Category: Live performance

Waikanae Music Society presents:
Michael Endres (piano)

SCHUBERT – Impromptus Op.142 (D.935)

CHOPIN – Barcarolle Op.60

RAVEL – Pavane pour une infante defunte / Jeux d’eau

GERSHWIN – Rhapsody in Blue (solo piano version)

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday, 2:30pm, 4th August 2013

The biographical note on pianist Michael Endres, reproduced on the back of the progranmme for his Waikanae recital, contains a number of critical responses from various parts of the world to his playing. Two of these judgements concurred exactly with my own reactions to Endres’ playing that afternoon – from a Boston newspaper came the comment that he was “one of the most interesting pianists recording today”; while the English Gramophone magazine declared that he was “an outstanding Schubert player”.

By the time Endres had finished the first of the four Impromptus Op.142 (or D.935) I was already inclining towards endorsing both statements. His playing for me gave a “freshly-minted” feel to the sounds, the music’s opening dramatic but not heavy, and the subsequent explorations a spontaneous flowing, by turns winsome and sombre.

What I particularly enjoyed was that he seemed like anything but a “right-hand” pianist. I felt he regarded the music as a tapestry whose strands at any place that was appropriate could be teased out and highlighted and given primacy in terms of the piece’s overall flow. He also brought out the wonderful “road music” quality of certain of the episodes, able to spin the melodies over long archways, with beautiful “lullabic” sounds.

Quicker with the opening of the A-flat Impromptu than either Kempff or Brendel on their respective recordings, Endres gave it a kind of folk-song-quality  rather than that of a hymn, one with a lusty, forthright chorus! – a beautiful flow was managed in the middle, like water coursing through rivulets, all nicely unmetrical and impulsive.

The third Impromptu was very like the same composer’s  Rosamunde music, playing with a real sense of listening to itself, and the variations following one another so naturally and organically. The fourth of the set was spiky and tangy, very Hungarian, I thought, characterful and flavoursome, with some wonderful “lurches” into different moods and atmospheres – incredible  swirlings, called to order by quasi-military fanfares! Endres’s playing certainly took the pieces out of the drawing room and set them in the wider, far more variegated world.

A similar kind of energy activated his performance of the Chopin Barcarolle, though I confess to preferring a more epic approach to the work than we got here – his was light and generally swift-moving, the figurations restless and volatile. I always like this music to generate a sense of journeying, of the prospect of great spaces to traverse, and of thus leaving something in reserve over the first few measures to grow into and enlarge.

However, Endres’s way was a very “here-and-now” experience, instead – the central section was swift and dramatic, splashy in places, in a way that went with the pianistic territory, of course. The agitations were even more oceanic at the opening’s return, leading up to and in the wake of the great cadential point – I thought it all too stormy for a Barcarolle, even one as epic-browed as this.  I wanted more spacious textures, moments which one could go so far as call poetic – but the pianist’s vision was of different things, which he certainly recreated with conviction.

I did like his Ravel – the famous Pavane was very boldly-presented, with a wide dynamic range and sharply-terraced contrasts (some people might have found it a bit too “iron hand in velvet glove”-like in places. He did, I thought, keep the music at arm’s length, showing little “hurt” in the sounds he made – I always think Ravel’s music much more “vulnerable” than Debussy’s in that respect. Whenever I hear this music I feel the presence of eyes looking out at the world from behind the mask, concealing the feelings; and there were the faintest touches of that tenderness here and there. By contrast, Jeux was all brilliance and no emotion, which is the ethos of the piece in any case, only the “laughter of the river-god” disturbing the equanimity – great virtuosity on the pianist’s part!  How interesting to think of Liszt’s fountains in his “Villa d’Este” piece next to Ravel’s evocations, and how much more feeling wells up from THOSE waters……..

Unexpectedly, the most disappointing item in the concert for me was the piano-only Rhapsody – it came across as somewhat “Jekyll-and-Hyde”-ish, because Endres seemed to take definite pains from the outset to differentiate between the solo piano part and the transcription of the orchestral parts. This was a good idea in theory, but in practice it resulted in his occasionally taking the music by the scruff of the neck and shaking it until bits fell off (and some did, in places!)….so, while the intent was perhaps laudable, its execution was too brusque, the music’s poetry too squeezed and its brilliance much too garbled in places.

