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Liszt, Debussy, Wagner: Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano) Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 14.10.2008 (JPr)


At a stand-up comedy venue a spotlight often illuminates a solitary microphone as the comedian takes to the stage and attempts to warrant the attention of the audience from the beginning of his set to the end. Here at the Queen Elizabeth Hall a Steinway & Sons piano was suffused by a rosy glow waiting the virtuoso talents of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet to enthral us -  and maybe to connect with our emotions by playing a fascinating programme of music by Liszt, Debussy and Wagner. Only someone of unique ability can carry an audience with them for the two hours of a solo recital as given here and Bavouzet aims to be such a performer.

In the programme notes Bavouzet writes how Debussy heard the 74-year-old Liszt play and was, not surprisingly, impressed by him. In the music played in this recital Bavouzet  seemed to want to show how Liszt begat Wagner and how both might have influenced Debussy, despite the fact that Debussy called Wagner ‘the old poisoner’. Although Debussy led the French musical impressionistic movement,  like someone who 'doth protest too much', he refused to accept that his works were impressionistic in nature, and he even claimed to dislike impressionistic art. The impressionist art movement began in Paris in the 1870's and slowly spread its influence to literature and music. Debussy's compositions revealed their impressionism through shifty sounds, wavering tones, radical structures and harmonies with chords that the poet Verlaine apparently described as being ‘harmoniously dissonant’.

Liszt of course was a touring performer who gave thousands of concerts during his lifetime. He composed a great number of piano works many of which were designed to show-off his own unique abilities. Some were transcriptions  advertising new music by other composers, notably Wagner. Liszt was the figurehead of the New German School, perhaps the greatest technical pianist in history and originator of the solo piano recital. Apart from the  brilliant studies and that showed-off his technique his other compositions range include later more reflective, poetic music in which earlier bombast is replaced by more subtle colouring and shadings,  thus foreshadowing Debussy’s impressionism.

Bavouzet had obviously fretted long and hard over his musical programme and this produced a late change in the order of the music, too late for an erratum slip to be given out. It had been posted at the entrance to the auditorium and Bavouzet announced from the platform that the changed order would make ‘for an even more harmonious programme’.

He was to begin with Liszt rather than Debussy. From the start of the recital I was struck by Bavouzet’s unfussy, composed manner on the piano stool. His fingering was clear, fleet and accurate and I was quite impressed with the dramatic and emotional range he displayed complete with a broad tonal palette. For me however, there was perhaps just a little too much muscularity to his playing: he might have benefitted from being a touch more rhapsodic during the Hymne de Matin S173a from Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (first version).

Bavouzet is recording all of Debussy Piano works for Chandos and it is not surprising that he seemed more connected to this music,  playing everything with seeming affection and impressive rhythmic acuity. I found the Ballade slave very intriguing with its haunting quality. While Debussy did not meet Stravinsky until 1910, this earlier work from the 1880s must have been known to Stravinsky because it seems almost a study for  music in The Firebird. I did not find the rather ardent Nocturne,  any night that I could have slept through and the dance rhythms of Tarantella styrienne were extremely frenzied - this time bringing Petrushka to mind.

Two things in the printed programme were intriguing. According to Nick Breckenfield’s note Richard and Cosima Wagner apparently had two sons … not true. A more interesting assertion comes from Bavouzet himself who suggests that Liszt may not have written his own transcription of the Tristan und Isolde Prelude because he was ‘concerned by the last two bass G pizzicato notes ending the Prelude exactly the same way his B minor sonata starts’. Bavouzet played Zoltán Kocsis' modern transcription followed by the Liebestod. There was  sustained tension throughout and the arpeggios and tremelandos revealed a great faithfulness to the sonority of the original concert version.

More Debussy came after the interval with Images Book 1 and L’isle joyeuse in particular. Here Bavouzet revealed an added ethereal fluency to his bravura technique. Images provided a lot of inspiration for Canteloube and his Chants d’Auvergne, and L’isle joyeuse is clearly a shimmering study for La Mer.

Rather out of character from what had gone before, the final item was Liszt’s rarely-performed 1849 Grosses Konzertsolo. Published is 1856 as Concerto pathétique this was originally composed as a Paris Conservatoire competition piece. It was dedicated to the pianist Adolph von Henselt who claimed he could not play it. In 1852 Liszt sent the score to Clara Schumann in the hope she would perform it in recital. She disliked it and thought that it contained ‘empty virtuosity’  but she let Liszt down gently by replying ‘Where can a woman find the strength to play it?’ Clearly this is the  younger Liszt at his most bombastic and flamboyant in an overstated Liberace sort of way,  yet it eventually reveals an eloquently insistent funeral march on the journey to a thunderous climax.

Only in this Liszt did Bavouzet ‘lean into the music’ as I expected he might have done elsewhere in the programme. Wonderful as it all was,  I was left with the impression that his playing throughout was a little on the cool side and came from the hands not the heart. Debussy was once asked why so few people were able to play his music, after some reflection he replied ‘I think it is because they try and impose themselves on the music. It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you – to be a vessel through which it passes.’  Bavouzet’s refined playing never sought to impose itself on the music, although neither did he abandon himself to any of it sufficiently  for my liking.

The rather sparse audience in the Queen Elizabeth Hall awarded Bavouzet a well-deserved ovation for this engrossing recital and he announced we would ‘go back to quiet Debussy’ for his encore.  One of the late masterpieces,  Étude pour les arpèges composés was given a typically refined account of elegant simplicity.

Jim Pritchard


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