A review of the concert on October 13, 2002 by Gary Lemco.
Russian pianist Stanislav Ioudenitch played a spectacular concert for the Steinway Society on Sunday, October 13 to a dazzled, packed house, thoroughly convinced that Ioudenitch brought more than ten fingers with him. With music by Mozart, Stravinsky and Schubert, Ioudenitch revealed a colossal technique in the full service of the poet’s temperament, whose breadth of vision and faciliy of articulation proved why he won the coveted Gold Medal at the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition.
Ioudenitch opened with a Mozart group, two of the composer’s “storm and stress” pieces, the D Minor Fantasia, K. 397 and the A Minor Sonata, K. 310, long a favorite of the late Roumanian pianist, Dinu Lipatti. Like Lipatti, Ioudenitch favors clear, clean, music-box resonance, with long lines that emphasize the independence of three-voice parts. A kind of poised stoicism marked these two works, rife with the composer’s personal anguish midst the superficial glitter, where a despondent dissonance would break through. When a bit of legato would temporarily win over the broken-style affects, the moment of song was enthralling.
If Mozart (and soon Schubert) showed off Ioudenitch’s Apollinian side, the demonized pyrotechnics and color display of Stravinsky’s Three Scenes from “Petrouchka” Suite permitted his Dionysiac temper full rein. Written in 1929 at the behest of showman Artur Rubinstein, the arrangement calls on the piano to approximate all manner of orchestral effects and color panoply, in the course of the tragic puppet Petrushka’s wanderings. The piano’s upper register gets quite a workout, with roulades and glittering cascades that describe the mercurial, whimsical, fantastic meanderings of the ballet, which even include pentatonic hints at his own “Le Rossignol.” Huge blocks of sound, percussive effects, polytonal and polyrhythmic episodes, all made the few bits of melody the more precious, the more brittle. When Ioudenitch hurled the last thunderbolt from this piece, the audience rose in frenzy at intermission.
The second hsalf of the program balanced the emotional equation perfectly: Schubert’s 1828 A Major Sonata is one of three that enjoy that “heavenly length” of his C Major Symphony. It opens as a kind of march, and a dirge atmosphere haunts its lovely second movement Andantino as well. But this is interrupted by a Bach-like fugato that liberates no end of dissonance and personal agony in the composer’s otherwise lyric outpouring. The last two movements emerge as bitter-sweet, where once again the melodic filigree occasionally suffers an emotional tremor. Ioudenitch rendered all this most lyrically and graceully, rounding every period, throwing the torment into high relief. When he rose to the occasion of a standing ovation with Liszt’ D-flat Rhapsdoy as his single encore, the communal awe was palpable, the feeling that we had been enchanted by an honest virtuoso who combines raw, electric power and the poetic muse, a real successor to the legenary talents Lorin Hollander and Vladmir Horowitz.
