Husum Castle has since 1987 hosted a festival like
none other, entirely dedicated to the piano and to little-known repertoire.
And every year Danacord brings out a CD containing selections from the
Festival’s recitals. Previous issues have been enthusiastically reviewed
for the site by my colleagues. If I strike a slightly cautious note,
I have the idea, looking at the programmes of the earlier discs, that
2001 may have been a relatively lean year, though it does conclude with
one "typical" contribution.
These days a Dohnányi Rhapsody is only middling
rare, but this is a sombrely impressive piece which makes much use of
the "Dies Irae" motive. Perl produces the right sound, full
and rounded, and sees that the right melodic strands come through.
Failure to do this renders naught Fredrik Ullén’s
performance of "La Fileuse" by the Finnish composer Laura
Netzel. The piece itself has little value, but if the right hand was
made to sound like fantastic filigree, as Ignaz Friedman might have
done it, and the left-hand melody sung out, it would make its point.
Unfortunately Ullén appears unable to differentiate between the
hands. The figuration is accurate enough but it is heavy and the melody
hardly comes through. He deals sympathetically with the early Bartók
pieces.
The Croat pianist Kemal Gekic has works by two of his
native countrymen. Tajcevic’s Balkan Dances are neatly turned miniatures
after the Bartók model; Papandopulo’s Study is the sort of run-of-the-mill
bit of modernism that could have been produced anywhere in the same
year (1956).
Hindemith’s Third Sonata is not exactly unfamiliar,
having been a standard choice for "the modern piece" in conservatoire
programmes for about fifty years. Not that this means it shouldn’t be
played in concert too, and Enrico Pace gives its swifter movements plenty
of committed vitality. That he fails to make the slower movements sound
more than gruffly dogged is a problem that practically everyone who
has played Hindemith’s piano works has had to face. And yet, if the
performer cannot reveal genuine beauty in the writing, then neither
can he hold off our sniggering acquiescence in Constant Lambert’s outrageous
jibe (about another Hindemith work): "Its combination of natural
aridity with deliberate virtuosity is indeed most displeasing. Exhibitionism
is only to be tolerated in the physically attractive" (Music
Ho! Faber 1931, p. 191).
Another Italian pianist, Giovanni Bellucci, gives a
very sensitive, non-exhibitionist, performance of Liszt’s sombre "Aida-Fantasy",
limpid of tone in the gentler moments, warm and rounded in the heavier
ones. This piece was written in 1871 when the opera was brand new; it
had its first production in Cairo that same year and was not performed
in Europe till 1872 (at La Scala). It is extraordinary how utterly un-Verdian
Liszt makes it all sound. Though I admire many of his operatic fantasies
and paraphrases, in this case I wish he had been a little less quick
off the mark. With more time to think he might have realised how Verdi’s
increased stature and mastery announced in this opera demanded treatment
to match it. As it is, the more notes he adds the more reductive he
becomes, scaling Verdi’s Nile down to the size of an ornate goldfish
tank.
Gottschalk’s breezy, colourful piece gets a breezy,
colourful performance.
Cor de Groot is a vaguely recollected name from my
earliest record-collecting days when some of his mono LPs (for example
the first two Beethoven concertos with the Vienna Symphony under Otterloo)
were on a cheap Philips label. The two brief pieces here are in a pleasing,
slightly jazzy mode, but something more substantial will have to be
found if a case is to be made for de Groot as a composer. The Dutch
pianist Frédéric Meinders then presents his own working
of a song by the Brazilian composer Antonio Carols Jobim; beautifully
written, moving from an atmospheric opening to a livelier conclusion.
About the Mendelssohn I am in two minds. Meinders is
a poet to his fingertips and he teases and assuages the ear to haunting
effect. On the other hand his treatment of dynamics, his soloing out
of single lines in a contrapuntal texture, his rhythmic separation of
the hands and his continual insertion of commas and rallentandos is
very far from what Mendelssohn actually wrote. The trouble is, as I
have just demonstrated for myself, if you play the piece simply and
flowingly, as I imagine was intended, it doesn’t actually sound very
interesting, whereas by the time Meinders has finished with it, it does.
Konstantin Scherbakov is maybe the one pianist here
who comes up with a "classic" Husum Castle event; Godowsky’s
outrageous tarting up of Schubert’s "Morgengruss" played with
calm artistry and a Ballad by the American Rzewski which combines bigness
of utterance with melodic simplicity and contrapuntal complexity.
As I said at the beginning, overall this is not one
of the more mouth-watering programmes in the series; if you haven’t
got any of these Husum CDs, I suggest you study the contents of them
all before choosing. If you are collecting these discs, then rest assured
that items of interest are certainly present on the latest, mostly well-recorded,
occasional patches of distortion resulting presumably from a very close
microphone balance intended, I suppose, to minimise audience noise.
In fact, the odd cough seems to be coming from some very distant vault,
reminding us that ancient castles should be well-equipped to deal with
recidivist concert-coughers.
Christopher Howell
Alfredo Perl (pianoforte)