The 7th International Piano Festival in Singapore, which featured young
talent this year, ended yesterday with Freddy Kempf's recital.
For those interested, I append below my reviews for the local newspaper,
The Straits Times, of the first two recitals by Jon Nakamatsu and
Konstantin Lifschitz.
The reviews of the recitals by Nikolai Lugansky and Freddy Kempf will
follow shortly.
JUL 1 2000
A good start with bold Haydn piece
By LIONEL CHOI
7TH INTERNATIONAL PIANO FESTIVAL
Jon Nakamatsu, piano
Victoria Concert Hall
Thursday
AS THE festival director Goh Yew Lin noted in his foreword, this
annual keyboard extravaganza has had a roller-coaster fate; indeed,
it would certainly be pitching things at an inhumanly-elevated level
to expect consistency of inspiration recital after recital for six
years running.
Still, one always hopes for better things, and what a relief, then,
to find the Seventh International Piano Festival, which focuses on
young talent this year, off to an auspicious start on Thursday evening.
In the space of merely three years, American-Japanese pianist Jon
Nakamatsu shot out of obscurity after a high-profile victory at the
1997 Van Cliburn Competition and is fast becoming an acknowledged
star on the circuit.
In fact, on account of his Haydn playing alone, one is even tempted
to employ that overused adjective -- great.
At least for those who do not care for didactic over-sensitivity
(a la Andras Schiff), Nakamatsu's robust and sometimes gleefully
subversive approach to the C minor Sonata would have provided much
pleasure, holding up the work as a stellar example of Haydnesque
Sturm und Drang.
In searching for the music's soul, he proved to be as scrupulous and
probing as he was daring, projecting Haydn's charming ideas boldly
and vividly with spontaneity, occasionally capricious but rarely
wayward.
The opening ambiguous Moderato alone brought some serious challenges:
here, Nakamatsu coaxed a wide but disciplined range of colour and
expression, his delicacy and compelling sense of purpose fusing to
produce something of unusual beauty and disquiet.
Technically, he possessed the sort of fingers one would expect from
any present-day competition winner, and all the rapid passages,
notably at the Finale, were scintillatingly super-fluid.
Tchaikovsky's F major Theme and Variations, Op 19 No. 6, was also
a delight, mercifully free of heavy-handedness.
In the Chopin group Nakamatsu displayed idiomatic style, authority
and polish, but one wonders if he were slightly less prepared to
abandon himself to the excitement of the moment, the F minor Fantasy
being a case in point.
And there was a hint of dryness to his sound in the Op 59 Mazurkas,
though the style and inspiration were unquestionably fresh and
tasteful.
Finally, Rachmaninov's Second Piano Sonata was played in the revised
version: a dubious choice, as while there is little doubt that
Rachmaninov improved parts of the 1913 original texturally when he
looked at it again in 1931, whether he did the right thing in paring
down the work so ruthlessly is another matter.
Nakamatsu's way with the central movement was perhaps a case of the
pianist supplying too much, too soon. But otherwise, with little
self-conscious posturing, he had a fine balance of textural clarity
and leonine power, though even in the most inflammatory of climaxes,
the overall effect seemed short of that indefinable Slavic quality,
that knife-edged musicianship to match his electrifying virtuosity.
While this reviewer admits to mixed feelings towards the Rachmaninov,
the concert was undoubtedly a resounding success: After all, getting
cheered back on stage to give five stylishly-played encores is in
itself something rather extraordinary.
Copyright (c) 2000 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.
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JUL 2 2000
Russian genius sounds better in concert
By LIONEL CHOI
7TH INTERNATIONAL PIANO FESTIVAL
Konstantin Lifschitz, piano
Victoria Concert Hall
Last Friday (30 June)
PEOPLE who hurried to buy 23-year-old Konstantin Lifschitz's CDs
after Friday's concert might be in for a bewildering time.
With one or two exceptions, little of the young Russian's genius
shows up in those albums.
The well-known Milan recital disc, in particular, is home to 66
minutes' worth of some painfully dour playing: Did Chopin and Ravel
really intend their Nocturnes and Gaspard respectively for use in a
funeral parlour?
True, Lifschitz was merely 16 then, but I raise this specific disc
as a telling example of the sort of other-worldly conceptions that
he champions to this day both ""live" and in the studio.
I therefore confess to a modicum of preliminary scepticism.
By all counts a remarkable polymath but undeniably quirky, Lifschitz
sports a bizarre brand of pianism that lives and breathes in a world
of its own, cloistered in an ivory tower, the kind of thing that
either does not register with audiences or, on that exceptionally
good day, leaves them deeply enchanted.
How much richer we are now, therefore, since Friday's recital turned
out to be a rare and treasurable occasion from start to finish.
One would still expect his approach to the Bach items to divide the
audience, though: The Sinfonias, played in order of complexity rather
than of key as somewhat in the way Bach first wrote them in Wilhelm
Friedemann's Clavierbuchlein, were as fascinating for his colossal
insight and familiarity with the polyphonic style as they were
intensely personal.
Yet, against the sheer creative vitality of the performances, the
astonishing clarity of articulation, and the sense of being led on
revelatory journeys through musical space, the idiosyncrasies sounded
so naturally and spontaneously conceived as to be inseparable from
the overall plan.
As was even clearer in the F major English Suite, Lifschitz played
Bach as if it ran in his blood -- intelligent, perceptive and intuitive
-- a far cry from the kind of modern-day academic arrow-pointing to
this clever counter-subject and that oh-so-logical key-change and so
on.
The enigmatic language of Scriabin and Messiaen found even greater
empathy in him.
Scriabin was conveyed with a kind of swimmy headiness, sometimes
ravishing in the subtle nuances of colour and rhythm, at other
times swirling with delirious abandon, the entire flow sounding so
irresistibly incandescent as to disarm criticism of some choppiness
and to render mental comparisons with other hallowed Scriabin players
odious and unnecessary.
The same could be said of the four representative movements from
Messiaen's Catholic-inspired cycle, Vingt Regards Sur L'Enfant Jesus.
The Almighty deserved nothing less than hypnotic colouring for His
opening theme, just as the rambunctious tam-tam celebrations of the
Holy Birth had to be genuinely exhilarating.
In the rapt intensity of the Kiss Of The Child Jesus, one was reminded
that music-making is really something that comes from being genuinely
inspired.
Presented in this rarefied way, music can make our hearts pound; our
senses are teased, our deepest emotions engaged in a most profound
way.
Ah, is this not why we love music so very much?
Copyright (c) 2000 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.
Cheers,
Lionel Choi
Singapore
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