Don Giovanni Overture - Mozart
Totentanz - Liszt
Piano Concerto in D K537(Coronation) - Mozart
Don Juan - Strauss
Corrado Rollero from Italy was hotly tipped as one of the favourites to win the 1997 Guardian Dublin International Piano Competition. Based on what I heard during the competition, I would have given him the first prize myself. But the jury inclined otherwise, and opted instead for Max Levinson.
Friday's NSO concert was Rollero's first public appearance in Dublin since the competition and it offered the chance to hear him in two composers he hadn't touched on in 1997: Mozart and Liszt.
During the competition Rollero made his impression through the expedient of concentrating on substantial statements, Schumann's F sharp minor Sonata, Schubert's in B flat, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and Brahms's Second Concerto. On Friday, however, the application of the grand manner to the Coronation Concerto, one of the slightest of Mozart's maturity, simply didn't work.
On the other hand, Rollero dug deep into his pianistic resources for brassy growls and flickering glitter, for a noholds-barred account of Liszt's Totentanz. This wasn't as macabre as some players make the piece sound, but, with fullblooded partnership from the NSO under Alexander Anissimov, it lacked for little in either panache or excitement.
Mozart's Don Giovanni Overture, which opened the concert, sounded rather inflated under the grandiloquence of Anissimov's approach.
Strauss's Don Juan responded more sympathetically to the magnifying glass, which, while it did eliminate some of the music's light and shade, made more of the internal detail clear to the ear than I've ever heard in concert in Dublin before.
