Thursday, September 12, 2024
Royal Albert Hall, London
Guest Reviewer, Ateş Orga
Replacing András Schiff, indisposed with a broken leg, Seong-Jin Cho, flying in from Berlin at short notice, steered clear of Bach’s originally advertised Art of Fugue with a late-night programme of Ravel and Liszt. Since winning the 2015 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, he’s come a long way – a particularly fine Beethoven chamber concert at the 2020 Solsberg Festival stays in the memory. His Miroirs triptych (omitting the first and fifth tableaux) and the Italian book of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, was a Goliathan display of pianism and fantasy. Through rarefied layers of tempo, sound, silence, touch, pedalling and dynamics, he conjectured a multitude of scenes, sketches and shadows. From the delicate intensity of the lonely B-flats opening ‘Oiseaux tristes’ (forget his rhythmic variance) and the plucked ‘dry’ resonances of ‘Alborada del gracioso’ it was clear we were in for no ordinary recital. He did wonderful things with the lower end of the instrument, from sensually velvet, full-throated low octaves (pedalled, non-pedalled) to sudden Vesuvian explosions and tensioned climactic crescendos. His voicing, cadenzas, and the delayed shaping of Liszt’s cadences showed an innate understanding of style and Romantic sensibility. In the ‘Petrarch Sonnets’ (encore similarly, Liszt’s D-flat third Consolation), cantabile aria, liquid ornament, dreaming intimacy and tonal beauty were everything. The closing ‘Dante Sonata’ stormed, surged and sighed, a pole-axing symphonic narrative. Satanic (“Abandon hope all ye who enter here”). Hellish, a fevered Presto agitato assai.Heavenly, an Andante, progressively tearful, improvisatory, loving, impassioned (Francesca da Rimini). Cho’s imagination and authority was a triumph, an artist possessed, a thespian caught high on the wing, scaling the vistas of the world. Piano-playing in the grand manner.
Maurice Ravel Miroirs – Oiseaux exotiques; Un barque sur l’oceán; Alborada del gracioso
Franz Liszt Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022k73