitively played and most eloquent. The Scherzo in B flat-minor op. 31 was played with great fire and virtuosity but I thought the rather fast tempo he adopted meant that many details and much of the polyphony was brushed aside, not allowing the music to breathe sufficiently in order to build the drama. However if I had this degree of finger magic I would probably be tempted into the same tempi! I felt much the same was true of the Ballade in A-flat major Op. 52 where the musical narrative failed to unfold in a natural way owing to his over-brilliant tempo. He seems to be developing such facility that although I am sure he knows precisely where he is going musically, the average listener, not at all so gifted, cannot follow quite so fast with his ears. Listeners need more time than the performer to process the detail, harmonic progressions and significance within the whole of the counterpoint and melody, time to breathe and take it in. The Polonaise in A-flat major op. 53 was oddly, in view of my former remarks, not a victim of fast tempo. It was certainly one of the noblest, majestic and controlled performances of this often performed piece I have heard for a very long time. I felt it equal to or superior to Blechacz in 2005. One could simply not wish for a finer performance. The Scriabin Prelude and Nocturne for the left hand Op. 9 was also brilliantly brought off, the management of the different voices within one hand superbly accomplished.

I must confess to not liking at all this particular transcription of Liszt, the Fantasy on two themes from W. A. Mozart’s ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ in the version completed by Busoni in 1912. Although performed with tremendous élan and breathtaking command of the keyboard, the musical material strayed far too far from Mozart’s original intentions for my taste. This is the type of Liszt transcription I am not at all fond of but what if I could actually play it like Koziak? Naturally I would be very happy indeed! Koziak is like a racehorse running brilliantly on its nerves. All that is needed to win is a light measure of informed and gentle control.

Paweł Wakarecy is quite a different type of pianist and as we know did reach the finals of the 2010 Chopin Competition in Warsaw and the award of the best Pole in the competition. I am so often being asked who I prefer, Koziak or Wakarecy. This is an impossible question as they both have different strengths and weaknesses. In his recital Wakarecy chose to play the great Schumann cycle Carnaval, Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes Op. 9. This work is in every serious pianist’s repertoire and Wakarecy gave it the great creative ‘literary’ characterisation it requires. An excellent poetic and passionate performance but for me lacking quite the brilliant articulated tone, rhythmic refinement and whimsical, mercurial shifts of mood so characteristic of Schumann. For me Wakarecy lacks the refined touch and subtlety of many performers but that is my personal taste and certainly a case can be made for a more robust Schumann. The sound Paweł makes in forte passages tends to be somewhat harsh to my ears on occasion but this may well be because of the small concert room in the Dworek and the huge instruments used there. He also played the Zarębski Grand Polonaise in F sharp major op. 6 but I am totally unfamiliar with this piece by an unfairly neglected composer. But I am learning...

Both these still developing pianists had to appear before Daniil Trifonov in the evening which was rather mean of the programmers!

FINAL RECITAL Daniil Trifonov (20.00)

What a miraculous year this young man has had in the contemporary world of the piano

As you might imagine I was looking forward to this recital immensely but fearful of what changes might come over Trifonov’s playing when he tackled Liszt. I need not have worried as the first half of his programme devoted to the composer was as brilliant as we have come to expect of him.

Liszt had a lifelong devotion to Schubert which gave rise to arrangements of over fifty of his songs transcribed for piano. He was very faithful to the Schubert score. In 1837 while staying as a house guest at Nohant with George Sand, her friends and her lover of the moment Michel de Bourges, Liszt would play in the warm summer evenings after dinner. ‘With the old house bathed in moonlight, and the pine trees swaying gently in the perfumed air, the music began to drift over the grounds. He played mostly Beethoven and Schubert.’ (Alan Walker Franz Liszt Volume I p. 244). His neurasthenic mistress Marie d’Agoult had recently translated some Schubert song texts into French for the composer. He often continued playing quietly in dream reverie long after the rest of the company had gone to bed and Sand was writing in her room.

Trifonov carefully chose this group indicating much about his own outlook on life. He first chose to play Frühlingsglaube (The Faith of Spring) which describes the awakening of the season (as a metaphor for the recovery of a wounded heart) originally to a text by the poet Johann Ludwig Uhland.

