By Donald Waxman
Benjamin Grosvenor, the much-heralded young British pianist, is only 21, but he began performing in public and winning awards at the age of 10 and hasn’t stopped since. His current concert itinerary shows him playing two or three solo or orchestral concerts a week worldwide for the entirety of the concert season.
For his recital at the Society of the Four Arts on Feb. 9, he had prepared a highly unusual program, looking somewhat like a throwback to 19th-century piano recitals, which were often made up of a string of short pieces. The first half of the program began with Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso and Schubert’s Impromptu in G-flat (D. 899, No. 3). These were followed by Schumann’s Humoreske (Op. 20), a suite of seven relatively short pieces.
After intermission were three vignettes by Federico Mompou and two Fairy Tales by Nicolai Medtner, followed by Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, which is a collection of eight waltzes, some less than a minute long. The Liszt transcription of the Valse from Gounod’s Faust was the longest single piece on the program. Would such a program, a brilliantly colored string of beads, work? As it turned out, it proved to be one of the most interesting and brilliant piano recitals of the season to date.
The Mendelssohn Rondo Capriccioso and Schubert Impromptu in G-flat are two of the most popular piano pieces in the romantic literature. Stroll down the halls of any conservatory in the world and you will probably hear students practicing these pieces. The Rondo Capriccioso has the same characteristics as his Midsummer Night’s Dream overture: swift, light and highly polished, a style that has come to be called Mendelssohnian.
Grosvenor gave a very stylish performance of the Rondo capriccioso, a Mendelssohnian one in the best sense; but as well, he had worked out many original ideas that gave this very familiar piece a fresh sound.
For example, the Rondo begins with a rapid three-note figure that reappears in rondo form throughout the piece. It is the same figure that is in Rossini’s William Tell Overture and that at fast tempos is conventionally played without accents. Grosvenor attacks the first note of the figure with a tiny jab; a small puff of gunpowder that gives an extra push to a piece already moving at top speed. This is an example of an inventive musical mind that is constantly in play, Grosvenor has a flawless technique and a prodigious memory, but so do many of today’s young piano virtuosos. What sets him apart is the abundance of original ideas in his interpretations.
The Schubert impromptus are as Schubertian as the Rondo capriccioso is Mendelssohnian, his intimate, spacious music unfolding in one long song. In the Feb. 9 performance, Grosvenor’s left hand was the perfect accompanist; his right hand, a beautiful bel canto singer.
Unlike the two familiar works that opened the program, the Schumann suite that followed, the Humoreske, is seldom heard. Schumann composed many suites of short piano pieces, a genre that marked a radical departure from the formal structures of the classic period. The suite was an important form in the neue musik of the 19th century, and Schumann, an avant gardist in his time, was its foremost proponent.
In some of the Schumann suites the pieces are pictorial, as in the Forest Scene; others are collections of characteristic pieces such as marches, lullabies, elegies, and the like. The Humoreske suite belongs to neither category; its movements are all abstract. In spite of the title, it is not a set of humorous pieces but borrows its name from a 19th -century literary term describing free-form sketches.
As with the Mendelssohn and Schubert, Grosvenor played these pieces stylishly, with just the right mix of affection, playfulness and brilliance; in a word, Schumannesque. However, the Op. 20 suite is not without flaws. Its seven pieces are each only three to five minutes long, but that adds up to almost a half-hour of music. Schumann wanted the pieces played without pause, and they are predominately in just two keys, B-flat major and G minor. Thus, the Humoreske seemed like one long work that had neither the unity of the classic sonata nor the ever-changing colors and moods of the ideal romantic suite.
Grosvenor has a very distinct persona at the piano. He sits somewhat hunched over the keyboard with fingers and arms close to the keys. He does not bob and weave with the music. He doesn’t pounce on loud chords from on high or bounce off of them in dramatic gestures. He doesn’t look heavenward with an ecstatic expression on his face. His eyes remain glued to the keys at all times.
He has an awesome technique and sounded as though he played an entire program without a slip; or, even more impressively, if he made a slip he covered it so skillfully that no one noticed. His playing can be powerful, nuanced, dazzling, introspective — whatever the music calls for.