Much of his playing, I thought, belied the title “Rhapsody” – here, some of the episodes suggested the piece ought to have been called “Toccata” or “Bacchanale”. I realise that Gershwin had to improvise some of his part at the first performance because he hadn’t finished writing it out, and so the element of spontaneity was authentic – but this was simply too ham-fisted and pugilistic an approach for me, I’m afraid, with, as I’ve said, bits dropping off the music when the going got really tough!!

But, who am I to criticise? – at the end of it, the pianist got something of a standing ovation! And I heard someone sitting near to me happily chortling, “Well, I’ve never heard Gershwin played quite like that before!” – obviously the hell-for-leather approach had as many admirers as it did doubters, if not more! It just goes to show how differently people actually HEAR music.

For myself, I’m happy to report that Endres played some more Gershwin at the concert’s end, and the results here were wrought of magic – these were, I think, exerpts from the “George Gershwin Songbook” for piano solo. Included in the selection was “The Man I Love”, “Lady Be Good” and “S’Wonderful”, plus another whose title I didn’t know. Michael Endres gave them everything that was missing, I thought, from his playing in the “Rhapsody” – here was charm, sentiment, fullness of tone, plenty of impulse and variety – so winning! – thus we ended the concert on what was, for me, a high note!

Classical Expressions, Upper Hutt presents:
Nikolai Demidenko – Carnivals and Sonatas

SCHUMANN – Carnival Jest from Vienna (Faschinsschwank aus Wien) Op.26
Carnaval – Scenes mignonnes sur quatre notes Op.9
SCHUBERT – Sonata in A D.664 / Sonata in A Minor D.748

Nikolai Demidenko (piano)

Classical Expressions Upper Hutt

Monday 29th July 2013

It was an occasion which brought home to me the refreshing reality of live music-making as opposed to the ethos presented by presentations of the artist “on record”. I had not previously heard Nikolai Demidenko in the concert-hall (though he’s been to New Zealand before), encountering him only through recordings.

It wasn’t so much what I’d heard that surprised me, as what I imagined the artist would be like. Photographs of the pianist seemed to suggest some kind of wild, intense, volatile spirit, aloof, uncompromising and ultra-romantic in a kind of “Wuthering Heights” sense. And, of course, the music he seemed to carry a particular torch for – that of Nikolai Medtner’s – itself had a similar aura – enigmatic, exotic and slightly out of the mainstream.

So, I was preparing myself for the entrance of some kind of Dostoyevskian figure, when a dapper, bearded, bespectacled man walked quickly, even a little nervously, onto the platform and bowed courteously to his audience – he had a somewhat ruddy complexion and his hair was reddish-brown, or appeared so in the light. Surely – surely not? – was this my wild, uncompromising, romantic artist from the land of the endless steppes? How could this be? It wasn’t long before Demidenko’s actual playing restored some of my equanimity, conveying to me (in a way that his initial appearance certainly didn’t) plenty of the volatility, energy and grand manner that I was expecting.

He began, at first none too commandingly, with Robert Schumann’s Carnival Jest in Vienna (Faschingsschwank aus Wien), ever-so-slightly smudging the treacherous opening flourishes; but his playing soon settled – his tones deepened and his focus sharpened. In between the fanfare-like reprises of the opening were beautifully-contrasted interludes, one of which was a delicious “strutting” rhythm, which eventually built up to a defiant quote of the opening of La Marseillaise (the song had been banned by the Austrian censor) – Demidenko hurled the tune forth with the greatest of gusto.

The suite of movements has plenty of variety; and Demidenko gave us essences of each one in turn – the fanciful dream-world of the Romanze was followed by the gaily-spirited, repetitive “skip” of the Scherzino, with its alternations of playfulness and pageantry. Then came the darker purpose of the Intermezzo, all swirling agitation at the outset, but with the pianist superbly delineating the individual currents so as to allow the embedded melody to sing forth – great playing!

After this the finale’s opening exploded with energy, causing Demidenko’s fingers to momentarily “jump the rails” (it all added to the excitement!) – it was, like Sviatoslav Richter’s playing on his famous “live” Italian recording of the piece, extremely forceful, “free-wheeling pianism” as one might put it, but exactly what the music itself suggested – Schumann at his most exuberant.