'The mild breezes are awakened, They whisper and move day and night.'

This charming piece was played with all the sensitivity one required. Next a type of sung Barcarolle "Aus dem Wasser zu singen" ('To be Sung on the Water') full of plangent harmonies. Die Forelle was as lively and sparkling as a trout leaping joyfully in a rushing mountain stream and then rang out the famous and ominous repeated octaves of the opening of the setting of Goëthe’s poem the Erlkönig. The frenzied galloping of the horse ridden by the father clutching his dying child, pounding though the dark wood haunted by the King of the Alder Trees was marvellously captured by Trifonov. The accompaniment piano part in Schubert songs is often very difficult in itself but Liszt wove the sung melodic lines through his transcriptions with great and ground-breaking intelligence and skill. He played it in many European capitals and it became a great favourite as well as spreading the name of Schubert which was hardly known outside the Vienna of the day. Trifonov gave a fine performance which was never exaggerated or hysterical, simply haunting and full of dark menace.

He then played a piece I had not heard for years and brought back so many sentimental memories of the pianists in my own family when we used to gather to make music together, my great aunt and great uncle Edward Cahill. The Liszt arrangement of Schumann’s beautiful love poem Dedication (Widmung from Myrthen op. 25 No.1). Trifonov performed it with the same fervent feeling and seductive tone and touch with which he approaches the Romance. Larghetto of the Chopin E minor Concerto. This was followed by a brilliant and superbly articulated La Campanella, the Liszt ‘Transcendental’ arrangement of Paganini. The bells in the little tower rang with a spectacular resonance and joy. There was tremendous audience enthusiasm for this virtuoso piece which gave us some indication of another aspect of Trifonov’s commanding technique which is the bedrock of his playing. With this technique his complex interpretations can be built at will, the technique becoming a servant of his imagination.

A Lithograph from Delacroix's Faust

Finally in the Liszt group the Waltz Mephisto No. 1 in A major (Der Tanz in Der Dorfschenke – The Dance in the Village Inn). Trifonov was terrifyingly intense and seemed full of insidious Mephistophelian seductiveness and evil. His unsurpassed technique was numbing and electrifying, like an electrical discharge on the Hungarian Plain. He really did play this like a man possessed, crouching low over the keyboard, leaning back in Mephistophelian derision, grimacing, cackling wickedly…really it was quite something to watch as well as hear and added to the overall dramatic emotional impact. Liszt was obsessed by Faust and he chose the account of the story by Nikolaus Lenau to set this piece of programme music. This passage from Lenau appears in the actual score:

“There is a wedding feast in progress in the village inn, with music, dancing, and drunken carousing. Mephistopheles and Faust wander by, and Mephistopheles persuades Faust to enter and join in the festivities. Mephistopheles grabs the violin from the hands of a sleepy violinist and draws from the instrument seductive and erotically intoxicating strains. The amorous Faust whirls about with a sensual village beauty [the landlord's daughter] in a wild dance; they waltz in mad abandon out of the room, into the open, away into the woods. The sounds of the violin grow softer and softer, and the nightingale sings his love-soaked song."

Trifonov through Liszt communicated all this passionate theatre to us in the most intense manner imaginable. ‘What incredible music this is!' I thought as we leapt up to an instant standing ovation even though it was interval and usually ‘not done’ in modern concert life.

After interval we began the Chopin. 3 Mazurkas Op. 56 which were simply perfect – I have nothing left to say. The 12 Etudes Op. 25 Trifonov unfurls like a great opera with many scenes. Although thankfully he does not run the end of one etude into the beginning of another, the completeness of his conception tonally and emotionally is tantamount to interpreting the set as an integrated unified work. Absolutely convincing. I will not go into the performance of each study here – although the depth of conception of each one and how it ‘fits in’ to the whole certainly deserves detailed analysis. Suffice to say I was riveted from beginning to end, particularly by his emotional commitment and range of intense response in tone and touch. His complete technique always remained a servant to his view of the music and not a means of superficial display and grand-standing before the audience. He was recalled numerous times and played wonderful encores ranging from a piece from Tchaikovsky's The Seasons to Chopin’s Tarantella. The audience continued to stand and applaud even when when he returned at the base of the platform with no further intention of playing....surrounding him with applause and adulation.

