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Beethoven, Prokofiev, Schumann, Debussy and Rachmaninoff:  Martyna Jatkauskaite (piano). Wigmore Hall, London. 30.11.08 (ED)


This recital marked Lithuanian pianist Martyna Jatkauskaite’s Wigmore Hall debut, awarded as part of her first prize in the 2007 Jacques Samuel Intercollegiate Piano competition.  Her burgeoning career, not least in her home country, is currently balanced by post-graduate study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

If the over-riding impression she created across the works of all five composers she played was one of strength of tone, physical power and integrity of conception,  then it says much for her well defined technique and ability to stamp authority on practically every statement she makes at the keyboard.

Beethoven’s 32 variations in C minor, WoO 80, is a work not without its problems of structure,which the composer himself admitted. Jatkauskaite rose unhesitatingly to the technical challenges the piece posed, as she did throughout the evening, and made much of the opportunities to produce rich and robust fortissimo playing, leaving one in no doubt that she sees Beethoven as a composer struggling with form and his own creative instincts.

As a composer, Prokofiev could be tongue-in-cheek when the mood took him, but Sarcasms, as the name suggests, delves deep into the most caustic recesses of his character. Martyna Jatkauskaite brought these out by pouncing on the angular rhythms within the five movements and highlighting the contrasts between the characters inherent in each, for example, the first came across as neo-romantic, whilst the second mixed neurosis with the distant perfume of Debussy in its more introvert moments. Throughout however, there was solidity in the bass register which gave the music no lack of gravitas or emotion.

Schumann’s Etudes Symphoniques – ever a challenge of form and integration of structure for pianists – closed the first half. The sequence of étude variations was powerfully and persuasively shaped to emphasise the drama within the work’s complex structure. There was an ever-present sense of adventure in the playing-off of more lyrical moments against the strongly articulated chordal writing upon which so much depends when making the most of the music.

Three movements from Debussy’s Images Book I provided an opportunity for more relaxed playing at the start of the second half. Reflets dans l’eau nevertheless was laden with emotional meaning in its power to suggest something approaching the sexual. Hommage à Rameau found Jatkauskaite negotiating the intricacies of Debussy’s sarabande-like adopted style with relative ease, whilst Mouvement explored rhythmic interplay in a hypnotic sense that was not dissimilar to Ravel’s Bolero.

All this though was in many ways but a prelude to Rachmaninoff’s second piano sonata, which concluded the recital. Little doubt was left throughout the three movements that Jatkauskaite carries with her an innate understanding of the work, and possesses the technical and musical ability effectively to link the emphatic first movement and ever increasing power of the finale via the reservation that is to be found in the middle movement. For me, this formed the work’s core in an emotional sense, out of which the grand passions of the conclusion were allowed to grow. Careful never to push the piano past its limits or to effect an unmusical tone, Jatkauskaite’s performance was at once showy yet unassuming and characterised by powerful music making yet never losing a sense of overall control.

Martyna Jatkauskaite, I suspect, will be a pianist well worth following in the future.

Evan Dickerson


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