Many moons ago my first encounter with the music of Anton Rubinstein was his Mélodie in F major, a staple of the classical airwaves and an encore favourite among pianists. A whole generation after writing this comparative trifle, Rubinstein composed his fourth and final piano sonata. Cast in the grand heroic mode, and matched perhaps only by Tchaikovsky’s contemporaneous Grand Sonata, it’s as though this remarkably prolific composer (20 operas, 6 symphonies and 5 piano concertos) had waited an eternity before flinging down one last statement of ultimate piano virtuosity. It is big in every way, and its four movements take up a full three-quarters of an hour in playing time. Leslie Howard has long championed Rubinstein’s music – his encore was the composer’s Barcarolle no. 1 in F minor – and this sonata occupied the second half of his latest recital at Wigmore Hall, devoted to Russian Masters.
The second-movement Scherzo proved to be an ideal display vehicle for Howard’s virtuosity, with Lisztian scales racing in profusion across the entire keyboard, furious trills, ringing dissonances and the lush weightiness of evenly placed chords. The Trio section offered a perfect contrast: darker, more reflective, with hints of sparkling waters flowing through glacial Norwegian fjords. In Rubinstein’s slow movement, Howard’s clarity of articulation was a particular delight, supported by astute pedalling and an innate feel for the rise and fall of the melodic line. Was Debussy in his La Fille aux cheveux de lin influenced by some of Rubinstein’s sonorities? It seemed so, at least in this performance. In the Finale, the use of heavy emphatic chords as a feature of musical punctuation, already evident in the long opening movement, served to heighten the turbulence and turmoil of the writing before being complemented by the bell-like peals of the powerful coda.
This deep and sombre tolling was also present at the start of Borodin’s Petite Suite, a collection of seven piano pieces composed over the course of a decade and published in 1885, with the very late Scherzo in A flat major added attacca to round off the concluding Nocturne more convincingly. Howard took the first piece, Au couvent (In the monastery), at a slower speed than the Andante religioso marking, reinforcing all-enveloping Russian gloom. This seemed to carry over into the subsequent movements, where I was more conscious of a slightly enervating heaviness, affecting in particular the two Mazurka-movements, which simply lacked the life-affirming uplift indicated by the many dotted rhythms. Even the Sérénade, which should drip with splashes of Spanish colour, appeared wan and lacklustre.
Few would think of Glazunov as a composer primarily for the piano. Yet his Theme and Variations, written in 1900, demonstrates an extraordinary range of inventiveness for this instrument. It begins with a plaintive seven-bar theme, derived from a Finnish folksong, and moves over fifteen variations, mostly in F sharp minor, through some dark, spectral and mysterious territory illuminated by repeated flashes of brilliant sunlight. Howard sought out some of the balletic dreaminess with floating qualities in the treble register and rippling arpeggios which conjured up impressions of a corps de ballet sweeping majestically across a theatrical stage. He brilliantly despatched Variation 8 with its cascades of triplets and in Variation 9 relished the bell-like qualities inherent in the composer’s marking of quasi campanelli. There was ample evidence too of the question-and-answer sequences between both hands which underline the capriciousness of this work as a whole. In the concluding variation, which is as close as Glazunov gets to making a grand symphonic statement, Howard summoned up all the necessary weight and gravity.