I have never witnessed scenes like this at the Duszniki Festival except with the magnificent Ukrainian pianist Aleksander Gavrylyuk (although I have only been coming for a mere seven years after all....). I fervently hope his teachers protect him from the ruthless grasp of the commercial world. I hope he does not perform too often now the demand to hear him is so huge and suffer burn out or lose the finer edge of his playing which sometimes happens with adulation and repitition. A very young pianist is only human after all and his is a quite extraordinary talent.

As I staggered out into the damp Duszniki night I reflected on the myth of Orpheus. The making of music is the cultivation of magic not simply a series of beautiful sounds more or less skilfully strung together on an instrument. It is a cabbalistic craft. For me Trifonov is an alchemist of the piano.

Brilliant Youth and Admiring Age - Daniil Trifonov signing Pan Moranski's programme at the Duszniki Zdroj Festival 2011, Poland

You can hear and watch his performance of this piece at the Artur Rubinstein Competition at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5FDtRiN6fY

However this performance was not as possessed or as fine as that at Duszniki but that may be the physical absence of the performer on Youtube and his 'electromagnetic emanations' (to refer to Rubinstein's theory).

Thank you Mr. Piotr Paleczny for sourcing all these wonderful pianists in yet another triumphant Duszniki Zdroj Chopin Piano Festival in Poland.

Liszt in Weimar

2011-07-26T19:10:00.019+02:00

Click on pictures to enlarge (Leica D-Lux 4)

Detail on the Bechstein piano belonging to Ferenc Liszt at the Liszt Museum, Weimar

For the past three weeks I have been wandering the shores of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) in Switzerland researching the wartime years (1938-1946) of the forgotten Australian pianist Edward Cahill. I drove as usual from Warsaw and in the round trip covered some 3,500 kms. However I will not describe this fascinating journey immediately as I wish to deal at first with Ferenc Liszt.

As it is the Liszt year (the 200th anniversary of his birth) I decided to return via Bayreuth and Weimar as a small pilgrimage to celebrate this great pianist and composer.

Bayreuth

The Franz Liszt Museum in Bayreuth is very close to Richard Wagner's Haus Wahnfried which will be closed for refurbishment for some years. I have visited both museums in the past (the Liszt shortly after it opened in 1993) and it is a very moving and interesting experience despite the fact that in the case of Wahnfried the facade is the only original part of the house that survives. Wagner's grave lies in the garden and I took a piece of ivy from it together with the roots to plant on my lakeside terrace in Warsaw. I was forced to leave my previous cutting in London which had profusely covered a trellis I erected over the kitchen window of my maisonette in Marylebone. This sentimental gesture will indicate my attachment to this composer more than any amount of purple prose.

Richard Wagner's home Haus Wahnfried in Bayreuth with the bust of his great patron Ludwig II of Bavaria

Richard Wagner, Cosima Wagner, Hans von Wolzogen and the elderly Franz Liszt at Haus Wahnfried Bayreuth circa 1880 (Photogravure by Franz Hafnstaengl after an oil painting by Wihelm Beckman, Liszt Museum, Bayreuth)

Liszt died in Bayreuth in 1886 during the first festival performances after Wagner's death. He was laid out in the hall at Wahnfried and is buried in a mausoleum in the cemetery of the city. Both men were very close quite apart from the fact that Cosima, Liszt's daughter, had scandalously lived with and finally married Wagner in 1870 after tortuous attempts to divorce her husband the piano virtuoso, conductor, teacher and composer Hans von Bulow. He had been one of Liszt's pupils since 1851. Wagner was always deeply appreciative of the financial, emotional and professional support Liszt had selflessly offered him over many years. 'Where has an artist, a friend done for another what you have done for me!....I cannot conceive what I would have been without you; and what you have made of me!' Wagner wrote to Liszt on 9 May 1853.

The museum is arranged chronologically and contains many engravings of the composer and other luminaries and lovers associated with him, the wonderful pastel portrait by Charles-Laurent Marechal, other fine oil portraits, medallions and decorations, ink pots, a life and death mask in the room where he died, personal letters, and his silent travelling practice keyboard.