Some critics have complained that he does not have much of a stage presence. He doesn’t need to; his charisma is in the music, where it should be. It is true that his bows to the audience, for example, are somewhat perfunctory; but that is of small consequence.
Following intermission, Grosvenor played Paisajes (Landscapes), a set of three short pieces by the early 20th-century Catalan composer Federico Mompou, followed by two of the Fairy Tales of Nicolai Medtner, a Russian composer whose lifetime straddled the 19th and 20th centuries.
Mompou’s slim catalogue of compositions consists almost entirely of short piano pieces and songs. In his evocative piano vignettes one hears echoes of his native Barcelona: street cries, children’s songs and Catalan folksongs; but there are never the strong accented rhythms that one associates with Spanish music. Mompou’s harmonic language and textures are more French than Spanish. One might call him a Spanish impressionist.
In the opening Paisaje, Grosvenor let the elegiac melody unfold in a restrained way and employed a delicate, lacey touch for the quick-moving interlude that followed. The second Paisaje is also tinged with melancholy, and then in the middle section the music suddenly flares up in a colorful tremolando. Here, Grosvenor sounded as though he were playing not on a piano but on a shimmering cymbal; it was a magical moment.
The last of the Mompou Landscapes is the most dramatic, its repeated cluster chords sounding like distant bells. (Interestingly enough, Mompou’s family owned a bell foundry.) The harmonic language in this movement is much more complex; the music turns dark and brooding. Throughout, Grosvenor seemed remarkably attuned to this strange, introspective music. He is like a fine character actor who can play any role convincingly.
The music of Medtner is firmly rooted in late 19th-century Russian romanticism and never crossed over to 20th-century modernism even though the composer lived until 1951. However, within that very romantic tonal style Medtner has a very distinct personality of his own. Like Mompou, Medtner is primarily a composer of piano music; and of his piano works the best-known are his sets of relatively short pieces in a genre of his own, one which he called Fairy Tales. These are not fairy tales in the literal sense but, brilliant fanciful pieces that evoke faraway places and images.
Medtner’s music is difficult to play. He was a virtuoso pianist, and he did not spare those who would play his compositions. His piano music does not lie under the hands as comfortably as Mendelssohn’s or Schumann’s. That did not seem to bother Grosvenor, who gave the two Fairy Tales a commanding and colorful performance, one that seemed completely effortless.
The Medtner Fairy Tales added a different color and accent to the program and the string of beads that I alluded to had now become a resplendent necklace. The brightest jewel in that necklace was yet to come, Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.
Ravel had an ongoing love affair with the waltz, from the simple waltz of Beauty and the Beast in his Mother Goose Suite to the sumptuous succession of waltzes in his large-scale orchestral work La Valse. The Valses Nobles et Sentimentales is a piano suite of eight pieces in waltz rhythm, each different in color and affect. These are not so much dances in tthree-quarter time as portraits of the waltz. Some pianists pull out all the stops in the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, turning it into an impassioned virtuoso piece; but it is elegant French music and doesn’t bear well a steamy interpretation.
Grosvenor played it in a cool fashion — French cool. It was a brilliant performance, crystal clear and impeccably articulated. In the succession of movements, one heard subtle differences: great sweeping moments and suave lilting ones, and even a seductive hint of jazz. For this listener, it was the highlight of the afternoon.
I could not stay for the final work, the Liszt paraphrase from Gounod’s opera Faust; but by all accounts it was a smashing display of pyrotechnics that brought the distinguished audience at the Four Arts to its feet in a rousing ovation. Here’s hoping that the Four Arts will book the British pianist for a return engagement as soon as his busy concert schedule permits.
When that does occur I would look forward to hearing him play a different kind of program. Perhaps it would include a Bach partita or a late Beethoven sonata or other large scale works from the pre-Romantic eras. I particularly hope that he would play some contemporary music from his country and ours, perhaps music by the British composer Thomas Adès or the American composer William Bolcom, or perhaps music by the much-acclaimed composer who grew up in West Palm Beach, Richard Danielpour.
Donald Waxman is a composer and contributor to Palm Beach ArtsPaper.