Each of these substantial piano solos by Chopin, Ravel and Mussorgsky can make a climactic close to a recital programme, but were here heard together. Benjamin Grosvenor opened with Chopin’s four-movement Piano Sonata no. 2 in B flat minor, built around his earlier Marche funèbre. The first movement was the least successful in this performance, its brief introduction marked Grave but here lacking gravity, while the agitato first subject sounded agitated in the wrong way, with some slight metrical unsteadiness.
Repeated sections tended to be at different tempi and phrasing second time around, which can be a mark of expressive spontaneity, but can also make one wonder if the artist’s interpretation is quite settled. The second subject was a beguiling lyrical oasis however. And all doubts vanished with the remaining three movements, the second movement Scherzo’s technical demands despatched with exciting virtuosity, the funeral march still the eloquent heart of the work, while the final Presto, athematic and atonal, sounded thrilling, presaging some future more menacing musical era.
That future arrived next, in the form of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, his “three Romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity”, its sinister scenes taken from Aloysius Bertrand’s collection of the same name. Ondine is a seductive water nymph, drawing the unwary down to her realm in the depths of a pitch-black lake. Its shimmering beauty was captured in Grosvenor’s keyboard control, and his locating what the composer called the “suggestive magic” of the glissandi.
Le Gibet (the gallows), Ravel told early performers, required strict articulation of its accents, and slowness of tempo “sans expression”. Grosvenor achieved these, and with the tolling bell motif, eerily conjured the corpse swinging on the gibbet in the gloom. Scarbo portrays a malevolent goblin given to nocturnal mischief before scurrying back into the shadows. Its rapid repeated notes, hairpin dynamics – to be played, said Ravel, très eclatants (very explosive) – and startling shifts in direction. This pianist must have consulted the composer’s reported advice – a compendium almost as essential as the score – to produce this very authentic account. The playing of Scarbo here was a technical tour de force; Ravel admitted he composed it to out-do Balakirev’s Islamey, in his day the non plus ultra of pianistic difficulty.
What could follow that? After an interval which the pianist must have welcomed, came Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. The first Promenade, suggesting the composer walking around the gallery, was briskly determined to glance at the pictures, pausing only for the few which captivated him. Each picture, graphically drawn by the composer, was atmospherically evoked by the player. In The Old Castle the melancholy song of the troubadour was haunting, the children scampered playfully in the Tuileries, in Bydło the cart lumbered along, in the Catacombs there was sepulchral stillness, and all the other pictures were similarly portrayed on the keyboard – and few piano works offer a soloist so much colour to explore.
But all the colour is finally banished by grandeur, in the closing Great Gate of Kiev. The great gate of the design was never built, so Kyiv’s imposing ancient entrance exists solely in Mussorgsky’s music. Grosvenor’s powerful chords rang out without ever becoming overloud, the Steinway of the Queen Elizabeth Hall serving him well. The pealing carillons too were played with bright-toned splendour, and the Boyars (well, the QEH audience) acclaimed the finest of all Tsarist-era piano music, and the brilliant pianist who performed it so well. None of the orchestrations are needed, not even Ravel’s, when a pianist has the full measure of Mussorgsky’s Pictures.