On this occasion in the 'Virtuoso Room' is Wagner’s particularly fine Steinway grand piano of 1876 No: 34304 (it has been moved there while Haus Wahnfried is currently being restored). One can purchase a CD at the museum featuring this instrument which impressed me greatly as to the richly coloured sound quality. The Années de Pèlerinage – Première Annéee – Suisse plus Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este are played by Tomas Dravta on OEHMS Classics OC 786 (2011). A wonderful instrument to my mind.

The bronze bust of Franz Liszt in the garden of the Liszt Museum Bayreuth by Johann Jakob Silbernagl (1836-1915)

Weimar

I have been to Weimar three times and consider it one of the most remarkable small places in Europe, an idealogical capital if you will, but now harbouring only the ghosts of Europe's squandered Enlightenment ideals. Surely no small place (perhaps a population of 12,000 when Liszt chose to live there) has experienced such a concentation of resident genius and illustrious visitors.

Goethe's Summer House in the Park an der Ilm

(to be continued as time allows)

Tchaikovsky Competition Moscow - Prizes - Trifonov takes the Gold!

2011-06-30T19:59:00.012+02:00

And so Trifonov wins the Audience Award

No surprise to me....

Later....

He won!

I am over the moon about this - so richly deserved - all my musical instincts correct.

[Scroll down for more detail]

The jury opened their ears and more importantly their hearts to his sensibility.

A great poet of the instrument.

And I am going to hear him at the Duszniki Zdroj International Chopin Piano Festival in Poland in August.

My emotions 'recollected in tranquillity' later...

The Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow - the Final Battle for the Holy Grail

2011-06-30T10:41:00.015+02:00

I have been so busy with my own researches on my forgotten Australian concert pianist and writing a recreation of his life in the 1920s I have only been able to watch the competition in fits and starts. However the Archive link on ParaClassics menu is a very useful catch up but why did they remove the finalists' concerto recordings apart from the Mozart? I would love to have compared them in my own time. One cannot remember the finer details in musical interpretations of a number of supremely outstanding finalists.

How the jury deal with talent of this high order I have no idea - certainly much of it must be in the final judgement one of personal taste followed by a compromise collective decision which is seldom fair but will never entirely disappoint.

Alexander Romanovsky is a magnificent aristocratic presence at the keyboard with the superb technique and deep musicality we have come to expect historically from so many glorious Ukrainian pianists. His Tchaikovsky concerto was noble and monumental with moments of great lyricism. The Rachmaninov Third idiomatic and superb. His articulation glitters like gold. Tremendous command of the instrument and music. Surely one of the strong contenders for the first prize.

Alexei Chernov is such a different personality but grand and magnificent in an entirely different way. He reminds me on occasion of Grigory Sokolov who won the Third Tchaikovsky Competition at the age of 16 in 1966. Emil Gilels who headed the jury gave him a standing ovation - an unprecedented gesture by a jury member before or since. There are pianists and there is Sokolov. Chernov should be magnificent in the Brahms.

I felt his Tchaikovsky concerto showed a fine communication with the orchestra and conductor, not always the case with Romanovsky who seemed somewhat detached. Chernov did not quite rise to the accomplished technical heights and refinement of Romanovsky but what are we talking about here anyway? If you have ever studied the instrument seriously every competitor in the final has achieved the miraculously unachievable. His Tchaikovsky concerto had moments of sublime magnificence as he took such a controlled, considered and imposing tempo. The Russian audience seem to have a deep understanding and sympathy with him. Yes, he is a very strong contender for this Gold Medal - as I said let's hear the Brahms.

Yeol Eum Son is without doubt one of the finest pianists in terms of sheer scintillating sound, tone and technical accomplishment that I have ever heard. She understands large musical structures and how to hold them together utterly convincingly. One has shivers running up and down one's spine when one encounters her playing - a feeling Nabokov believed heralded the presence of great art. Her fiery and ardent sexuality was forcibly transmitted through the Tchaikovsky concerto and rendered me breathless on occasion.

And yet.....and yet.....it is as if she loves the music almost too much. Is this a meaningful remark or a nonsense? Is it possible to play with too much love? For me in the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto she extracted the last ounce of sentiment and passion from this music which sometimes became uncomfortable for me - almost mannered rubato, overly savage contrasts, holding back a phrase almost to stasis.

