A little improvisation can work wonders in a recital, and it's a forgotten practice that is worth remembering, writes MICHAEL DERVAN
AUDIENCES ALWAYS seem to like it when performers talk to them. Soprano Claudia Boyle warmed up the house with a wisecrack in her Rising Star recital (NCH, Wednesday) when the auditorium doors were opened by mistake at the wrong time, and she came back on stage to see a handful of people making for the foyers in the belief that the interval had arrived. And pianist Stephen Hough (NCH, Sunday) offered a personal perspective on the evening's programme between performances of Beethoven's MoonlightSonata and his own Broken BranchesSonata, generously seeking to address the listeners in the choir balcony as well as those in front of him, who had dearer tickets.
In a short space of time Hough reminded everyone of how unusual the Moonlightis. The lapping dreaminess that seems like nothing else in music, followed by a minuet, and then by a finale that arrives like a stormy outburst, is not exactly the everyday meat of an early 19th-century sonata. As he pointed out, the evening's other works – Scriabin's Fifth Sonata, Liszt's Sonata in B minor, and his own piece – all share the characteristic of ending with the material they began with.
He also drew attention to the fact that the almost improvisatory opening of the Moonlightcould serve as a reminder of a time when pianists would improvise a little before they started to play. The Irish pianist Charles Lynch (1906-84) did something on these lines when I heard him in recital, stretching his arms outwards towards the ends of the keyboard, apparently to make sure he was seated exactly where he wanted to be, and then playing a few warm-up chords, almost as if to remind himself what the piano in front of him would be like to play.
I've come across a few recordings that feature more fully the kind of improvisation that Hough was talking about. The Italian label Ermitage issued swathes of tapes from the archives of RSI, Switzerland's Italian-language radio service, in the 1990s. A concert by German pianist Wilhelm Backhaus (1884-1969), taped in Lugano in 1953, found him improvising little connections between items in a selection of pieces by Chopin. And the baritone George Henschel (1850-1934), a friend of Brahms and a multi-faceted musician who was also the first conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, recorded, to his own piano accompaniment, two songs by Schumann in 1914 (re-issued in EMI's compendious A Record of Singingsurvey), where he improvised a connection to take the listener from the key of the first song to the key of the next. No doubt when the period performance brigade get fully into the manners and practices of the early 20th century, we'll hear a lot more of almost forgotten practices like this.
Improvisation, or at least the sense of the spontaneous gesture, was by no means absent from Hough’s music-making on Sunday. It was at its most obvious in Liszt’s B minor Sonata, where the player managed to make himself seem tossed and turned by the very sounds and emotions he was himself churning up. It was at times as if he was having to make his mind up about quite how violent the next frenzy – or just how slow or dilated a retreat into reverie – might be allowed to become.
It’s not an easy ploy to bring off in this particular sonata, as any number of piano-competition hopefuls have discovered to the cost of themselves, their listeners and their juries. The ears and mind tire of flying octaves whipped up too much and too often. Hough showed how to balance the extremes and also offered subtle surprises by underplaying passages that are normally thundered out. The Liszt Sonata sounds at its best in performances such as this, which avoid stressing the obvious.
Hough calls his own Broken BranchesSonata "an oblique tribute to Janacek's cycle On an Overgrown Path". And that's how it sounds, too, a sequence of sometimes obsessive fragments of the kind that Janacek made so uniquely his own. The intensity of gesture in Hough's piece, however, doesn't always seem to have found ideal expression, and, even in the composer's playing, the material at times sounded forced beyond what it had to yield.
Extravagant would probably be a mild word to characterise Scriabin's Fifth Sonata of 1907. The markings for its very opening include " Impetuoso. Con stravaganza" (Impetuously. With eccentricity) and later markings run to " quasi trombe, imperioso" (like trumpets, imperiously), " tumultuoso esaltato" (tumultuous, exalted), and " vertiginoso con furia" (dizzily with fury). Hough kept things too much under control for the wildness of the musical conception to work, and sounded altogether more at home when the music turned languid or caressing.
His playing of the Moonlight (about which Scriabin is reported to have said, “I can’t abide such music”) was neatly characterised, sensitively coloured, and well controlled. But somehow it also managed to sound, even in the finale, like the work of someone who was consciously on good behaviour, holding themselves back in some way. There was no such feeling in the group of three encores, the last of which, Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat, Op 9 No 1, was exquisite in its delicacy, as if spun from the finest, softest silk.
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (NCH, Friday) found Alan Buribayev doing to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony what hordes of young pianists have done to Liszt’s B minor Sonata. Audiences usually enjoy the particular kind of tumult and pulling of heartstrings that’s involved, and they did on this occasion, too. But the shock value of a Jerry Bruckheimer approach to Tchaikovsky is one I’ve never warmed to.
The concert’s real heart came before the interval, when Russian cellist Natalia Gutman gave a commanding account of Prokofiev’s problematic late Sinfonia Concertante (a reworking of his earlier, and even more problematic Cello Concerto). Gutman’s playing, discerningly super-charged in musical approach and sheerly gorgeous in sound, here had a sensitive musical partner in Buribayev, and her Prokofiev was trumped only by her playing of some solo Bach as an encore.
And the Rising Star, Claudia Boyle? Her recital, with Mairéad Hurley at the piano, showed presence and personality. The voice is clear and even, and she does a good line in, as it were, picking notes out of the air, anywhere in her range, a skill that always impresses when the notes are high. She’s not only got lots of those high notes, she also knows how to space them out in a programme, so that each new reach and grasp can make the maximum effect.
She also does elegance and finds moments to shape and colour in unexpected ways. Most times I've heard her she has done something that earlier hadn't seemed within her grasp. She's not entirely consistent yet, and she may be a little too fond of playing coquette and soubrette. But she's already got engagements at a high level, in Mozart's Entführungwith Berlin's Komische Oper in April and May (a Calixto Bieto production which, I kid you not, is recommended only for over-18s), Britten's Midsummer Night's Dreamwith the Teatro dell' Opera di Roma in June (when the conductor is James Conlon) and as the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Magic Flutewith Chicago Opera Theater in September. The big question is when will we get to hear her sing again in Ireland?
