CityLife

Murray Perahia

Robert Beale
Bridgewater Hall, RNCM
February 15 and 17, 2010

It's been a good week for piano recitals. First there was Murray Perahia at the Bridgewater Hall (February 15), completing the ‘mini-residency’ he began by appearing as conductor with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields late last year.

He is one of those pianists who is a phenomenon just to witness, with a style – controlled, proportioned and yet virtuosic – which is a performance in itself. Even when he becomes a little wayward, the experience of the music-making is the dominating thing.

He played music he is known for, beginning with Bach’s Partita no. 6 (BWV830). It’s an extraordinary work, and he caught its alternations of bravura and tenderness to remarkable effect.

It was a thoroughly modern performance, with its own touches of Romantic drama here and daintiness there, but never at odds with its original. He does not mistake the trees for the wood.

Beethoven’s Sonata no.30 in E (op. 109) is a challenge for anyone, with its long series of variations as a finale, and Perahia mixed briskness and a fair dollop of sentiment.

His Chopin selection, which filled the second half, began with a masterly account of the third Ballade, and continued with three of the Etudes, which were warmly received.

He chose three Mazurkas, of which the C sharp minor (op. 50 no. 3) was the most substantial, with a big range of expression brought to bear (though I always long for more rubato in these pieces, bearing in mind Charles Hallé’s observation that you could actually count in four when Chopin himself played them). 

The fourth Scherzo brought the programme to a barnstorming close.

Graham Scott’s performance for Manchester Recitals at the Royal Northern College of Music (February 17), began with the same Beethoven sonata Perahia had played. It was in a different acoustic (more suited) and his approach was an exposition of the text rather than a demonstration of technique, but with an emotional engagement which I found more satisfying.

Scott’s programme was a weighty one, including a finely shaped account of Berg’s piano sonata, a superbly fiery one of Liszt’s Variations On Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, and a richly multi-faceted one of Rachmaninov’s Sonata no. 2, notable for its balanced tone and tenderness as much as its clangorous climaxes. 

It also included a world premiere: Absinthe, by Adam Gorb. It was (the composer told us so) explicitly about the breakdown of a relationship between two people – and yet, as experienced, it was inevitably a kind of dialogue between those characters.

Gorb, self-deprecatingly, called it ‘really decadent’, and it was perhaps self-indulgent, to the point of obsessional, in its use of devices such as sympathetic string vibration and crashing note clusters, as well as a periodic, intoxicated, haze of late-Romantic harmony.

But then, maybe obsession was the very thing it was designed to be about. Graham Scott played it with devotion.

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