It is often said that composers do not necessarily play their own compositions well. However when a composer is also a great pianist as Rachmaninov was then listening to his own recordings of his concerti is very instructive. They indicate what he was trying to achieve, what actually drove his creative ideas in these monumental works. He was not an overly sentimental composer I feel (listen to his Chopin interpretations) although the way he is performed everywhere would give the lie to this idea. Someone once asked Stravinsky what would be played on space stations in the future. He answered not Stockhausen or Boulez but 'super hi-fi Rachmaninov'. Very wise remark. Consider the 1936 recording of Horowitz in this same work - he winds up the tension almost unbearably but is never mannered or sentimental - simply incandescent. 'He fell upon the work like a tiger!' Rachmaninov remarked of Horowitz in this concerto. All these remarks are dealing at an impossibly high level of performance accomplishment remember.

For me the finest musician in the competition is without doubt Daniil Trifonov. He is a great poet of the piano and is entirely possessed by the spirit of whatever music he is playing. He communicates his profound emotional commitment effortlessly to the audience who respond accordingly. His technique is never in question but like all the greatest technicians and virtuosi it is not on overt display but remains a brilliant, flexible and willing servant to the music. With the webcast coverage one can see his pedalling which is a wonder to behold. His use of the flutter pedal in the Tchaikovsky was a virtuoso effort and the sound produced was remarkable. This afternoon he plays the Chopin E minor concerto Op. 11 which for me is one of the great performances of this early work. I heard his interpretation at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw last year. His instinctive understanding of the reverie, the intensity and abstracted illusions of youthful love in the Romance - Larghetto movement is desperately moving and absolutely unique in my experience. Do not miss this.

And yes, I definitely think he should win the competition (as I thought he should have won in Warsaw although Bozhanov was the genius there). But is he a 'Competition Winner' type as Avdeeva undoubtedly was from her very first note?

Ah yes...we have had this dilemma of choice with distinguished juries, the great pianists sitting in judgement and arguing their own deeply held musical passions and beliefs...points being accumulated...decisions made...the arguments begin...

Whoever wins from these finalists they are already all winners at the very highest levels of accomplishment - not a truism trotted out by an uncommitted, indecisive critic but they really are and should all have distinguished musical careers.

I would have made a Faustian pact with the devil to play like any of them.

Daniil Trifonov plays the Chopin Etudes Op.25 and Mozart A Major concerto K. 488 from Moscow

2011-06-24T00:56:00.029+02:00

If you are not already watching the Tchaikovsky Competition piano section streamed on 'Paraclassics' you really must do so.

Trifonov gave one of the greatest live performances of Op. 25 I have ever heard. So passionately committed to this music it was electrifying. I could trot out all the poetic cliches in the book but what use would that be? Pathetic words signifying little. Really you must watch this although it may not be to everyone's taste - the involvement of this pianist in the extreme emotions and fiery virtuosity of Chopin's youth makes one almost uncomfortable and leaves one questioning one's own personal musical committment.

Here we have a young man possessed of a unique and ardent love, nay passionate joy in this music that only illusioned youth is capable of, unfettered by mature experience and deep reflection. I have always believed that Chopin is played best by young pianists of the same age as Chopin himself when the work was composed and possessed of a similarly emotionally febrile sensibility. Consider Pollini's superb playing of Chopin when he won the Chopin competition in 1960 and the cool classical poise and magnificent mature perfection of his performances today. Wonderful yes but it is not always appropriate to bring an almost classical emotional control and cool marble polish to the Chopin Etudes. Winners inevitably mature and innocence is lost.

The Op. 10 set of Etudes and many of the Op. 25 set were composed when the composer was in his early to mid twenties. This Chopin was a volcano of contained masculine passion and feminine lyicism revelling in his own revolutionary virtuosity, not yet 'civilised' by the Parisian aristocracy nor seriously betrayed in love or as later, haunted by the shadow of a lingering death. Trifonov defies normal criteria of judgement in his balance of the masculine and the feminine in Chopin. The entire jury applauded this performance (something that never happened in Warsaw) and the audience 'went wild'.

