MUSIC: The Purpose of a Recital
Andras Schiff and Friends, Janacek Recital, Wigmore Hall & Manuel Villet, Piano Recital, St. John’s, Smith Sq
Andras Schiff and Friends, Janacek Recital, Wigmore Hall, 28th March;
Manuel Villet, Piano Recital, St. John’s, Smith Square, 9th April.
‘A recital programme’, Andras Schiff has written, ‘is the pianist’s visiting card. It reflects on the performer’s taste and intelligence in a way that the public is influenced by it before she or he has played a single note’. This is perfectly true and has been so since Moscheles instituted the solo recital as we know it in the 1820s with his ‘historical soirées’, at the same time taking some of the first steps to formalising the definitive canon of ‘the classics’ in music. In Moscheles’s case his aims were largely polemical — he was directing his public as to what they should listen to. Eventually the canonical repertoire became a comfortable habit with the listening public, a recipe for recital programming which in Schiff’s words was predictable but effective. Today the younger generation of soloists has taken up the role once more of seeking to form and educate their public, as did Moscheles; but the appeal of the old virtuosic recital has not died out. These two London recitals, within a few days of each other, are interesting examples of either genre.
Schiff may be sometimes demanding, sometimes austere in his programming, but the clear implication behind all his recitals is that he – and his colleagues, where appropriate – are to be regarded as mediators with the masters, not primarily as personalities in their own right. This can lead to a certain emotional coolness, which in itself may be inspiring, especially when coupled with intellectual perspicacity – a wonderful performance of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ I heard a couple of years ago in Brussels remains one of my most treasured concert experiences.
Recently in London Schiff has chosen to promote the chamber music of Janacek, and the recital at the Wigmore Hall on the 28th featured two of the composer’s major piano pieces, the surviving movements of the sonata I.X.1905 and the suite In the Mists, as well as the concertino for piano and chamber ensemble, the first String Quartet (played by the Panocha Quartet) and the rollicking suite for wind ensemble, Mládi ('Youth'). The quartet (confusingly entitled, after the Tolstoy story, The Kreutzer Sonata) is the most well-known of these in the British concert hall, having become a favourite of many of our own ensembles. The Panocha Quartet proved that there is no substitute for the natives in interpreting Janacek’s intense and pithy style. But Schiff’s solo performances stood out; the fragmented melodies, the profound introspective interludes, the harmonies now spare, now romantically lush, maintained an enraptured audience. Perhaps Schiff’s now famous anathema on coughers also helped to keep us behaved, but all of us had to acknowledge his illuminating power to lead us confidently into these still too-little known corners of the repertoire.
If Schiff is in some ways a modern equivalent of the intellectual approach of Moscheles, the programme of the veteran Manuel Villet placed him firmly in the tradition of the more explicitly virtuoso Liszt. Mozart and Brahms sonatas, some pieces of Debussy and barn-storming examples of Liszt himself, denote an almost archetypal romantic recital. We are here to experience the artist’s interpretation of the music, rather than to be brought before the altar of the essence of a composer. And it was not really until we came to the Liszt pieces that Villet’s powers of engagement began to reveal themselves. Here we had a real sense of the titanic struggle of Liszt and some of his contemporaries to test the physical properties of the combination of man and piano to their utmost. As Browning frankly remarked, ‘Our interest’s in the dangerous edge of things’. The fantasy on Mozart’s Don Giovanni is not only daemonic in its conception – the ballad ‘La ci darem’ and the praise of champagne being framed and ultimately overwhelmed by the sinister themes of the avenging statue – it is fiendish in its elaboration and electric in such a committed execution. The physical challenge engages the audience as much, (or maybe even more), than the elements of the musical conception. At the triumphal conclusion of this piece, Villet was a genuine hero.
It is not surprising that Schiff, despite his Hungarian origins, clearly cannot abide Liszt and never performs his music. For him perhaps Liszt is too much ‘of the earth, earthy’. Yet music is undeniably a physical as well as a spiritual experience and audiences are interested in registering both these aspects of its powers. For this reason, those rare and exceptional artists who are able to evoke this full range – a Chaliapin, a Rubinstein, a Rostropovich – are our cynosures. But they don’t turn up every day. As a card-carrying intellectual of course I talk Schiff – but, sneakily, I enjoy feeling Villet.
Allen Buchler, April 11, 2003 08:48 AM