Brilliant Interplay
By Wolfgang Sandner
ESSEN. It still exists -- the once-dominant Russian school of pianists with
its magnificent blend of "sensitivity and severity," of creative musicality
and technical rigor, in which sloppiness is not tolerated and an inventive
approach to the repertoire is paramount. Those interested in finding out
what made this school so successful will find a wealth of information in the
book Die Kunst des Klavierspiels (The Art of Piano Playing) by Heinrich
Neuhaus, who taught Sviatoslav Richter, Jakow Sak and Emil Gilels, to name
but a few.
Those who would prefer to let the pianists themselves do the talking,
however, can go to the Klavier Festival Ruhr in North Rhine-Westphalia --
the world's largest annual piano festival. The 83 soloists at this year's
festival, which runs until Aug. 18, include Lazar Berman, Alexei Lubimov
(one of Neuhaus' last pupils), Valery Afanassiev, Grigory Sokolov, Oleg
Maisenberg, Nikolai Lugansky and Dmitri Bashkirov, whose master class will
be open free of charge to both pianists and listeners.
The festival got off to a spectacular start on June 16 with a performance by
Bashkirov's daughter Elena Bashkirova and the French pianist Brigitte
Engerer at the Aalto Theater in Essen. As a pupil of Neuhaus' son Stanislav
at the Moscow Conservatory, Engerer can also be counted among the
beneficiaries of the great Russian piano tradition. The two pianists'
rendering of Mozart's Double Concerto in E-flat major, KV 365 and of York
Höller's Widerspiel (Interplay) for two pianos and orchestra was impressive
evidence that this tradition does not merely squeeze every new talent into
the same musical mold.
Particularly in the Mozart concerto, a piece in which two virtuosos battle
for supremacy, each trying to outshine the other with tremolo chords and
melodies played an octave apart, with splendid fioriture and playfully
recapitulated motifs, the differences in the pianists' touch and phrasing
were certainly noteworthy, despite their rhythmic congruity. Bashkirova was
the more precise and razor-sharp of the two, while Engerer's playing was
much softer, more fluid and elegant. While the brisk first and last
movements were thus defined largely by Bashkirova, the C-minor Andante with
its almost menacingly dark, extraordinarily modern-sounding harmonic
progressions brought Engerer's elegiac, almost nostalgic tone to the fore.
Whereas Mozart's concerto requires two soloists of equal standing, Höller's
Widerspiel, which the same two pianists gave its world premiere in Cologne
just a year ago, is more like a three-movement piano concerto for a dominant
first piano and accompanying second piano. Bashkirova was the ideal soloist
here, playing with bravura and unflagging energy throughout the heavy-metal
regions of this almost brutish, but impressively ominous work. Originally
inspired by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal's fictional Chandos Letter, which talks
of the interplay of eternal forces "as splendid as music and algebra" --
read heart and mind -- Höller's composition marked the culmination of a
magnificent opening concert, much of the credit for which must also go to
the Bochum Symphoniker under the circumspect baton of Steven Sloane.
For more information (in German), go to www.klavierfestival.de
Jun. 19, 2001
© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2001
Paul Moor (Berlin)
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
Telefon: (030) 8639-5784
Telefax: (030) 8639-5785
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jun 19 2001 - 14:00:01 PDT