Pollini and Pletnev at the Festival Hall
Strikingly, both Maurizio Pollini and Mikhail Pletnev chose to make the first halves of their recitals in the South Bank Centre's international piano series from the same two early Beethoven sonatas: Op 10, No 3 and Op 13, the Path?tique. Pollini retains his legendary status, but in fact his recitals here in recent years have been of a decidedly mixed accomplishment. Where once his playing was marked by iron command and concentration, he has shown an increasing self-indulgence (not least in his willingness to vocalise as he performs - something much better left for the tennis court) and a tendency towards an over-pedalled cloudiness of texture. His concert was infuriating in that a truly great performance of the Chopin Preludes in the second half was preceded by a dazzlingly awful rendering of the Beethoven, which Pollini performed as if he had something near contempt for the works. Where in the Chopin, who has indeed always brought out the best in him, Pollini found different colours for each piece, in the Beethoven it seemed as if he thought that speed itself was the overriding aesthetic value. It was, in an odd way, impressive to hear playing of such rapidity and evenness, but the cost was an all but total absence of musical argument, or interest. (Perhaps this was just his mood at the moment, since his recording of these works, due out from Deutsche Grammophon in June, is considerably more attentive to their rhetorical possibilities, and is certainly worth hearing.)
The contrast with Pletnev's performance this month could not have been greater. Having founded the Russian National Orchestra (RNO) in 1990, Pletnev has devoted much of his time over the last decade or so to conducting (and had indeed brought the RNO to the Festival Hall only a few weeks ago), but unusually this has had no ill effects on his pianism. Given the mechanics of a piano, it is all but incredible that a pianist should be capable of producing such a variety of sounds as he did (though he did take the precaution of bringing his own Steinway for the recital). The very long second half of his recital was taken up with Tchaikovsky's 18 pieces for piano that the composer put together at the same time as he was writing the 6th symphony in 1893, the year he killed himself. The symphony was clearly the focus for the expression of Tchaikovsky's emotional torment, since the piano pieces, with their homages to Schumann and Chopin, are wonderfully lyrical and charming, with a bravura elegance that Pletnev exploited to the full. It was Pletnev's Beethoven, however, that was spectacular. These are familiar works, and yet without sounding in the least self-conscious or gimmicky, Pletnev made them sound quite new, not least by some of the most careful balancing of chords that I've ever heard. The slow movement of Op 10, No 3 became a tragic statement of such eloquence that even the Festival Hall audience was completely silenced. Deutsche Grammophon would be mad not to get him into the studio to record both the Beethoven and the Tchaikovsky. In the meantime, they have just released a stunning disc of Pletnev playing Schumann, in which an initially somewhat mannered but ultimately explosive account of the Symphonic ?tudes is coupled with a C major Fantasy as full of fantasy as any on record. Crucially, it captures beautifully the range and colour of Pletnev's sound.
That would make it recommended listening for Richard Goode, who at the Barbican three days later managed no greater tonal variety than loud and soft - and neither of those very pleasant to listen to. Goode has a reputation as perhaps the most thoughtful and musical of American pianists, but this was hard to square with the evidence of this recital. Beethoven's Six Bagatelles are elusive pieces, difficult to bring off, but Goode made so little of them that it was hard to see why he thought them worth performing at all. Similarly in Schubert's Sonata in A minor D845, so many expressive opportunities were passed over that it reminded one why people used to think that Schubert's instrumental works are no good. To be fair, this was only half the recital and I can't report on the rest; after hearing what he could do to the Beethoven and the Schubert, it seemed better to leave to the imagination what he would do to the poetry of Schumann's Davidsb?ndlert?nze. Much better to go home and listen again to Pletnev on disc.
Goerne at the Wigmore Hall
For ?12 it was possible to go to watch Matthias Goerne rehearsing four young singers in Brahms's Liebeslieder-Walzer at the Wigmore Hall. It can be fascinating to watch a singer working with other singers, and this class was especially revealing, both about Goerne's approach to the repertoire - it was good, for instance, to find that in his criticisms of his students he showed a concern for diction that has not always been so apparent in his own recent recitals - and about his attitude to his audience, as he decided to conduct the classes in German. Of course, the Wigmore has a famously educated audience, and it may be that I was the only one not to have grasped every detail of his critical analysis. Certainly everyone dutifully sat through the first half - except, that is, for the Wigmore's artistic director who walked out with a look that wasn't easy to interpret. In any case, when Goerne returned after the interval he was ready to show how fluent he can be in English, even in front of a London audience.
