A review of the concert on May 4, 2008 by Gary Lemco.
Concluding the 2007-2008 series of Steinway Society the Bay Area concerts, the youthful Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz (b. 1985) performed at Le Petit Trianon Theatre Sunday, May 4, presenting a large program that included music by Mozart, Debussy, Szymanowski, and Chopin. The major work, Chopin’s Op. 28 Preludes, revealed a true exponent of the poet-virtuoso, a technician and colorist of high ideals and often quicksilver textures who brought an enraptured audience to its collective feet several times, enough to warrant two encores, the last of which, Moszkowski’s effervescent “Etincelles,” might have stood for the éclat that marked the entire evening’s music-making.
Looking every lean inch the hot-blooded Polish youth, virtuoso Rafal Blechacz plays the piano with what his countrymen call zal, enthusiastic energy and verve, tempered by a classical poise more evocative of Lipatti than Cortot. Blechasz opened with Mozart’s relatively rare Sonata in D Major, K. 311 (1777), a sunny, experimental piece in three movements, whose Allegro requires light, graceful trills and passing notes, a whirling filigree Blechacz executed with lithe finesse. His aggressively bright attacks provided motor power while Mozart’s codetta became a development section unto itself, moving to a recap of the themes in reverse order. The slow movement, a kind of French rondeau, had taste and direct, vocal appeal. The last movement, a full-fledged Italian rondo, elicited a more concertante effect, even adding a cadenza to suggest a concerto for solo piano.
If the Mozart engaged Blechacz’s capacity for bold, classic lines, Debussy’s three Estampes (1903) or portrait-lacquers, smeared their colors in a way that both illuminated this composer’s unique style as well as shed light on Blechacz’s approach to Chopin. The exoticism of Pagodes shimmered with a pungent, olfactory sensuality; even the chords seemed tiered as they unfolded their oriental languor. If Evening in Granada was to have evoked a Moorish garden, its rills passed by too quickly under Blechacz’s etude-like treatment, the tempo having turned a modal, habanera-borne paradise into a blur of guitars. Gardens in the Rain, however, succumbed to the “study” effects gratefully, the arpegggios’ quivering velocity ripe with plastic, hypnotic colors.
To conclude the first half of his recital, Blechacz proffered the Variations in B-flat Minor, Op. 3 of Karol Szymanowski (1903), a virtuoso set of twelve variations on a theme solidly based on the example of the Brahms Paganini Variations, Op. 35. The modal theme itself is all Poland, perhaps touched by the sentimental spirit of Paderewski. What follows is a series of learned, often contrapuntal dialogues and exercises in massive filigree and spans, the octaves and runs thoroughly in the bravura, Lisztian style. In passing, we might discern _ostinato_ allusions to Handel’s Chaconne in G Minor and the block chords that conclude Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Often titanic in scope and scale, the Szymanowski proved Blechacz capable of fire and poetry in a national style whose syntax remains indisputably unique, often lost in “export”.
Chopin’s set of 24 Preludes, Op. 28 (1838) remains the Rosetta Stone for Romantic keyboard rhetoric: in no “set” form, they comprise a sequence of tonal responses arranged around the circle of fifths in every key of the chromatic scale. Often abbreviated, they can be nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes, etudes, or truncated sonata-movements. Their interdependence in key, texture, ornamentation, vocalism, fermata, and delay of the tonic still compel us through the entirely idiomatic style of the keyboard writing. Each of us has his favorites: Blechacz accented the weird asymmetry of the A Minor; he propelled the E Major as a fateful ascent; the vocal A-flat Major became a kind of _de profundis_; the F Major the calm eye of the storm that erupts volcanically in the D Minor, No. 24. Having swept us away in the throes of Chopin’s mercurial convulsions to George Sand, Blechacz graced us with his first encore. Chopin’s perennial Waltz in C-sharp Minor, the wand of eternal youth, of that feminine impulse which the poet says leads us onward, higher toward Parnassus.
