A review of the concert on March 24, 2000 by Dr. Thomas Wendel.
The legendary Phillipe Entremont, conductor and pianist, plied his latter talent in a welcome return to the Bay area Friday, March 24. The artist’s appearance was the result of the fruitful collaboration between Villa Montalvo and the Steinway Society of the Bay Area, to both of whom the musical public owes a debt of gratitude.
Mr. Entremont’s beautifully balanced program featured before the intermission Mozart’s exquisite A-Major Piano Sonata, K.331 followed by what is certainly one of the mountain peaks of the piano literature, Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata, Opus 57. Following the intermission we moved from Austria of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to twentieth century France. And here Mr. Entremont was utterly in his element. The French half of the program seemed both weightier and more assured, which is not surprising from this recognized master of the French repertoire.
To this listener, though Mr. Entremont’s Mozart was beautifully wrought, it nevertheless seemed too far removed from its drawing-room eighteenth-century origins. There were what many might accept as “nice touches” — rubatos, heavy accents, great shifts in dynamics — in short, this was a quite personal reading of the work. The famous Turkish rondo seemed to lack humor; it became a matter of high seriousness.
The Beethoven Appassionata Sonata likewise received a riveting, if in the end not an altogether convincing, interpretation. To put it bluntly, the great coda of the final movement lacked the overwhelming, visceral power that the work demands. The meditative middle movement seemed also to lack just that quality; its opening chords seemed altogether to assertive. And yet for all these perhaps “picky” details, there was much that was impressive about Entremont’s Beethoven, not the least of which was his careful delineation of the work’s movement-by- movement structure.
But following the intermission, there was nothing to be “picky” about. One could search far and wide for greater perfection than Phillipe Entremont projected in his performances of several Debussy Preludes, Pour le piano, and the Sonatine and Alborado del grazioso by Ravel. To take but one example, the fabulous Cathedral engloutie never to these ears had sounded so ravishing, so magical. And the concluding Prelude, Feux d’artifice quite simply left the audience stunned from its incredible virtuosity.
The same was true for Ravel’s beautifully proportioned early three-movement Sonatine, and as for the dazzling and popular Alborado del gracioso that concluded the formal program, Entremont fabulously turned the great Steinway instrument into castanets, tambourines and drums. Such sounds, particularly in the wonderful acoustic of the Carriage House, were nothing short of incredible. Here was virtuosity with a capital “v.”
But we were not through. The continuous standing ovation brought the musician back to the piano for an utterly lovely evocation of Couperin’s charming Soeur Monique. Never has Baroque ornamentation sounded so graceful and so integral a part of the score. Couperin was an inspired conclusion to an inspired evening of music.
