SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Three Nocturnes, Op. 9
Two Polonaises, Op. 40
Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 35
Mazurkas, Op. 7 Nos. 1, 2, and 3
Mazurka in C sharp minor, Op. 30 No. 4
Waltz in A flat major, Op. 42
Scherzo No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 31

There are recitals of piano music that are all about the pianist, and then there are those that are about the music. This recital was the second of two announced as a celebration jointly of Chopin’s 200th birthday and of the 40th anniversary of Garrick Ohlsson’s winning the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. But Ohlsson is the least self-advertising of musicians, and there was no doubt where the focus of this evening lay.

Nearly twenty years ago, it was performances by the great Czech pianist Ivan Moravec that converted me from a distant admirer into an enthusiastic lover of Chopin’s music. Ohlsson, I think, occupies an entirely comparable plane of interpretative insight, expressive power, technical mastery, and sheer musical modesty. Like Moravec’s, his playing stands as a salutary corrective to the all-too-common view of Chopin as a sort of effete, nervous ninny of the keyboard. In this beautifully balanced program, we heard a composer endowed with as much virility as sensitivity, the explosions of passion in whose music exert a hugely dramatic impact not least because they occur at the least predictable moments.

It would be hard to single out a few of the evening’s performance as outstanding, because Ohlsson showed himself the master of every Chopinesque facet. But perhaps what I loved most about his playing was the way it evoked the composer’s characteristic balance of rhythmic impetus with an almost mystical timelessness. In pieces like the A-major Polonaise of Op. 40, known as the “Military” (and in the wonderful A-flat-major Polonaise, Op. 53, offered as a second encore in response to a vociferous standing ovation from the packed house), it was the richness of Ohlsson’s tone and the brilliance of his finger-work–his clarity and accuracy in the matter of what George Bernard Shaw used to call “marksmanship”–that impressed most vividly. Yet perhaps even more remarkable were his breathtaking flirtations on the very edge of audibility: the central section of the funeral march in the Second Sonata, for example, was given with an eggshell-walking delicacy that still never lost evenness of touch.

In performing that astonishing movement, even as great an interpreter as Rachmaninoff told us more about himself than about Chopin. With Ohlsson, it was the composer that was uncompromisingly served. An unforgettable evening.

Bernard Jacobson

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