Wigmore Hall, London
There is something about much of Liszt's piano music that encourages an old-fashioned approach, even from a fastidiously stylish pianist such as Nelson Goerner. It is hard to imagine a work such as the B minor Ballade, which opened Goerner's all-Liszt programme, being played with the kind of forensic attention to detail that a pianist might apply to a work by Schumann or Chopin, for instance. In Liszt such as this, the gesture is everything, and Goerner projected the ballade's grandstanding energetically enough.
His technique is well able to cope with it all, and can certainly put plenty of muscle behind it, but it is by no means armour-plated. In the climax of the ballade, and in the closing pages of the first Mephisto Waltz, which ended his first-half sequence, there were moments when the playing seemed to dip out of focus; the rhythms became unstable, the textures rather cluttered. A trio of late pieces ? the first two of the Valse Oubli�es and the Bagatelle Sans Tonalit� ? suited him much better, and the delicate tracery of the two waltzes, as well as the flurry of diminished sevenths with which the bagatelle ends, showed him at his most refined.
The second half of the recital returned to the key in which it began ? B minor ? for Liszt's great sonata. That performance was more or less the same mixture as before ? wonderful finesse alongside passages that were not quite calibrated so precisely, and which crucially allowed the tension to drop at several important moments. But as if to reveal where his heart really lies, Goerner's encores weren't Liszt at all, but Chopin, and the D flat Nocturne Op 27 No 2. Spun out with such relaxed naturalness and elegance, this was perfectly judged.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/28/nelson-goerner-review
Peter Beagrie ITV St Petersburg Sir Alex Ferguson Petrofac Manchester United
No comments:
Post a Comment