There was more of the same kind of excitement and enthusiasm throughout Demidenko’s playing of Carnaval, that fantastical procession of characters, both make-believe and from among the composer’s own friends and colleagues. Demidenko’s view of this “portrait-gallery” was as absorbing as any I’ve heard, right from the beginning, with his grand and rhetorical Préambule, and – playing for maximum contrast – fascinatingly halting and nervous Pierrot, leading to a teasing, mercurial (if none too accurately-played) Arlequin!

To go through the work and give Demidenko credit for every single moment of illumination of Schumann’s wonderful writing would tax the reader’s patience to excess – nevertheless, one must make mention of the pianist’s ghostly evocation of the rarely-played Sphinxes, a brief kind of “appendix” to the Coquette/Replique sequences, which Schumann didn’t intend to be performed, even if luminaries such as Rachmaninov, Cortot, Horowitz and Gieseking chose to include it in their recordings, for our delight.

Usually it’s the final section of the work, the Davidsbundler putting the Philistines to flight, which guarantees plenty of keyboard thrills – but Demidenko cut loose earlier with Paganini, Schumann’s tribute to the violinist’s overwhelming presence and virtuosity – a veritable onslaught, with cascades of notes, leaving us all open-mouthed with astonishment! The Davidsbundler triumph at the end thus had a slightly less “death-and-glory” and more ritualistic aspect to its energies, as much a summing-up as an actual coup de grace stroke, the piano tones properly rich and satisfying.

In the second half, Schubert’s A Major Sonata D.664 was balm to the senses after Schumann’s invigorations! Here was another side of Demidenko’s pianism, one of lyrical poetry, the player bringing out both the music’s weight and its weightlessness, the contrasts bound together with the same ease of flow. Schubert was able to bear us away upon the wings of whatever mood he chose to explore, sometimes setting tranquility and anxiety cheek-by-jowl, as in the first movement’s sounding of bass figurations beneath the filigree treble ones at the recapitulation, and the second movement’s melancholy darkening after the rich loveliness of the opening.

Demidenko brought out the “bigness” rather than the drawing-room aspect of the finale, contrasting the prettiness of the opening theme with great rolling colonnades of sound serving as flourishes between the lyrical moments – these purposeful energies dominated the central section of the movement, and playfully vied with the melodic impulses right at the end – an approach which arrested and held, rather than stretched out one’s attention, right to the final chords.

In some ways the previous work’s antithesis, the A Minor Sonata D.784 which followed began as it meant to go on, with furrowed brow and grim forward motion, then plunging into agitated figurations involving cascading octaves and heart-stopping sforzandi tremolandos.

Demidenko preferred urgency to portentousness throughout, but wonderfully controlled all of the different dynamic levels of the various statements, so that each had a slightly different “weight” of character. In places I thought he pushed the music too fast, as with the arrival of the resplendent fanfares at the climax of the development, where the effect was a shade brusque rather than truly climactic – but the agitato element was certainly maintained, if at the expense of some of the music’s “haunted” stillness.

The pianist gave us an exquisitely-voiced melodic line at the slow movement’s beginning, before allowing the shadow of the twisted chromatic figure to darken the ambience and hold it in thrall. I liked the heartfelt surge of feeling mid-movement, as well as the lyrical response, the opening theme taking flight as it were, trying to escape those chromatic growlings in the bass – all very exploratory and wonderful!

As for the finale, under Demidenko’s fingers it became a whirling dervish of a movement, weaving together strands of panic, nervousness, determination and wide-eyed exhilaration – the pianist got plenty of glint in some of his flourishes and a real “ring” on the tone of his topmost notes, making up for some occasional fumbling of the syncopation in the midst of the excitement. The music’s second subject was a poor, consoling thing, easily swept away on the recurring tide, its uneasy calm already “spooked” by the music’s sudden irruptions of desperation, which die as quickly as they appear.

After the return of the wretched, consoling theme the music erupted for the last time, with extra weight and emphasis, perhaps the most desultory ending of any of the composer’s sonatas for piano. What strife, what trouble, and what grim resolve! Fortunately Demidenko redeemed our troubled spirits with a couple of encores, firstly a Chopin Nocturne, giving its melody a deliciously wayward trajectory, and then a stirring piece by Medtner – whose music the pianist has magnificently and resolutely championed over the years. The music sounded like it was a first cousin to one of the Rachmaninov Etude-Tableaux – and Demidenko’s playing of it brought the house down.