A review of the concert on April 29, 2007 by Gary Lemco.
Russian piano virtuoso Nikolai Demidenko played nothing less than a blistering concert at Le Petit Trianon Theatre Sunday, April 29 under the auspices of the Steinway Society the Bay Area, a demonstration of prowess and emotional fury rare in this reviewer’s experience. Demidenko’s program of Bach, Liszt, and Schumann provided musical fodder, or rather ammunition, for his volatile temperament, which might be the musical equivalent of the late Marlon Brando. That the spirit of Liszt was nigh we could experience palpably, in the music and in the demonic punching power of Demidenko’s art, which paradoxically did not want for the poetic turn.
Acquiescing to the merest, most peremptory of smiles, bows, and audience contact, Demidenko, once situated before the keyboard, transforms from a mild-looking accountant into a man possessed. He opened with Bach Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542 in the Liszt arrangement. What began as Dante’s descent into the catacombs soon assumed a motor power and massive sonority that combined oratory with rhetorical fluency in the pursuit of transcendence, poetry and percussiveness. That Demidenko could make the piano imitate the organ’s diapason, rife with pedal tones and illuminated, musical tapestry already testified to a pianist of superior cloth. Hard upon the G Minor Fantasy and Fugue came Bach’s own “Italian” Concerto in F Major, pungent and sparkling at once. Infinitely aggressive yet curiously serene, Demidenko’s rendition set a pace strictly in the bravura style, dancing rocks indeed, but no less generous with its sinuous rills. An arched, pointed, disturbed militancy pervaded the Andante; and then the Presto, demonic and swift, breathless but not shapeless as the pianist’s fleet fingers tossed Bach’s several- voiced inventions into the air, presto become prestidigitation.
Two cornerstones of the Romantic ethos, even Romantic Agony, comprised the remainder of the evening. Liszt’s Variations on Bach’s Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Klagen from Cantata 12 (1862) provided Demidenko with a monumental, even obsessive vehicle for his capacity to impose an elastic tension on music of somber, chromatic beauty. Liszt takes Bach’s serpentine bass melody and casts it into 46 variants of increasingly virtuosic character, a series of set of etudes in the form of a passacaglia. Much of Liszt’s texture points to 20th century harmony and octave displacement, painful dissonances and huge contrasts in chordal then pointillist part-writing. Dense, punishing music, assumed to have been written to mark the death of Liszt’s eldest daughter, the piece under Demidenko made a shattering impression, for which we were both grateful and subdued.
The last piece of the program per se was Schumann’s Sonata No. 1 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11 (1835), another of this composer’s convulsive responses to his own love life, cast as a fitful fever of visions, mood-swings, and mischievous intermezzi. From the outset, with its obsessive tremolandi to its later repetitions of martial and hymn-like riffs, Demidenko kept us mesmerized, torn between Schumann’s mephitic rampages through a sea of troubles, and his desire to evoke some hidden tone or harmony just beyond his grasp, the Philosophers Stone for which he strives in his own C Major Fantasie. The more vehement sections recalled similar shock-waves in the Liszt B Minor Sonata; the lighter filigree evoked Schumann’s song _Fruhlingsnacht_. And after the torments and the ecstasies, the audience aclamor at Demidenko’s feet, he tossed off three charming, pearly, ingenuously tender Scarlatti sonatas, diaphanous gems to soothe the many passions his exquisite art had so thoroughly unleashed.
