A review of the concert on November 18, 2007 by Gary Lemco.

With the last chords — even a few added riffs — to Chopin’s Second Scherzo in B-flat Minor, veteran pianist Anton Kuerti concluded a whirlwind, Dionysiac piano recital at San Jose’s Le Petit Trianon Theatre, courtesy the Steinway Society the Bay Area, Sunday, November 18. Fluency and implosive, passionate fire marked Kuerti’s Chopin, from the outset of his first piece in the diptych, the knotty Polonaise-Fantasie in A-flat, Op. 61, whose episodic labyrinths seemed to have enmeshed Kuerti, except that the individual details emerged so fancifully and strongly taut that maintaining the extended arch of its design no longer mattered Its coda, too, enjoyed the absolutely unfettered bravura of a committed, virtuoso technique in the service of a penetrating musical intellect.

Anton Kuerti comes to the Viennese-Polish tradition honestly, via the tutelage of Mieczyslaw Horszowski, himself a pupil of the legendary Leschetizky. Kuerti’s opening foray into Haydn’s Piano Sonata No. 38 in F proceeded with both crystalline grace and ferocious motor power, a capacity for the long and line and blazing fioritura that literally swept us away in a sonata-movement from Carl Czerny, whose music Kuerti has revived with singular fervor. This rousing etude could have been penned by Liszt as another Grand Galop chromatique, a _sturm und drang_ toccata with all the trimmings. The Steinway grand Kuerti played resounded with bold strokes and excited gestures, all without yielding to the temptations of percussive histrionics Beethoven’s Sonata in F, Op. 10, No. 2 made obeisance to Haydn, but its second movement evinced aspects of the _empfindamkeit_ style of cantilena, introspective and highly stylized.

For this listener the highlight of the evening took the form of Schumann’s splendid Fantasie in C, Op. 17, originally construed as a testament to Beethoven, with musical allusions that extend backwards to the _Banquetto musicali_ of Frescobaldi. Eminently dramatic, the piece is at once a three-part monument of Romantic Agony and hothouse flower, the first movement breaking off “in the style of a legend” that combines maerchen (fairy-tale marches) with the “dancing letters” typical of the composer’s love of anagrams The second movement, another syncopated march, had Kuerti’s jaw set, his back and arms hunched as though communing only with himself and Schumann’s notions of inwardness. The last movement, whose arpeggios seem to borrow a page from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, became an exalted paean to night, a musical analogue to the poet Novalis. Only indicating our presence with the briefest of nods, Kuerti accepted the unbridled standing ovations with a curt tolerance, perhaps unaware of how much the lyric drama whose mantle graced the shoulders of Backhaus, Kempff, and Serkin, now rests between his talented fingers.