And this profound musicianship displayed in the context of a competition. Quite breathtaking. The boy is only 20.

The performance of both works covered here will by now be in the Archive. You will need to scroll along for the Chopin as the day begins with Trifonov playing a remarkabe piece by the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin

http://pitch.paraclassics.com/#/archive/concert/205e

Oh...it is 1.00am in Warsaw! Am I supposed to sleep after that?

Written in the small hours of July 25th :

And so after an elegant, stylish and limpid Mozart concerto (No. 23 in A Major K. 488) Trifonov effortlessly passes into Stage II Round III. The Adagio brought me close to tears. This is one of the most poignant movements Mozart ever wrote for the piano. F sharp minor is my favourite key which always rends my heart with its tragic tonality. It is the only concerto movement he wrote in this dark key. The clouds of melancholy pass over in the Allegro assai and Trifonov here had a wonderful rapport with the very fine Russian State Chamber Orchestra under the former oboeist Aleksey Utkin. The pianist brought such a rush of welcome joy and refined elegance to this movement. No phrase was repeated in the same manner. Truly wonderful and the Russian audience love him so and were not shy in expressing their delight. The Jury awarded him the 'Best Chamber Concerto Performance' prize together with Yeol Eum Son.

We are witnessing with Trifonov a rare and most extraordinary flowering of musical talent in a short space of time. He is a transformed figure to the rather shy, somewhat insecure boy who took part in the International Chopin Competition last year and rushed a few things in his nervousness and so did not win. But now his victory at the Rubinstein Competition and now this....

Why is it that Trifonov moves one's soul when you consider the immaculate refinement, tone, touch, grace and musicianship of the wonderful Korean Yeol Eum Son in her performance of the Mozart Concerto in C K. 467. She made it a Meissen piece of absolute perfection but there were no lurking demons there to balance the elegance, no dark statues concealed in the garden.

With Trifonov I am for some odd reason reminded incontrovertibly of the young English poet John Keats and the 'principle of Beauty' that drove him in the all too brief magical period of his great creative flowering. This principle drives Trifonov too and we are witnessing something quite miraculous here.

I pray he retains it in a world presently in abject prostration before the golden calf.

Daniil Trifonov wins the Artur Rubinstein Competition!

2011-05-27T07:46:00.009+02:00

I have been so busy writing my latest book on Edward Cahill (in a way dying to life in order to create it) that I have not been able to follow the Rubinstein competition in detail.

However I sat up late last night to watch the finalists on that incomparable television channel Mezzo. Trifonov played the Chopin E minor Concerto Op. 11 with all the ardent love, sensitivity, grace and classical style that I had expected of him from his performance of the same work in the Chopin competition here in Warsaw last year. His interpretation of the Romance-Larghetto movement brings one close to tears - all of the romantic, illusioned yearning that young love is capable of - the finest I have ever heard including Lipatti and Pollini (just after his win of the Warsaw Chopin Competition in 1960).

I was overjoyed at this result. This win absolutely confirms my conviction that Trifonov was one of the greatest Chopin players in Warsaw (see my extensive October 2010 posting on my Chopin 2010 blog). Avdeeva won because she was clearly a tremendously authoritative and brilliant pianist, a true 'Competition Winner' type with a distinct voice, but for me not the greatest Chopinist in the competition. Trifonov and Bozhanov were the finest in every way for me. The Bozhanov phenomenon is the rather different story of musical genius - a pianist who has moved quite beyond mere piano competitions.

Concerning Trifonov, clearly the Tel Aviv jury and the audience in Israel (he won the Audience Award also) responded to and more importantly recognised this young man's miraculous musical sensitivity and commanding technique. What will be the outcome of the Tchaikovsky Competition that he heads off to almost immediately? How exciting!

Trifonov will be performing in Poland at the 66th Duszniki Zdroj Chopin Piano Festival (5-13 August 2011) together with a number of the greatest young pianists playing today - Wunder, Avdeeva, Kozhukhin, Geniusas, Lugansky and the unknown (at this time) winners of the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Liszt Competition in Utrecht. What a line up!

I will be there as usual full of enthusiasm in this enchanting small spa town forever associated with a charity concert Chopin gave there long ago. I hope to write my customary detailed blog of the event.